Art Style Guide for Pioneer - brainstorming

[TheBob]

51m^3 tankage, filled with water... that's 51 tons of propellant cappacity. I like it, but it seems a bit much for Pioneer, at least for a transport.

Unless we're going a (little) bit less exuberant ISPs.

[bszlrd]

@Zordey: I've used Blender. I've built the parts as standard meshes and gave them a semi transparent material, and calculated the volumes using the add-on for 3D printing. I rendered the ship from an isometric POV with only ambient occlusion. The parts were on a separate layer, and were rendered separately from the ship, and to an RGBA png to preserve transparency. After that I composited it in Inkscape, and added some lines and text. It could e composited in Blender too.
It's not really polished yet, but I'm intended to design it properly for the article.
I want to create a basic importable blend file or simple add-on with simple meshes representing each part type, so capacities and masses can be calculated.

Crew compartment looks a bit small for sure, especially for prolonged flight (it's around a 2.8m*2.8m room, which could be enough for shorter flight). But these meshes are good for adjusting this kind of stuff.
@TheBob: I think ISPs should be nerfed at least on a magnitude. 30 000 km/s seems to be too good and safe in my opinion. But tank could be shrinked anyway, when adjusting the cargo hold and crew compartment.
Like this:

This way propellant capacity is about the same I've originally estimated, but the cargo space is larger (basing that value on water as cargo. It's 80t in the game right now.)

[bszlrd]

I'm right now working on that article about the overall structure of a spaceship, so there's a common ground designers can start building from.
It's a bit sketchy (and grammatically incorrect I presume), and it lacks example images (like the previous one) but I need some reviews about it to be able to continue. I also need to come up with volume and mass ranges for each type of part/equipment, so I'm open to suggestions.
So please criticize.

[NeuralKernel]

I read through it and can't find anything major to object too...
The only thing I'd say is that the sensors should probably be more distributed... smaller sensor pods placed all over the hull to give better coverage. At the very least I'd say there should be six sensor pods to represent the different camera views (fore, aft, left, right, up, down).

[bszlrd]

Makes sense. I've included them. Thak you.
Also I've updated the article with images.
Evernote doesn't shrink images unfortunatelly, but there's a scrollbar at the bottom.

[Tichy]

I just remembered about a post that (maybe) NeuralKernel wrote on SSC about ships that uses gyroscopes to turn around.
Could it be a good idea to have a manufacturer that does all his ships with that system?
I imagine a line of ships that are built around a big orb (ore more) that contains the gyro and that turns without using thrusters.

Many ships in the 2001 Nights manga have a similar shape (but in the orb, they contain a balck hole).

[bszlrd]

I thought about that also, but for some reason I imagine that a gyro attitude control as an auxiliary method. And RCS bursts provide some very nice visual cues and make the ships feel more dynamic without pushing the envelope with fans and other ridiculous moving stuff.
Low detectability military combat ships could rely on such a system for attitude control though, for stealth reasons. (I know, there's no stealth in space, but one can always aim to reduce detectability)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_moment_gyroscope