Considering function over form, the wings are the engine mounts. I can see refueling ports (depending on the type of fuel) at the tips, but not general loading tubes. They would have to pass through the engineering spaces and that doesn't seem practical.
First off, escape pod hatches. The bulk of them are set in the O1 and O2 decks (the superstructure) and launch vertically, but I've made sure that there's ample clearance for them so they won't be firing through any spaces where there might be a cannon barrel barring the way. Where there wasn't space to put them on the deck, I've stuck them on the sides, such as on the fire control towers and below the main turrets. Also, there's a few of them set in the wingtips as well. I haven't added any vertical ones on the upper or lower wing surfaces, because they're kind of complicated and I haven't gotten the hang of the tools for placing stuff on curved surfaces yet. I'll get there.
The refueling ports are mainly done. The forward one (left in the picture) is the receiving port, and is fixed to the wall. The aft one is where the ship offloads to smaller vessels, and the port here is mounted on an extending flexible hose. (It's neither flexible nor extending at the moment, but I think I've worked that part out so I'll rig that when I need it.)
I've checked the destroyer mesh, and this whole structure is big enough to fit its wingtips, so this will be pretty much a standard fixture that'll go on everything once I get the last few details done. When not in use, there'll be a segmented door sliding shut to seal it off, outside of the atmospheric separation field.
Lightwave tells me the ship clocks in at 2 million and change faces right now, but around a third of that is due to how it freezes the bridge chairs, which are subpatch objects. Without them, the facecount is one and a quarter million or so...
perhaps distribute escape pods all across the ship because if the ship needs evacuating crew may be trapped in certain areas(or not have time to get from their stations to the pods), if there are escape pods all across the ship they still have a good chance of surviving wherever they are. the ship is coming on nicely.
Since I don't build ships out of explodium, under most circumstances the right thing to do would be to stay put and wait for rescue, as any compartment that still has air will likely run out much less quickly than a tiny escape pod. Those who can't get to one will have to EVA and wait for pickup by the larger ships' boats.
what are the, shuttles? i would say they need wings for traveling in an atmosphere but your ship can land on planets anyway so atmosphere capable shuttles are not needed. why so many guns at the back there?
The guns are placed according to the plans for the original WW2 ship, which had a big brace of guns in that area. You might have noticed by now that I try to work in as much of the original ship as possible, and if it has guns someplace, come hell or high water I'm putting guns there on my ship as well.
Since countergrav is a staple of the setting (to the point where my bigass 700 meter ships can operate indefinitely in an atmosphere without being able to land outside of a specialized cradle), no the shuttles don't need wings. Some of them have them anyway, but that's to mount sensors and other stuff on. (It turns out these are not the shuttles that I was supposed to use here, there's a much slimmer version of the same length that would look a little better, but it needs new docking hatches.)
While I'm on the topic of boats, here's a pic with two of the larger ones in the scene. The upper one is of course a PT boat, complete with enough torpedoes to ruin a much bigger ship's day entirely - if it can get close enough. The lower one is a militarized commercial shuttle, used as an FTL-capable VIP transport. (I get complaints off and on that it looks out of place compared to my other ships, but so does a 737 next to a bunch of B-1 and B-2 bombers - yet it's still used for military purposes.)
The new docking towers, with the adjustable docking tubes:
The point to the retracting towers is that they're not just adjustable in fine detail using the docking tube, they can be elevated another five meters and used to access one of the much bigger PT boats or VIP shuttles.
After a lot of arguing, I've given in to the feedback and added a hangar elevator as well, though it's under protest. You need a seriously big elevator to handle these shuttles - the elevator is 32 meters long and 20 meters wide:
Also visible in this shot is the slimmer version of the 30 meter shuttlecraft, which has just gotten its new docking hatches modeled. (not visible right now since they're closed, but they're there...)
Finally, an overall render from this higher angle, to show some of the other upperworks detail that's been added that wasn't visible before:
I got this idea rolling around in my head as I was trying to sleep, and I thought I'd better write it down before it went away:
1 knot = 1852 m/h = 0.51444 m/s
1 knot' = (skipping this level for now)
1 knot'' = 299,792,458 m/h = 83275,682778 m/s
The factor is 161874.9787 plus umpteen more decimals.
