Bowfin Light Fighter

[bszlrd]

It became a Light Fighter after all, when I put some other ships next to it to see it's scale.
The sketch:


It needed a bit of playing around with proportions, but I think I got it this (third) time. It's not easy when you work from an image that was based on a 4cm sketch made on the subway. :)
Edit: I forgot to include the blend file. Here it goes.

It will have a turreted nose gun, two fixed guns somewhere on the base of the nose, and a bunch of missile launch tubes near the retro thrusters. I agree with bobtheterrible (in the sketch thread), the placement of those are better in the sketch, than what I painted on the first attempt.
I'm intending it as a police ship for CIW too. It's performance will be sometwhat similar to the Kanara, although with a bit of lower mileage, but better acceleration and maneuverability. It will be lighter than it too, and will have less cargo space. By default it won't have a hyperdrive, but there will be room for a small one in it.

The base mesh is in a good shape, but no UVs yet.
It uses the landing gear of the Pumpkinseed right now, and I think I will leave it that way, because it fits nicely.




And a view from the cockpit (the black lines are showing what will you see in game, at 16:9 and 4:3 aspects):

[DraQ]

So we finally get a proper Kaluri fighter :D .

Looks great and, more importantly, Kaluri-like, but I have a one nitpick:

Cockpit should really be further forward and maybe bit higher, a bit larger too - it's rather apparent from the cockpit shot, with nose blocking a lot of the view.

[bszlrd]

Some update on the Bowfin.
Landing gears are animated, and I reworked the cockpit shape a bit. I won't move it neither higher of forward, partly because visual reasons, and I want to keep the cockpit closer to the center of mass/rotation of the ship. And most of the lower part of the cockpit will be blocked instruments anyway. Not to mention the military version I eventually want to make which will lack outside cockpit anyway.

I also added geometry for the aft area because the blockiness was quite apparent there.
And I've drilled in the missile tubes (23cm diameter), and a pair of fixed gun nozzle holes too. And I worked out the turret of the nose gun and sensor dome too. Eventually those should be able to support a turret feature.

[impaktor]

Looks very nice!

(For some reason I thought the Kanara was way smaller than the pumpkindseed and this new ship.)

[bszlrd]

Now that you mentioned it, I just checked, and it seems I was quite generous with the scale of the Kanara. It could be resized to 75% and it still accomodates the pilot nicely. Hmm. I have to do that.

[DraQ]

Ok, now I have nothing to complain about, maybe apart from being wary about baking almost exact weapons configuration right into the ship's model (I'm hoping for ships getting highly configurable in this regard at some point).

And yeah, Kanara could be much smaller.

[impaktor]

It could be resized to 75% and it still accomodates the pilot nicely.

Or make everything bigger! "MOAR!"

[bszlrd]

Here's a mod with it's current state.
It's far from ready, but nicely taking shape. Already has normal mapping, the diff texture has some progress, but not ready (and 2048x in this mod, that will be only 1024x in the final version.). Some normals are inverted due to dupicating and mirroring. No collision mesh, gun and camera tags for now, and some thruster tags are temporary too. Main and retro thrusters won't contribute to rotation most likely they make quite a visual mess.
Stats are from the Kanara for now, I've only changed the price to 1 spacebucks, so it will show up in the market.

[bobtheterrible]

Hi Noz,

Great work! I really like the paneling :)

[bszlrd]

Thanks, and nice to see you around. :)
I want to keep down the tiny paneling detail that's so prevalent in sci-fi ship designs.