Jump to content

Biological ships


Tnecniw

Recommended Posts

It could be really interesting if you could develop or create some sort of biological ships. Like large living space faring "animals". A sort of incredible bio-engingering shooting parasitic creatures or spines as weapons :3 A bit silly maybe but it would be really cool.

(other "ship types" would be really cool aswell :D

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hmmmm. This seems.... almost controversial. Not the idea, since it is an interesting idea but I'm not sure what stance I want to take on this.

 

For one, a biological entity or as such would be an interesting thing and very cool, however, what would be the logic, ideas and facts behind it.

 

I don't know. I really don't know but here is something to think of. If this was possible, it would theoreticly enable biological creatures, systems and as such. If this was the case, what part in the game would it have if it was implemented? Any extra thoughts?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hmmmm. This seems.... almost controversial. Not the idea, since it is an interesting idea but I'm not sure what stance I want to take on this.

 

For one, a biological entity or as such would be an interesting thing and very cool, however, what would be the logic, ideas and facts behind it.

 

I don't know. I really don't know but here is something to think of. If this was possible, it would theoreticly enable biological creatures, systems and as such. If this was the case, what part in the game would it have if it was implemented? Any extra thoughts?

Maybe it could be a ship type... Like the biological "classes" of ships are more menouverable (since they are alive and can partly react on their own) and can sort of regenerate with time without repair... But they have much less armor and take damage easier due to them only having a sort of biological armor?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Maybe it could be a ship type... Like the biological "classes" of ships are more menouverable (since they are alive and can partly react on their own) and can sort of regenerate with time without repair... But they have much less armor and take damage easier due to them only having a sort of biological armor?

 

And they would need some sort of biofuel - instead of normal gas or rocket fuel, perhaps organic compost or...meat (like animal carcasses)? This brings to mind the Combine synths from Half-Life 2.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

And they would need some sort of biofuel - instead of normal gas or rocket fuel, perhaps organic compost or...meat (like animal carcasses)? This brings to mind the Combine synths from Half-Life 2.

Yeah :3 thought of that too...

 

Of course I wasn't sure if they will have fuel (need to read up) but that could be the case and quite fun :D like you could treat your ship in the same way you would treat a horse in a sense. Like a riding animal

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You mean having building materials like these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBtbjdLB3f8

 

(Minus the horrible music, and... Graphics, and limited block based building tool)

More meant like the Leviathans from STARCRAFT 2 heart of the swarm. Or the hive ships from the Tyranids in Warhammer 40K or (a bit of a more usable version) the ships of the wraiths from Stargate atlantis

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Like the Vorlon and Shadow ships in the Babylon 5 series.  The ships were "living" ships.  The Shadow ships actually required a human wired into it as a CPU, but the Vorlon ships did not have restriction.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Like the ship from Farscape. 

 

Star Trek TNG also had one episode with a living ship.

 

 

"Space whales" are a staple of Scifi.  With many many instances of encountering rare space fairing large creatures.  Sometimes the lore is that the technology for FTL travel is actually reverse engineered from studying them... Sometimes it's that they are captured and converted to space craft... and sometimes like Babylon 5 it's the culmination of technological development.

 

So there's lots of ways you could fit it into the game.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Bio-ships would be a great add on. Maybe different ships require different fuels (herbivore, photosynthetic [simply a giant solar panel], carnivore [Venus Flytrap style], and of course, mechanical [simply an electronic-like self-replicating nanobot.])

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My signature has a bilological ship I made in a different game (dont get too excited, the ship cant fly or do anything, just sit there and look pretty). But the biological aspect is that the hull of the ship was made from an alien carapace of unfathomable strength, but there is nothing living about the ship outside of the AI that helps to run it.

 

I think from this standpoint, we will easily be able to make biological ships in Dual, and create our own back story for them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

I think from this standpoint, we will easily be able to make biological ships in Dual, and create our own back story for them.