The square root is 402.33 and change, which is nice and round. Ish. In other words (all values should really use the approx sign, but I don't know the html for that)
c = 1,079,252,848.8 km/h
1 knot' = 402.3 knots = 745.1 km/h
1 knot'' = 402.3 knots' = 161,845 knots = 299,737 km/h (close enough for government work, the speed of light drops in a gaseous medium after all) (The initial idea was to make one knot = one lightsecond, which is one I've had for ages. It just didn't crystalize until just now, though).
1 knot''' = 402.3 knots'' = 161,845 knots' = 65,110,360 knots = 120,584,387 km/h (just over 1/9 c)
1 knot'''' = 45.01 c
1 knot''''' = 18,109 c = 20,65 lightyears/hour
1 knot''''' = 7,285,230 c = 8311 lightyears/hour
OK, here goes some technobabble:
Hyperspace has multiple levels where the distance compression increases exponentially by a factor of 402.3 and change. The lowest level wasn't discovered until after the second, fourth and sixth, and while in itself only useful as proof of a theory, its discovery led to the subsequent discoveries of stages 3 and 5, which had definite practical applications. It did however lead to a bunch of confusion as the scales had to be refactored, and some obsolete reference books still refer to stages 2 and 4 as Alpha and Beta. According to this scheme, stage 3 would be Alpha-plus, stage 5 would be Beta-plus, and stage 6 would be Gamma.
Hyperspace stage two or Alphaspace is characterized by its low particle density, which is comparable to the upper levels of the stratosphere. There is enough drag that ships will eventually run into a top speed above which they can't travel due to their particle shielding not permitting it, but said speed is fairly high. As the compression factor is only around 162k, it is mainly useful for in-system travel, but it is possible to travel interstellar as well, though it takes a long time and requires a powerful ship.
Hyperspace stage three or Alpha-plus has a significantly higher particle density, but it's still very thin. Since it's discovery it has been quickly replacing Alphaspace as the primary intra-system stage.
Hyperspace stage four, or Betaspace, has a particle density comparable to sea-level air, and is exellent for airfoil-controlled craft among other things. The high compression factor makes it useful for interstellar travel, as a freighter moving at 150 knots local works out to about 6700 c in realspace - Earth to Alpha Centauri in a few hours. Still, there are inhabited systems which take more than a year of travel time to get to in Betaspace, and mankind is ever looking outward...
Hyperspace stage five was eagerly sought after for many years, and its discovery was almost as revolutionary as the discovery of Alpha and Beta. Also known as Beta-plus, stage five allows for very fast interstellar travel - at a serious cost. The particle density in Beta-plus space is so high, visibility is effectively zero and many sensors work extremely poorly - it is too thin for acoustic-type sensors, and too thick for em radiation. It is rumored that the military has been experimenting with specialized sensors that would allow them to sneak up on ships in Beta-plus, and effectively blindside them, but no one has yet posted conclusive proof that this is so, nor figured out a mechanism for how such sensors would work.
Hyperspace stage six or Gammaspace has a particle density so high it is more of a liquid than a gaseous medium. In fact, it is so thick that to everyone's initial disappointment, travel through Gammaspace has so far proved impossible. Eventually, someone came up with the bright idea of testing whether techniques developed to transmit information through water on old Earth would work through Gammaspace, an experiment which gave its designer a Nobel Prize, as not only did acoustic transmission work (at a local speed of around a thousand knots, or 8 billion c), but VLF and ELF radio worked as well, at local light speed (with a compression factor of 402.3^6 = 4.24E15!) The data rate is abysmal, but the value of being able to communicate in real time across the entire galaxy is not to be underestimated.
Yep! It's not a galactic holonet by any means, but being able to send messages planet-to-planet with effectively no lag is worth not having a data rate of more than "a few characters per minute" (says Wikipedia about ELF). I couldn't find anything about the data rate of VLF, but I'm imagining something on the order of a 300 baud modem, which would be enough for IRC-like communication...
I'm just.... Well I suppose you could pull a Sparrow here: "For being called so imaginative, we're an impressively unimaginative lot when it comes to naming things."
Well, between VLF and ELF there's Super Low Frequency (SLF) and Ultra Low Frequency (ULF), though I'm too lazy right now to be bothered about which is which right now...
Every so often I get the urge to try again and create a pier or shipyard, and today was such an occasion:
So far, I'm thinking this is my best attempt yet, and I still have some things I'd like to add. The central tube between the two piers is going to have an enclosed dock inside of it, for basic construction. (The current piers are for outfitting of a spaceworthy hull - it's where things like turrets are fitted. I might have to make it a bit bigger though.
