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Ship Designs


elDunco

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What kind of vehicles will you build? I want to see if anyone has began sketching out blueprints for the ships they plan on creating. I know we've only been given a little bit of info on ship building but I've already began sketching out some initial ship blueprints myself (I'll post those soon :D)

 

What kind of ships do you plan on making given the info we have? Post pics if you have any!

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A class of ship that I would buy is a medium-big sized and very well protected (and with high power guns) exploration ship, for a crew of 5-10.
I imagine Silver Light and Vulture making their designs, so everyone can choose the better for him/she/them.

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Check out the Solar Empire, we are dedicated to designing ships. 2 of us have already presented ships. 

Here is a destroyer class i designed. Yes the Solar Empire is star wars based, but doesn't have to be. 

This one I plan on being about 300m, Sorry the resizing of the image kinda scrambled the lines....the actual image is very large. unknown.png

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The most important ships to build in the beginning will be prospectors designed for the home planet.  I don't know if we'll be able to mount scanners directly on ships or if we'll have to get out of the ships in order to scan.  The design of the ship will depend on the range of the scanners if they are ship mounted.  We may also be able to build drone-mounted scanners so you get to a location then you deploy your drones and they run a pattern around your ship and draw a map for you... a lot will come down to the instrumentation we can build, the capabilities of the elements and so forth.  I know that mining itself is going to be a human-only activity as they don't want to allow ships or drones do it since that would result in planet-wide devestation.  

 

If we have the option of refining ore using a ship-borne refinery, we may have a prospector-refinery design so we don't want to fill our inventory with unrefined resources.  I know that we store resources in our nanopacks but I don't know what the inventory capacity will be.  Maybe we'll have room for a whole day's mining on our back.  Maybe your inventory fills up after half an hour and you need to head back, in which case having cargo capacity on your prospector ship will be very valuable.

 

I've read that there will be different scanners for different materials.  If these can be mounted shipboard, it may be convenient to have the full array of scanners available in the ship.  It may be that a crew of prospectors need to work together, one on each type of scanner, which would result in a much larger ship.  Or maybe we'll be able to script the scanners together so they fire in sequence and we can build a scanner map showing different kinds of resources.  We may want a ship to run the scans then land and send out vehicles with their own cargo capacities that the miners drive to their targets while the ship moves to scan the next hex.  

 

It all comes down to the business rules are for scanning for, mining, refining (if needed) and storing resources, and what elements are available.  Will we know the depth of the resources when we detect them?  Will there be deep resources that we have to dig down to even be able to scan for?  Will we have to have ships that can drop off a mining camp with basic defensive systems, then run back to base to fill up with security forces, then return with a load of ore... so the ship may not be specialized at all.

 

Basically I'm saying what's important in my philosophy as a designer and scripter will be building vehicles that respond to rules, conditions, economic realities and the military situation.  I think it's important to consider what will be possible and come up with some basic ideas for a variety of conditions so that as we discover the rules, capabilities and conditions, we'll be in a position to come up with efficient and cost-effective designs.  I'm going to want to be able to quote a Return on Investment for the equipment I design, for example, so that people will know what they're buying. 

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Yeah I'm holding back on the cosmetic designs of my ship till I know exactly what a practical ship design will be. Right now I've got a rig ship sketched up (for space trucking :D) but its a very basic, boxy design atm. Essentially It's just a sketch up of the basic ship they've shown with a cargo container on back which I've planned on placing our nano pack containers in. Also drew it with a quad engine with 2 fuel cell setup since I figured the added weight would need an extra push. This is all based off that ship building teaser I saw so I'm sure there is plenty of room for design improvement. Like I said though I wouldn't fall in love with your cosmetics for the ships till we have a better idea of whats capable. Wouldnt want the vehicle to move like a brick because of a few fancy prongs sticking everywhere.

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Yeah I'm holding back on the cosmetic designs of my ship till I know exactly what a practical ship design will be. Right now I've got a rig ship sketched up (for space trucking :D) but its a very basic, boxy design atm. Essentially It's just a sketch up of the basic ship they've shown with a cargo container on back which I've planned on placing our nano pack containers in. Also drew it with a quad engine with 2 fuel cell setup since I figured the added weight would need an extra push. This is all based off that ship building teaser I saw so I'm sure there is plenty of room for design improvement. Like I said though I wouldn't fall in love with your cosmetics for the ships till we have a better idea of whats capable. Wouldnt want the vehicle to move like a brick because of a few fancy prongs sticking everywhere.

Form follows function.  Unless I'm selling a ship I don't see the point of sexing it up.  If wings don't matter, I'm not going to use them.  If they improve performance in atmosphere, I will use them.

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Form follows function.  Unless I'm selling a ship I don't see the point of sexing it up.  If wings don't matter, I'm not going to use them.  If they improve performance in atmosphere, I will use them.