 

Bingo. I wouldn't mind organic materials to work with that might have certain properties and look (healing, requiring food, a "digestive system" element to connect too, etc), but I don't think this is a game about the dev's creating cool ships for us, biological or otherwise. They give us the tools to create our own. 

 

Come to think of it I am surprised Star Citizen - which is almost completely financed by selling ships to players - hasn't yet tried cashing in on a Moya.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Bingo. I wouldn't mind organic materials to work with that might have certain properties and look (healing, requiring food, a "digestive system" element to connect too, etc), but I don't think this is a game about the dev's creating cool ships for us, biological or otherwise. They give us the tools to create our own. 

 

Come to think of it I am surprised Star Citizen - which is almost completely financed by selling ships to players - hasn't yet tried cashing in on a Moya.

Of course, I understand the idea that we will be building the ships and such...

 

But you still need to be able to do certain things which the developers maybe didn't think of doing. Adding in the abbility to grow or "Breed" biological space ships could be something like that :D

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Stellaris has these "space whales" that fly around aimlessly. They actually "eat" the gas from gas giants. I think something similar that you would build onto them would be cool. Then you could fly them through a gas giant before a long trip. Not sure if this mentioned already, but.... This really makes me think of the ship from Lexx. It was technically a living ship. It would, if I remember correctly, supply food and water for the passengers. Picture to follow......lexxxxx.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Stellaris has these "space whales" that fly around aimlessly. They actually "eat" the gas from gas giants. I think something similar that you would build onto them would be cool. Then you could fly them through a gas giant before a long trip. Not sure if this mentioned already, but.... This really makes me think of the ship from Lexx. It was technically a living ship. It would, if I remember correctly, supply food and water for the passengers. Picture to follow......lexxxxx.jpg

I have myself played quite ALOT of Stellaris and I agree :D something like that could very much work and that would make quite an interesting "type" or "class" of ship.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thinking that one way this could be implemented as a hull reinforcement.

Say you build just the frame work for a ship. Then plant seeds or place organic material in various places and it grows around the frame work. Kinda reminds me of the "Wraith" ships in Stargate: Atlantis. Ship regrows as damaged and generates new matter as needed so long as the power supply is able to sustain it. 

Benefits:

-Ship hull regeneration 

-Ease of ship manufacture (Just frame it then let it grow)

-Very hard to destroy 

 

Disadvantages:

-Can only grow as big as say 70% of max power output

     -Requires more power to just run basic systems vs just sustaining hull integrity

-More susceptible to bio engineered attacks for lower tech level organic development (Max level not 100% perfect but could be adaptable if attack is survived)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thinking that one way this could be implemented as a hull reinforcement.

Say you build just the frame work for a ship. Then plant seeds or place organic material in various places and it grows around the frame work. Kinda reminds me of the "Wraith" ships in Stargate: Atlantis. Ship regrows as damaged and generates new matter as needed so long as the power supply is able to sustain it. 

Benefits:

-Ship hull regeneration 

-Ease of ship manufacture (Just frame it then let it grow)

-Very hard to destroy 

 

Disadvantages:

-Can only grow as big as say 70% of max power output

     -Requires more power to just run basic systems vs just sustaining hull integrity

-More susceptible to bio engineered attacks for lower tech level organic development (Max level not 100% perfect but could be adaptable if attack is survived)

Yeah, possibly :3 could make it a very interesting class of a ship... and maybe you could like "direct" its growth, to create your own design when it came to these biological ships.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah, possibly :3 could make it a very interesting class of a ship... and maybe you could like "direct" its growth, to create your own design when it came to these biological ships.

