Art Style Guide for Pioneer - brainstorming

[Tichy]

Because space is black, I want colourful ships. Bright, flat colours with stripes/patterns/tribal markings. "Chris Foss mixed with Homeworld" is a good summary of what I like. What I want to avoid are uninteresting ship shapes with detail for the sake of detail, only available in silvery/grey/black colour shemes.
You will not often see other ships up close, so it's good if shapes and colours are recognizable from distance. Fine detail will also often go unnoticed

I just thought about that. Regarding the ships I completely agree, but I think that ground and orbiting stations (and the eventual ships in which you can dock) should be very detailed. Event the internals. They are objects that are seen from very close, and some extra detail would give a greater sense of scale.

[TheBob]

A high specific impusle Plasma rocket would run hotter and need additional cooling, but would also produce thrust gentle enough to make maintenance of the droplet radiators simpler.

Yes, but still there is the problem that the current ships are ill-suited to it. A droplet radiator is not invisible, it's a major consideration in the ships design. Also, switching engines and stuff is cool, but I have no Idea of what the plans are on this...

Hydrogen gives better Specific Impulse for a given energy than any other element while water is more useful as high thrust remass, shielding and coolant.

It's also extremely difficult to store and voluminous (you have more hydrogen in a liter of water than in an actual liter of liquid hydrogen...). Sure almost 9/10 of the remass you're carrying around is less efficient, but taking into account tankage and cryogenics needed to store hydrogen, it is not quite clear which is the better deal. Carrying water would be a lot less complicated for sure, and could be more easily replenished... If I'd be anywhere where I can't count on regular maintenance, I'd go with water...

[NeuralKernel]

It's true that there are points in favour of water and hydrogen for remass. For dense storage of Hydrogen, a bit of handwavium available opens the potential of Metallic Hydrogen storage... Metallic Antihydrogen is you want to get cocky ;)
As far as multiple engine types with different performance profiles are concerned, I don't think that's as much of an artistic issue either. It could easily be a single engine type operating in different modes like a VASIMR. I'd represent the different modes by changing the colour of the exhaust... redder for high thrust low ISP, bluer for low thrust high ISP.
As for the droplet radiators, they could be handled independantly of the model like shields or damage particles.
My (unfinished and amateurish) ship models are very much designed with thermal management and multiple drive types in mind, but I also don't think these gameplay elements would require much (or any) changes to the current models if they are technobabbled properly :)

[bszlrd]

Droplet radiators are to elaborate in my opinion.
I also can just repeat what robn said:

Its probably ok to give a nod to the problem (so "visual cues") and then not worry too much about it. If realism would make for a crappy game, then make something up!

One example of that nod are those fins on the Mola and Pumpkinseed
And I'm saying we should give that nod to the problem, so there's a type of detail part that has function, and it's not there only as a greeble or something.
We should avoid greebling as much as possible. It's like talking without anything to say, in my opinion. I'm not really fan of the Kanara in that regard, with it's strange winglike frames. And details that are thought trough properly can add a lot of depth to the ships. And we need depth there because ships are our characters.
And factions/manufacturers could have different ways of making these detail parts like heat sinks, landing gears, antennas, laterals, and such, which would also add depth and would build coherency and the visual language of the game.

[TheBob]

Droplet radiators are to elaborate in my opinion.

Agreed.

[NeuralKernel]

I'm not actually that attached to the idea of droplet radiators, if there's even just a token aknowledgement of Thermodynamics to the design of the ships then I'm happy :)

[bszlrd]

Right now I'm sketching an article about basic ship structure, and another important question about life support popped in my mind. Are there any believable food/water/air/etc generators? How much we have to store, and how much we can replenish on-board?
I think we have some room for wiggling in that regard. Small ships could have replenishing facilities for extended periods, but food tastes ugly, water and air won't feel fresh after a while. Larger ships could have similar facilities, but has storage for weeks of flight. Especially if it's a passenger transport.

Of course most of the time this won't have too much impact on the looks, but it should be considered when creating a ship.
If a small fighter can support a month of travel, then the pilot should have at least a bit of room for moving around, a good library of entertainment, a hobby and a good training in some kind of meditation to endure long and boring travel. (TV and similar could exist in every system, but I would be curious if there's a need to adjust for any redshift like effects when receiving a broadcast when accelerating towards the source. I think it's not that significant tough.)

I think time acceleration should be only a usability function and it shouldn't have any in-game/universe presence as a time altering device.

[NeuralKernel]

I've been wondering about the same issue for a while, myself.
With the smaller and more agile ships the accelleration can be strong enough that you couldn't move around if you had room...
Just how human do Ship Pilots have to be? The Character is the ship, not the primate inside... why not go Brain in a Jar, Upload or AI?

[Zordey]

I'm all for realism in ship models, but to a degree, it still needs to look nice as well.

My Venturestar has ridges running down the main engine nozzles that were supposed to represent cooling fins but that is as far as I am going to take it.

My thoughts are, by the year 3200, if you can build engines to accelerate at 30+G and travel in the atmosphere in many thousand m/sec then thermal dissipation materials will be so advanced that they are not even a consideration in design.

[TheBob]

Are there any believable food/water/air/etc generators? How much we have to store, and how much we can replenish on-board?

project rho provides a nice overveiw as always:
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/r ... upport.php

Generally, a continuously regenerating food supply is a problem often underestimated. You can go with Algae, which don't really have all the nutrients required (especially lacking vitamin C), but are relatively volume and mass efficient, and then there's hydroponics, a system which we haven't even managed to make work on earth in a purely self-contained way, but it can be done with enough research... But they need a hell of a lot of volume.

Water reclamation is a lot better known, You go either with Bioreactor (basically a minature reclamation plant), where you put waste water into a contained environment with appropriate bacteria and they clean it out, or by supercritical water oxidation.

Now, there's a few factors in Pioneer that make this a bit moot. First of all, there's still the question if time acceleration is just a play mechanic, or if it is a kind of hybernation field as it was described in Frontier. If the second, then life support is no problem at all and would consist purely of stored consumables (and a CO2 filter...).

If it isn't, then we're looking at significant times of required self-reliance, but not excessively so. Having onboard food production for times less than a year isn't worth it, you're better of by storing food (volume-wise and mass-wise). Only very few voyages in Pioneer take that long, usually you're in the range of two to three months even for rather extended exploration trips. So food supply should not be a consideration in the overall ship design. If actual food consumption is ever implemented, there might be a Hydroponics upgrade to enable longer self-reliance for the few people that will need it.

As for water and oxygen... We have power to spare. We have so much power, in fact, that cracking filtered CO2 is a very logical way to go (It is pretty energy intensive, prohibitivly so for nowadays spacecraft, but certainly not for Pioneer spacecraft). A Bioreactor or supercritical oxidiser to reclaim waste water (and some oxygen) also wouldn't require a lot of space. given how far other spaceflight-enabling technologies have advanced, those things would be just as advanced.

So all in all, I don't think that life support is really a design consideration for this setting.

I think time acceleration should be only a usability function and it shouldn't have any in-game/universe presence as a time altering device.

I agree there too.