 

I've given this some thought too.  In space, the most efficient design is what maximized space since there is no air to deal with.  So boxy and ugly will be more efficient.  I fear space in this game will eventually look like it was overrun by the borg.  

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I am going to see how well my designs carry over from space engineers Ive got a handful of fighters, some freighters ,communication satellites most of my warships rely a lot on how Space engineers works as a game but could still make some nice homages in DU.

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I am going to see how well my designs carry over from space engineers Ive got a handful of fighters, some freighters ,communication satellites most of my warships rely a lot on how Space engineers works as a game but could still make some nice homages in DU.

Is it worth playing around with Space Engineers waiting for DU alpha to start up?

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Yes it is. You won't get ships designs like in DU, but you'll get a good idea at how to think about constructing things.

True,Im kinda going in blind to the building options of DU but thats part of the fun to me!

 

Is it worth playing around with Space Engineers waiting for DU alpha to start up?

Yes Not the same in any sense but you can play around with shapes and layouts its also a pretty neat game when it feels like being stable.

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Yes it is. You won't get ships designs like in DU, but you'll get a good idea at how to think about constructing things.

Welp I went to Steam to look at it and the reviews are pretty horrible. Apparently it was very good before they introduced planets and destroyed playability.  The constructs in the videos are also kind of ugly, to be honest.  Gravity looks good, and the collisions are cool, but for gameplay purposes here we won't do collision damage (see 37 other threads.)

 

One of the things I like about the architecture DU seems to be adopting; it's firmly multiplayer and it's starting with planets and the kind of stuff they want to add appears to me to be foundationally sound inheritance-wise from an object oriented programming standpoint.  Ships are still ships, elements are still elements, we're just going have them zap each other when CvC comes out.  If we can't figure out how to do something with voxels, elements and LUA, we just won't do it.

 

The one concern I have is isolating the LUA scripts so they can't divide the universe by zero and crash the whole game, but I'm sure we'll put LUA through its paces in Alpha.

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Posted it some other thread but what the heck :P

 

vtol%20carrier%20front%20mesh.jpg

vtol%20carrier%20topdown%20mesh.jpg

vtol%20carrier%20leftside%20mesh.jpg

vtol%20carrier%20frontleft%20smooth.jpg

vtol%20carrier%20frontright%20smooth.jpg

mannedgunlower.jpg

 

Still sort of work in progress - I don't particularly like the rear end, and the VToL thrusters need some love. Then add stuff like windows / unmanned turrets etc.

Oh my god that's a lot of guns !  :o

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Welp I went to Steam to look at it and the reviews are pretty horrible. Apparently it was very good before they introduced planets and destroyed playability.  The constructs in the videos are also kind of ugly, to be honest.  Gravity looks good, and the collisions are cool, but for gameplay purposes here we won't do collision damage (see 37 other threads.)

 

One of the things I like about the architecture DU seems to be adopting; it's firmly multiplayer and it's starting with planets and the kind of stuff they want to add appears to me to be foundationally sound inheritance-wise from an object oriented programming standpoint.  Ships are still ships, elements are still elements, we're just going have them zap each other when CvC comes out.  If we can't figure out how to do something with voxels, elements and LUA, we just won't do it.

 

The one concern I have is isolating the LUA scripts so they can't divide the universe by zero and crash the whole game, but I'm sure we'll put LUA through its paces in Alpha.

 

Try Empyrion. I originally did not care for it when it first released, but it has come a long way and actually has better build mechanics than SE, imho.

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I don't have any ideas of what I will build other than what I have already done in Space Engineers, though DU has some differences when it comes to building tools. At first I will probably build mostly hover vehicles, assuming they will be cheaper than actual ships.

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In space, you don't have to deal with air.  The best design, from an efficiency standpoint, will be to maximize interior space with as little weight as possible.  Very different from vehicles meant to travel through an atmosphere.

 

So the best design really would be a box -- like a skyscraper in space.

 

It would be neat if the game simulated atmosphere so that it would make sense to design aerodynamic ships for atmosphere and boxy ships for space, but I don't see how that will be possible with current computing/network capacity.

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In space, you don't have to deal with air.  The best design, from an efficiency standpoint, will be to maximize interior space with as little weight as possible.  Very different from vehicles meant to travel through an atmosphere.

 

So the best design really would be a box -- like a skyscraper in space.

 

It would be neat if the game simulated atmosphere so that it would make sense to design aerodynamic ships for atmosphere and boxy ships for space, but I don't see how that will be possible with current computing/network capacity.

 

The Vogon spacecraft from Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy would be quite interesting to see in DU, those giant yellow bricks are so endearing. 

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  • 1 year later...
9 hours ago, Star Explorer Catptain said:

I was just wondering if a player such as myself liked going solo it would be possible to have two ships, one kind of like a mother ship, like Star trek ships and a shuttle to use for travelling down the planet. 

Yes it will be possible. Just may be time consuming for a solo player to build larger ships.

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