I tried to make the large shipbuilding cranes as flexible as possible without giving up the classic shipyard look, and I think they came out OK. I have yet to make the actual crane arms, but you get the idea I hope. I have another set of more classic cranes that are small enough to fit underneath the main one, though they need a bit more work as well before I can add them.
If anyone is wondering how the crane is supposed to pick anything up from the deck of the pier, the answer is that such outsize loads are delivered to one end of the crane's work area in freefall, where they can be picked up and manipulated.
upper view is good and revealing, the top shuttle by the side(the PT boat, we call them MTBs in britain(motor torpedo boat)) is also nice. retracting towers are good, maybe have retracting turrets as well so it can travel faster in an atmosphere without ripping them off. knots is a bit of a dated measure, and that 1 knot'' ( you defined it as 83275,682778 m/s) is much faster than the speed of light(3x10^8 ms^-1). your hyperspace ideas are interesting, compression factors(perhaps in a diferent sense) are alo used in my sci fi stuff, see my blog article on hyperspace(pure fiction, just there to supplement my models and writing). i notice that making these hyperspaces of yours high density allows you to get away with having starships fly like aircraft, and you seem to have a method of ftl radio in your stage six hyperspace. your dockyard looks interesting but needs more detail.
Oops, that was supposed to be a decimal point - if you look at the speed in m/h, you'll notice that one knot'' is supposed to equal one light second per hour, or 1/3600 of c. That comes out to 83,275.682,778 m/s, or a bit over 83 km/s. In other words, c in realspace is 3600 knots in Alphaspace, which is the realm of coilgun shells and hypersonic missiles.
(Battles fought in Alpha-plus or Betaspace would be much like the ones depicted in Star Wars, where turning off your engines means you drift to a stop, and where relative speeds between combatants are still slow enough for human reactions. Also, sound in space and visible laser beams are both also explained...)
Well, if you want to go with that frequency dubbing, then I'd say got hat way: low-frequency->VLF->SLF->ELF->ULF
I like your hyperspace theories, I used something similar myself as an explanation for warp10+ ideas of FTL-travel (though I went to the extend of 9 layers of hyperspace with the capacity to travel between galaxies...)
The staryard looks sweet. I hope to see you work on that a bit more.
Battles fought in Alpha-plus or Betaspace would be much like the ones depicted in Star Wars, where turning off your engines means you drift to a stop, and where relative speeds between combatants are still slow enough for human reactions. Also, sound in space and visible laser beams are both also explained...
your mathematical error/typo is forgiven. i see you have found a way to ensure that space battles are like the classic sci fi sort rather than following the physics that applies in a vacuum far from any significant gravitational fields, i prefer battles in space to be BATTLES IN SPACE Attachment not found..
sound in space is a big NO. atleast you have found a way to achieve this by having air like properties in hyperspace rather than by totaling ignoring issac newton.
Aresius: ELF and VLF are actual radio bands defined by ITU - from lowest to highest by frequency, they go: ELF, SLF, ULF, VLF, LF, MF, HF, VHF, UHF, SHF, EHF. (V for Very, U for Ultra, S for Super, E for Extremely.) Wikipedia also mentions an unofficial designation for a band above EHF - Tremendously High Frequency, which covers the gap between EHF and the infrared spectrum.
ELF used to be used to radio coded instructions to submarines, but they've apparently quit that as the communication was really damned slow (about the best you could do was send out three-letter code messages, such as "ascend to receive further instructions"), the installations required were huge (kilometer-long buried antennas and enormous energy expenditure to transmit), and there were things pointing to military ELF transmissions as one cause of mass whale beachings.
VLF is the primary way of communicating with subs under water, and that's still restricted to Telex like speed.
spacefighter: Any visually impressive space battle scene would require a whole bunch of physics abuse, or else limiting the scope of the setting tremendously. Star Trek explained it with invent-as-you-go technobabble. Star Wars didn't explain anything. B5 kept the action contained in a small zone around a chokepoint (the jump gate) for much of the series, and left Newton behind with the station when they added the Whitestar to give the crew some mobility. Very nearly the entire Gundam franchise takes place in Earth Orbit, and they still had to invent explanations for each continuity for why sensor ranges were so limited and why giant robots would be a good idea.
