Pioneer dev forum

So I've got a few rough models of a ship design I'm working on. It's a flattened and stretched spheroid "Lifting Body" aerodyne with cargo and fuel scooping capability speacialized for the Jovian environment. Because it's meant primarily to fly quickly between various bodies within a smaller Jovian system and often to do so under extreme Tactical or Environmental conditions its Reaction Drives are optimized for high thrust over endurance.
Screenshots of my most detailed (but not most recent...) version are here in the community forum... easier than posting double (quadruple? can one of the mods kill that double post there?)
http://spacesimcentral.com/ssc/topic/42 ... n-cruiser/

What I haven't decided is whether to keep those little wings or keep it as a clean lifting body, and I'm wondering about putting the fuel scoops on the underside with the upper sections reserved for cargo handling. I imagine putting the cannon and missile mounts on either side of the front cargo doors and I'm still not happy with the sensor tower...

I'll try a few simple variations at low LOD for now... but I still can't quite figure out textures, I can assign materials to different objects to do some basic colours and I've had some limited encounters with UV maps and stuff... but I got lost pretty quickly last time I tried. Any tutorials or help would be great.
On that note... what do I do for animation? I can rig things up in the game engine with logic blocks and some VERY simple python... and I seem to remember some timeline stuff but I haven't really played with that part of Blender much and I have no idea how Pioneer is handling things these days. I know there's the landing gear to think about and I seem to remember some talk about other new options being available, along with something about colliding parts?

It's a nice starting sketch. I like the side silhouette of it. I like like those little wings too, they work well with a lifting body intended to jovian atmospheres. I won't make them pointy though, that looks silly.
Anyway I can draw some sketches based on your images if you want. (or even model if you post it, would make my life easier.) It's faster to iterate with a pencil then a 3D model.
Which shipyard builds it? (please don't pick a SolFed yard, we need ships on the other side too. :) And this curved shape could work with Kaluri for example)
It would be nice to know some other things about it too. What's it's size for example? What's the intended performance. I gather that it's more short range-high thrust. What is it's capacity? Maneuverability? Is it intended to land on a planet, or space only, apart from gas giant skimming?

Using an elongated spheroid as a base shape isn't really optimal. It's geometry is unbalanced (some quads on the same loop are quite bigger then at other areas), which makes detailing hard. Which already shows on several places.
And instead of pushing around edges to get those protrusions, I'd make a more balanced base shape, and add the protrusions as separate objects. When I'm happy with all the rough detailing, it's not that hard to join and weld these separate objects into one. It can even be done with the boolean modifier, but that needs quite a lot of cleanup sometimes.
And because of this, I won't even start to unwraping and texturing it yet, it's easier to build the high LOD shape properly first, then UV-in it. LOD making is easy and quick if you have these stages already.
Here's a time-lapse I made for NyankoSensei about UV-ing his nice station. It's long and unedited, and faster than it should be (Blender doesn't capture realtime), but hopefully it shows, how I approach UVs.
You can place seams (cuts) on the model (ctrl+e -> Mark Seam), and do an unwrap with U. And if you generate a color grind when you create a new image, then you can see any distortions, When there isn't any southing distortion, then the UV is mostly, ready, you just need to optimize the layout, so there isn't much unused space on the image.

You can use materials, but the whole thing should come together on one neat texture map ideally.

You don't need any BGE magic or python to get a model in Pioneer. Not even rigging really. Any animated part should be a separate object, with it's pivot correctly set up. You can then animate these, i is the shortcut for keyframes. You can finetune these keyframes in the Dope Sheet and Graph Editor. There's even a preset workspace for animations, you can select it on the top of the Blender window, look for "Default", you can open that to get to other workspaces.

Hope this helps a bit, I'm curious how this craft turns out.

Cool, thanks for the tips... just got back from a visit with the folks, why I didn't get back to you earlier.
So... how would you go about setting up an elliptical Hull layout? The sphere works for the most part but you are certainly right about making certain jobs harder later on...
As to the Ship Design outside Blender...
What I've got in mind is about 150 tonnes, with at least 4 Gs of Lateral thrust and not much more than a thousand kps of deltaV when fully loaded.
I don't have a specific Shipyard in mind... but since I've been running Guns to the Martian Resistance since I started playing it's a safe bet I'm not too keen on giving the SolFed any credit for it! :D
The wings I would prefer to keep at least a bit pointed (if they stay...), I was going for a similar elliptical planform as the Original Spitfire but the effect isn't very good on that model...
So when you say I can build the model from separate objects do you mean actual separate "Objects" or just new meshes added within edit mode? Could you elaborate on how to weld separate meshes together, because that really would make my modelling go much smoother and open up plenty more design options I'm currently hacking around...

I would use a SubSurfed cube as a base, extruding and loop-cutting it to an ellipsoid surface. And when you are happy with the base shape, you can apply the SubSurf and add details. Using separate objects are better when you are roughing the thing out, since you can use the object's own transform axes even if you rotate it. You can then weld them by hand (ctrl+J joins meshes, K can be used for cutting, edge and vertex slide are good freinds of the modeller) or you can use the boolean modifier, but the former usually needs some amount of cleanup (a lot most of the time).
I might be able to write some kind of quick guide on how you do these, but you have to wait at least until next weekend for something like that. (I want to write quite a few things about these stuffs)

I'd keep the wings, they spice and pronounce the silhouette. I think a rounded wing could look good with with ship. I'll brainstorm a bit about it (already drew some quick and dirty sketches)

I think I've got the new (to me!) tools figured out, had real world stuff too, though... oh well.
So I've got some basic design concepts still to work out... and actually the design possibilities have opened up in general, I guess that's just how it goes when you learn blender as you go, eh? :)
So I still can't decide on whether to keep the wings or to maybe turn them into fins... should the fuel scoops go on the top or bottom of the hull, likewise for the Cargo Handling and in its case how big can it be aerodynamically... ?
Still working on it... and a few other ideas as I figure blender out... any more advice for dealing with curved shapes?

@NeuralKernel any news?

BTW, I can't click any of the images, since I'm not a member on the spacesimcentral page.