 

I think it depends on how deep are are they willing to go in regards to multi-block structures:

https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/566-multi-block-systemweaponry/

 

Since organic systems would sort of naturally be a multiblock system, they would face the same challenges of having algorithms checking multiple elements and ship voxels. That's being said, it would go hand in hand. If you can code an engine with it's own fuel pipes, you can code a hull with it's own blood vessels.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think it depends on how deep are are they willing to go in regards to multi-block structures:

https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/566-multi-block-systemweaponry/

 

Since organic systems would sort of naturally be a multiblock system, they would face the same challenges of having algorithms checking multiple elements and ship voxels. That's being said, it would go hand in hand. If you can code an engine with it's own fuel pipes, you can code a hull with it's own blood vessels.

Honestly, when it comes to ships I kinda want it to have to make SOME sort of sense... I don't want "spore" ship builder (where you could litterally make a flying wall) I want it to make some sort of logical sense with the designs. Biological ship design shouldn't neccecarily be much diffrent then designing a normal ship tho. (then I mean in game, not logically wise) I mean, you select where the ship will "build" and the biological growth copies your desires.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Stellaris has these "space whales" that fly around aimlessly. They actually "eat" the gas from gas giants. I think something similar that you would build onto them would be cool. Then you could fly them through a gas giant before a long trip. Not sure if this mentioned already, but.... 

 

This is almost exactly that one episode of Doctor Who - "The Beast Below", where the Earth had been burned up and the entire U.K. population was flying in space on "Starship UK", a city-spaceship built upon the back of a star whale that they had captured.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

tueZuBf.jpg

This is almost exactly that one episode of Doctor Who - "The Beast Below", where the Earth had been burned up and the entire U.K. population was flying in space on "Starship UK", a city-spaceship built upon the back of a star whale that they had captured.

Never seen much of Doctor who... :D but me personally intended more lin the sense of actually beings as ships. Like it is almost a sort of Symbiotic relationship (I think that is the right term) where you help the ship with food (fuel) with caretaking and keeping it relative healthy... and in return it takes you to places and such and fight enemies. 

Almost maybe like the Leviathan from the Starcraft 2 universe :D (as mentioned earlier... tho, the image became bigger than I thought)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well living shape designs are a pretty old trope of sci fi:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LivingShip

 

ArachnidTransport.jpg

Falcon06.jpg

cb268337f4ab764e3a862df585192e63.jpg

 

vorlon_transport___perspective_by_dlamon

 

crab2.jpg

 

landscape-1426608253-leviathan-concept.j

 

 

How far this can go in a voxel building game is another question. I wouldn't expect to see flopping skin and animated soft tissue, and I doubt they'd build gameplay around actually growing ships. But voxels with organic looking textures,though probably no actual organic properties, would have a pretty low barrier. Organic looking counterparts to the prebuilt ship elements would be a slightly higher one, and actual organic systems would require quite a bit more development time, but might still be justifiable. 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well living shape designs are a pretty old trope of sci fi:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LivingShip

 

ArachnidTransport.jpg

Falcon06.jpg

cb268337f4ab764e3a862df585192e63.jpg

 

vorlon_transport___perspective_by_dlamon

 

crab2.jpg

 

landscape-1426608253-leviathan-concept.j

 

 

How far this can go in a voxel building game is another question. I wouldn't expect to see flopping skin and animated soft tissue, and I doubt they'd build gameplay around actually growing ships. But voxels with organic looking textures,though probably no actual organic properties, would have a pretty low barrier. Organic looking counterparts to the prebuilt ship elements would be a slightly higher one, and actual organic systems would require quite a bit more development time, but might still be justifiable. 

Yeah :D

 

speaking of which, will the whole game only be designed in voxels? So the ships will look a bit... well... I guess Robocraftish?  Like without THAT much detail and such?Robocraft-copter-class.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah :D

 

speaking of which, will the whole game only be designed in voxels? So the ships will look a bit... well... I guess Robocraftish?  Like without THAT much detail and such?

 

In the dev' blog they describe rounded tools, so at least there's that. It probably won't be quite as blocky as Space Engineers or RoboCraft. Think more EverQest: Landmarks construction style. In fact the building tools look almost identical to Voxel Farm used by EQ landmarks.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...