Personally, I found Star Wars to be the most appealing of the lot, visually and dramatically, but the lack of explanations led to people writing their own, which has piled up into something almost worse than the Star Trek technobabble collection. I desperately want to avoid people "calcing stats" for my stuff - it's useless, and the numbers people come up with are ludicrous.
(Teratons? Seriously? An explosion in the hundred of megatons is a country killer, for most places that aren't the US, Canada, China or Russia, and even then the population is concentrated enough that you'd get at least half of them with one shot. A gigaton would level most of a continent, and burn the rest. A teraton explosion leaves a tiny patch on the opposite side of the planet uncovered by the fireball, and that spot would have massive earthquakes from the converging shockwaves through the earth's crust, and the burning ejecta from the explosion would blanket the remains. Planet killer, definitely.)
So, to avoid fan-made explanations with unfortunate implications, I'll explain my physics abuses in a way that'll limit their impact in the real world. Somehow.
Anyway, on with the show. I don't actually have anything to show that was made today - just a render from yesterday that I never posted:
This is the start of the construction dock, as opposed to the outfitting docks to either side. I've loaded up my biggest ship to date as a construction aid - the construction dock needs to be big enough to handle that ship. I'll build some smaller ones later, for lesser ships like the cruisers and destroyers, and possibly some form of station to attach them to - administratively, if not physically.
Well, as per space-battles, I like EAS' idea that they have some miniature bots flying around, much like the WSKRS in SeaQuest. They're miniature cams and surveillance, and EAS made them up to explain hos sounds can be heard in space, as well as how the Klingon government used the external and internal shots of the Klingon Boarding party from Kurges ship, shortly before the Ent self-destructed (and all those other instances). As per the Newtonian laws, well.... It all depends on how you bend tghe laws of physics with both the laws of coolness, and your creative mind for inventions and excuses.
I've reprofiled the main hull, making all the edge loops vertical, in order to make it easier to add more edge loops and consequently more detail to the sides. The first stuff that got added in was a set of ladders - something I've been meaning to add for a while but never got around to before. I also redid the hull number, so they're once again modeled objects rather than textures. This lets me do some fun stuff to them, such as this:
Notice how the hull number glows? It has some luminosity set on it so it'll never become completely dark - unless I turn it off, that is. I experimented with lighting them conventionally with spotlights or edge lights, but in the end I think this works better. (Compare and contrast the anti-collision "slime lights" on modern jets...)
Once I was somewhat satisfied with the forward end, I got started on the new docking ports, which are now made without booleans. I'll be adding another set of these aft, but I'll only add the upper ones, I think. The geometry is kind of difficult to work with on the lower half where these would go.
Also visible in this picture are some extra cranes I added along the sides of the hull, and just for fun I made some shells for the main guns. Did I say they were twice the size of the originals? I was way, way off then, because the actual caliber of the guns turns out to be 1360 mm, or more than three times the original size. That means they're something like 30-ish times heavier than the original shells, which weighed in at one and a quarter tons each. Calling it forty tons won't be too far off. This demonstrates why having gravity on deck, especially gravity that is perpendicular to the hull surface, is a good idea - while getting them moving with no gravity is easier, making them stop again is decidedly harder if you don't have gravity to help. Also, if one of them fell over and started to roll towards the bow, there'd be nothing but ketchup left of whoever got in the way. Hence, perpendicular gravity to avoid rollers.
(Actually, I didn't do the math before I made those pallets they're standing on - six of these on one pallet is 240 tons, which is kind of a heavy load...)
Hyperspace is an atmosphere, more or less. Also, the ships are equipped to fly and fight all the way down the gravity well. It makes a much more visible statement when a kilometer-long battleship is visiting your surface spaceport an everyone within a hundred miles can see the ship floating there...
As for why the ammo is on the deck, that was mainly for show. I need to build the magazine reloading hatches at some point as well.
Slept most of the day away, but I did manage a few things...
The main turrets have been modified slightly and have gotten some individual detailing added. I've also built some staircases or whatever the navy speak for those is - I've only installed a couple of them and both are visible from here, but more are to come when I'm not as tired.
i like the way that the shuttle docks to the side of the hull with that extending access tube. detail is still awesome but putting the shells outside is asking for trouble, if hyperspace is like a gas or fluid then the shells could be ripped form the deck if the ship goes fast enough. EVAs are risky at the best of times, why put the SEALs in extra danger and during a battle if the shells are inside they are more easily reached to load the guns with and less likely to be detonated by an incoming hit and increase the damage it causes. detail great as ever, maybe try adding some more features that are not derived from an iowa battleship.
