OPLI Barnard ship line.

[torham2234]

Ok, I love this ship.

A few nitpicks and suggestions, though:

1. Those horizontal booms look pretty pointless (if cool). The best thing that could be done to justify their existence would be putting RCS nozzles on their tips for roll and yaw control. Giving your attitude thrusters leverage without spreading too much mass away from the center is really a good way to make the best of them and it's basically just a longer way of saying "booms".

2. The ship could use some asymmetry. I think the best way of going about it is making the general silhouette symmetrical, but break it up with surface detail and small components, for example the cockpit indentation could be moved to the side, maybe even intersecting the edge and looking chevron-like from the front, with the other one occupied by some protruding sensor pack - something intermediate between Sinonatrix' front lights and Nerodia's sensors.

3. I generally see this ship as a workhorse kind of ship. A multitask craft excelling in no single area but capable of turning its flexibility into a trump card of its own. A perfect craft for explorers and people prefering taking various odd jobs instead of sticking to a well defined career path. Boom mounted thrusters on an otherwise large-ish craft would help cement that.

Regarding atmospheric shields, I think maybe Pioneer could do away with those as separate bit of equipment and maybe make heating dependent entirely on hull. Atmospheric/planetary capability in general is more of a function of whether the ship has landing gear capable of supporting it weight and whether it can overcome planet's gravity than aerodynamics when you have a powerful fusion torch as your prime mover. As long as you have reaction mass left in your tanks you can always do controlled descent instead of fiery reentry.

Speaking of reentry - is there any way to make the heating shader treat all meshes as smooth shaded (in regards to normals)? As it is it looks really artificial on sharp, flat shaded geometry (but great on streamlined ships).

1: yes, ...I did thought of this. At the moment they house the gun mounts. It can be changed, If we all agree on it .I am trying to follow Nozmajners sketches, its his ship line...



2: yes. You would not believe how many days I tried to pull off that original sketch. I had several goes at the original concept, pretty much since I did the sinonatrix. I could push the cockpit to the side and put a light housing next to it, like sinontarix, but I would have to adjust all the textures and everything. It a bit too late to start doing severe remodeling...

[DraQ]

1: yes, ...I did thought of this. At the moment they house the gun mounts. It can be changed, If we all agree on it .I am trying to follow Nozmajners sketches, its his ship line...



2: yes. You would not believe how many days I tried to pull off that original sketch. I had several goes at the original concept, pretty much since I did the sinonatrix. I could push the cockpit to the side and put a light housing next to it, like sinontarix, but I would have to adjust all the textures and everything. It a bit too late to start doing severe remodeling...

With all due respect (and it's certainly due respect, as both the new ship and Sinonatrix are great work), but the guns there look quite derpy and they don't have as many reasons to be there as RCS 4-packs. Ok, with turreted weapons you might want to maximize coverage, but they don't need to protrude more than necessary to cover any ship that's further than right next to your hull and we don't even have turreted weapons yet.
Do note that Sinonatrix generally has RCS on furthest protruding points of the hull.

I can see it might be a bit late for massive remodeling, but a bit of tweaking by moving the cockpit and adding asymmetrical details would go a long way helping to maintain OPLI's characteristic utilitarian ugliness*.


*) Or beauty, as I prefer to call it. :P

A bigger ship class could be derived from this one by inserting another hull segment between current main hull and engine module.

P.S. it seriously screams "multitask ship" to me - sort of like Asp, but bigger and with less extreme acceleration.

[torham2234]

Do note that Sinonatrix generally has RCS on furthest protruding points of the hull.

heh, well I put them there... :)

I do play KSP as well, so I know a few things about zero G maneuvering.... although with the insane thrust ratios the pioneer engines are using, reality sometimes takes the back seat.

[FluffyFreak]

Speaking of reentry - is there any way to make the heating shader treat all meshes as smooth shaded (in regards to normals)? As it is it looks really artificial on sharp, flat shaded geometry (but great on streamlined ships).

...probably, but I'm not really that good at shaders :)
I just wrote it as best I could. I'd like to do more to it, including extruding a shell of triangles to do some sort of fire/plasma effect.

[FluffyFreak]

I think the look is good as it is right now, if you're struggling to make something look good in 3D from a 2D sketch then it might just not work.

[DraQ]

Do note that Sinonatrix generally has RCS on furthest protruding points of the hull.

heh, well I put them there... :)

:D

I do play KSP as well, so I know a few things about zero G maneuvering.... although with the insane thrust ratios the pioneer engines are using, reality sometimes takes the back seat.

I reserve "insane" for the stuff we had in Frontier, although Pioneer could probably work well enough with further reduction in thrust - I've even seen an AI co-pilot dodging incoming fire with lateral burns in Mola-Mola - though it would require remaking most of the ships as tail-landers and/or allowing to take off on nearly empty tanks (seriously, we should drop massive internal tanks in favour of small buffer tank and most of the fuel fuel in cargo bay).

Speaking of reentry - is there any way to make the heating shader treat all meshes as smooth shaded (in regards to normals)? As it is it looks really artificial on sharp, flat shaded geometry (but great on streamlined ships).

...probably, but I'm not really that good at shaders :)
I just wrote it as best I could. I'd like to do more to it, including extruding a shell of triangles to do some sort of fire/plasma effect.

We already have shield effect why not apply reentry shader to the shield bubble (whether ship has shields or not) and use it as second layer of our reentry effect?

Could be visible from inside too.

[impaktor]

@torham2234 Just letting you know that since the latest build equipment definitions for the ships have changed, so a small update will be needed to the lua-file. It should be clear what is needed by looking at the lua-file for the other ships.

[FluffyFreak]

...probably, but I'm not really that good at shaders :)
I just wrote it as best I could. I'd like to do more to it, including extruding a shell of triangles to do some sort of fire/plasma effect.

We already have shield effect why not apply reentry shader to the shield bubble (whether ship has shields or not) and use it as second layer of our reentry effect?

Could be visible from inside too.

At the time I wrote the heating effect I had not yet written the shield shader, Mrs Chicken meet Mr Egg ;)
I plan to do more too it, in fact start on something, but I haven't had time to do any further work on it.

[impaktor]

Apart from some nitpicking, (some tiny triangles that can be removed on radar dome, almost too symmetric texture), of which it is up to the creator to heed or disregard, and settling on the specs for the ship, this is basically done, right? I would love to see this added to the game.

@torham2234 are you still out there? Do you still want to work on it? If not, then I take it this is up for grabs?

[FluffyFreak]

Yeah this should definitely go in.