Pioneer dev forum

I've started to clean up the Lunar Shuttle model as an acute procrastination.
I played a bit with some ideas/sketches turning it to a series of ships with a shared basis:



A smaller one with most of it's engineering inside the main hull, and the current one with a separate nacelle or engine pod, aimed to vacuum flight, and both might have a variant aimed for atmospheric flight, with wings.
There could be a passenger and cargo variant for each, and if I can do it right, all of these can share a single texture map.
The silhouette of space only with an engine pod is almost identical to the original one, only the engine pod is changed a bit, and it's not visible here, but I repeated those antennae stuff of the top to the bottom and I want to turn it into aux heat sinks most likely. The biggest difference in it's shape is the reworked cockpit area.

What do you think?

I like the one rear left of first picture, but without the nose thrusters(?)

the other atmospheric one looks a little unbalanced (front heavy) or something from those pictures.

Yeah, I'm trying to make sense of that thing on the nose, it was quite an odd shape on the original mesh, but it makes a nice silhouette from the side (and an ugly buglike from the top :D ). I intend it to be a sensor cluster and headlight, with only one small maneuvering thruster there.
Wing placement and balance is a good question, I have to play around with that too to nail it just right.

I like these variations, the wings look ok to me since you don't know how it's balanced with that big engine but that nose is quite odd.

A drawing about it, but no progress on the nose thing yet (but added some mess there :D ). Some windows are there, maybe a bit larger than they should be (seems like a one seater this way, but I want to keep the original size of the craft which means two pilots in a tandem arrangement).

I like this new variants, expecially the winged ones and the new cockpit.
I think that what the current shuttle needs most, is a new texture. If you place it beside the other ships, at the moment, it looks very different.

If you intend to turn the antennaes to heat sinks, shouldn't be better to move them to the rear end in the models with the separate engine?

It might be moved there, but I'm not sure if those will even be heat sinks. It's auxiliary anyway, so it can stay, especially because it will keep the silhouette closer to the original.

Regarding the front thing, I tried removing it altogether and go for a more carlike front with headlights. I think it looks quite good.

The original author was a terrible modeler and should be shot on sight, this ship derserves remodelling!
Very nice work, I like where this is going :)

nozmajner wrote: Regarding the front thing, I tried removing it altogether and go for a more carlike front with headlights. I think it looks quite good.

I liked more the first version. This one, reminds me of an old cartoon called Denver the last dinosaur. It gives a funny "face" to the ship. ;-P

It's more like a Ford Ka for me :D