Posts
First off, escape pod hatches. The bulk of them are set in the O1 and O2 decks (the superstructure) and launch vertically, but I've made sure that there's ample clearance for them so they won't be firing through any spaces where there might be a cannon barrel barring the way. Where there wasn't space to put them on the deck, I've stuck them on the sides, such as on the fire control towers and below the main turrets. Also, there's a few of them set in the wingtips as well. I haven't added any vertical ones on the upper or lower wing surfaces, because they're kind of complicated and I haven't gotten the hang of the tools for placing stuff on curved surfaces yet. I'll get there.
The refueling ports are mainly done. The forward one (left in the picture) is the receiving port, and is fixed to the wall. The aft one is where the ship offloads to smaller vessels, and the port here is mounted on an extending flexible hose. (It's neither flexible nor extending at the moment, but I think I've worked that part out so I'll rig that when I need it.)
I've checked the destroyer mesh, and this whole structure is big enough to fit its wingtips, so this will be pretty much a standard fixture that'll go on everything once I get the last few details done. When not in use, there'll be a segmented door sliding shut to seal it off, outside of the atmospheric separation field.
Lightwave tells me the ship clocks in at 2 million and change faces right now, but around a third of that is due to how it freezes the bridge chairs, which are subpatch objects. Without them, the facecount is one and a quarter million or so...
Not done with this section yet, but I think I've gotten the basics down.
Since countergrav is a staple of the setting (to the point where my bigass 700 meter ships can operate indefinitely in an atmosphere without being able to land outside of a specialized cradle), no the shuttles don't need wings. Some of them have them anyway, but that's to mount sensors and other stuff on. (It turns out these are not the shuttles that I was supposed to use here, there's a much slimmer version of the same length that would look a little better, but it needs new docking hatches.)
While I'm on the topic of boats, here's a pic with two of the larger ones in the scene. The upper one is of course a PT boat, complete with enough torpedoes to ruin a much bigger ship's day entirely - if it can get close enough. The lower one is a militarized commercial shuttle, used as an FTL-capable VIP transport. (I get complaints off and on that it looks out of place compared to my other ships, but so does a 737 next to a bunch of B-1 and B-2 bombers - yet it's still used for military purposes.)
The point to the retracting towers is that they're not just adjustable in fine detail using the docking tube, they can be elevated another five meters and used to access one of the much bigger PT boats or VIP shuttles.
After a lot of arguing, I've given in to the feedback and added a hangar elevator as well, though it's under protest. You need a seriously big elevator to handle these shuttles - the elevator is 32 meters long and 20 meters wide:
Also visible in this shot is the slimmer version of the 30 meter shuttlecraft, which has just gotten its new docking hatches modeled. (not visible right now since they're closed, but they're there...)
Finally, an overall render from this higher angle, to show some of the other upperworks detail that's been added that wasn't visible before:
1 knot = 1852 m/h = 0.51444 m/s
1 knot' = (skipping this level for now)
1 knot'' = 299,792,458 m/h = 83275,682778 m/s
The factor is 161874.9787 plus umpteen more decimals.
The square root is 402.33 and change, which is nice and round. Ish. In other words (all values should really use the approx sign, but I don't know the html for that)
c = 1,079,252,848.8 km/h
1 knot' = 402.3 knots = 745.1 km/h
1 knot'' = 402.3 knots' = 161,845 knots = 299,737 km/h (close enough for government work, the speed of light drops in a gaseous medium after all) (The initial idea was to make one knot = one lightsecond, which is one I've had for ages. It just didn't crystalize until just now, though).
1 knot''' = 402.3 knots'' = 161,845 knots' = 65,110,360 knots = 120,584,387 km/h (just over 1/9 c)
1 knot'''' = 45.01 c
1 knot''''' = 18,109 c = 20,65 lightyears/hour
1 knot''''' = 7,285,230 c = 8311 lightyears/hour
OK, here goes some technobabble:
Hyperspace has multiple levels where the distance compression increases exponentially by a factor of 402.3 and change. The lowest level wasn't discovered until after the second, fourth and sixth, and while in itself only useful as proof of a theory, its discovery led to the subsequent discoveries of stages 3 and 5, which had definite practical applications. It did however lead to a bunch of confusion as the scales had to be refactored, and some obsolete reference books still refer to stages 2 and 4 as Alpha and Beta. According to this scheme, stage 3 would be Alpha-plus, stage 5 would be Beta-plus, and stage 6 would be Gamma.
Hyperspace stage two or Alphaspace is characterized by its low particle density, which is comparable to the upper levels of the stratosphere. There is enough drag that ships will eventually run into a top speed above which they can't travel due to their particle shielding not permitting it, but said speed is fairly high. As the compression factor is only around 162k, it is mainly useful for in-system travel, but it is possible to travel interstellar as well, though it takes a long time and requires a powerful ship.
Hyperspace stage three or Alpha-plus has a significantly higher particle density, but it's still very thin. Since it's discovery it has been quickly replacing Alphaspace as the primary intra-system stage.
Hyperspace stage four, or Betaspace, has a particle density comparable to sea-level air, and is exellent for airfoil-controlled craft among other things. The high compression factor makes it useful for interstellar travel, as a freighter moving at 150 knots local works out to about 6700 c in realspace - Earth to Alpha Centauri in a few hours. Still, there are inhabited systems which take more than a year of travel time to get to in Betaspace, and mankind is ever looking outward...
Hyperspace stage five was eagerly sought after for many years, and its discovery was almost as revolutionary as the discovery of Alpha and Beta. Also known as Beta-plus, stage five allows for very fast interstellar travel - at a serious cost. The particle density in Beta-plus space is so high, visibility is effectively zero and many sensors work extremely poorly - it is too thin for acoustic-type sensors, and too thick for em radiation. It is rumored that the military has been experimenting with specialized sensors that would allow them to sneak up on ships in Beta-plus, and effectively blindside them, but no one has yet posted conclusive proof that this is so, nor figured out a mechanism for how such sensors would work.
Hyperspace stage six or Gammaspace has a particle density so high it is more of a liquid than a gaseous medium. In fact, it is so thick that to everyone's initial disappointment, travel through Gammaspace has so far proved impossible. Eventually, someone came up with the bright idea of testing whether techniques developed to transmit information through water on old Earth would work through Gammaspace, an experiment which gave its designer a Nobel Prize, as not only did acoustic transmission work (at a local speed of around a thousand knots, or 8 billion c), but VLF and ELF radio worked as well, at local light speed (with a compression factor of 402.3^6 = 4.24E15!) The data rate is abysmal, but the value of being able to communicate in real time across the entire galaxy is not to be underestimated.
Every so often I get the urge to try again and create a pier or shipyard, and today was such an occasion:
So far, I'm thinking this is my best attempt yet, and I still have some things I'd like to add. The central tube between the two piers is going to have an enclosed dock inside of it, for basic construction. (The current piers are for outfitting of a spaceworthy hull - it's where things like turrets are fitted. I might have to make it a bit bigger though.
I tried to make the large shipbuilding cranes as flexible as possible without giving up the classic shipyard look, and I think they came out OK. I have yet to make the actual crane arms, but you get the idea I hope. I have another set of more classic cranes that are small enough to fit underneath the main one, though they need a bit more work as well before I can add them.
If anyone is wondering how the crane is supposed to pick anything up from the deck of the pier, the answer is that such outsize loads are delivered to one end of the crane's work area in freefall, where they can be picked up and manipulated.
Let's see what I can come up with, and thanks for the reply!
(Battles fought in Alpha-plus or Betaspace would be much like the ones depicted in Star Wars, where turning off your engines means you drift to a stop, and where relative speeds between combatants are still slow enough for human reactions. Also, sound in space and visible laser beams are both also explained...)
I like your hyperspace theories, I used something similar myself as an explanation for warp10+ ideas of FTL-travel (though I went to the extend of 9 layers of hyperspace with the capacity to travel between galaxies...)
The staryard looks sweet. I hope to see you work on that a bit more.
sound in space is a big NO. atleast you have found a way to achieve this by having air like properties in hyperspace rather than by totaling ignoring issac newton.
ELF used to be used to radio coded instructions to submarines, but they've apparently quit that as the communication was really damned slow (about the best you could do was send out three-letter code messages, such as "ascend to receive further instructions"), the installations required were huge (kilometer-long buried antennas and enormous energy expenditure to transmit), and there were things pointing to military ELF transmissions as one cause of mass whale beachings.
VLF is the primary way of communicating with subs under water, and that's still restricted to Telex like speed.
spacefighter: Any visually impressive space battle scene would require a whole bunch of physics abuse, or else limiting the scope of the setting tremendously. Star Trek explained it with invent-as-you-go technobabble. Star Wars didn't explain anything. B5 kept the action contained in a small zone around a chokepoint (the jump gate) for much of the series, and left Newton behind with the station when they added the Whitestar to give the crew some mobility. Very nearly the entire Gundam franchise takes place in Earth Orbit, and they still had to invent explanations for each continuity for why sensor ranges were so limited and why giant robots would be a good idea.
Personally, I found Star Wars to be the most appealing of the lot, visually and dramatically, but the lack of explanations led to people writing their own, which has piled up into something almost worse than the Star Trek technobabble collection. I desperately want to avoid people "calcing stats" for my stuff - it's useless, and the numbers people come up with are ludicrous.
(Teratons? Seriously? An explosion in the hundred of megatons is a country killer, for most places that aren't the US, Canada, China or Russia, and even then the population is concentrated enough that you'd get at least half of them with one shot. A gigaton would level most of a continent, and burn the rest. A teraton explosion leaves a tiny patch on the opposite side of the planet uncovered by the fireball, and that spot would have massive earthquakes from the converging shockwaves through the earth's crust, and the burning ejecta from the explosion would blanket the remains. Planet killer, definitely.)
So, to avoid fan-made explanations with unfortunate implications, I'll explain my physics abuses in a way that'll limit their impact in the real world. Somehow.
Anyway, on with the show. I don't actually have anything to show that was made today - just a render from yesterday that I never posted:
This is the start of the construction dock, as opposed to the outfitting docks to either side. I've loaded up my biggest ship to date as a construction aid - the construction dock needs to be big enough to handle that ship. I'll build some smaller ones later, for lesser ships like the cruisers and destroyers, and possibly some form of station to attach them to - administratively, if not physically.
AWESOME!
Well, as per space-battles, I like EAS' idea that they have some miniature bots flying around, much like the WSKRS in SeaQuest. They're miniature cams and surveillance, and EAS made them up to explain hos sounds can be heard in space, as well as how the Klingon government used the external and internal shots of the Klingon Boarding party from Kurges ship, shortly before the Ent self-destructed (and all those other instances). As per the Newtonian laws, well.... It all depends on how you bend tghe laws of physics with both the laws of coolness, and your creative mind for inventions and excuses.
I've reprofiled the main hull, making all the edge loops vertical, in order to make it easier to add more edge loops and consequently more detail to the sides. The first stuff that got added in was a set of ladders - something I've been meaning to add for a while but never got around to before. I also redid the hull number, so they're once again modeled objects rather than textures. This lets me do some fun stuff to them, such as this:
Notice how the hull number glows? It has some luminosity set on it so it'll never become completely dark - unless I turn it off, that is. I experimented with lighting them conventionally with spotlights or edge lights, but in the end I think this works better. (Compare and contrast the anti-collision "slime lights" on modern jets...)
Once I was somewhat satisfied with the forward end, I got started on the new docking ports, which are now made without booleans. I'll be adding another set of these aft, but I'll only add the upper ones, I think. The geometry is kind of difficult to work with on the lower half where these would go.
Also visible in this picture are some extra cranes I added along the sides of the hull, and just for fun I made some shells for the main guns. Did I say they were twice the size of the originals? I was way, way off then, because the actual caliber of the guns turns out to be 1360 mm, or more than three times the original size. That means they're something like 30-ish times heavier than the original shells, which weighed in at one and a quarter tons each. Calling it forty tons won't be too far off. This demonstrates why having gravity on deck, especially gravity that is perpendicular to the hull surface, is a good idea - while getting them moving with no gravity is easier, making them stop again is decidedly harder if you don't have gravity to help. Also, if one of them fell over and started to roll towards the bow, there'd be nothing but ketchup left of whoever got in the way. Hence, perpendicular gravity to avoid rollers.
(Actually, I didn't do the math before I made those pallets they're standing on - six of these on one pallet is 240 tons, which is kind of a heavy load...)
As for why the ammo is on the deck, that was mainly for show. I need to build the magazine reloading hatches at some point as well.
Slept most of the day away, but I did manage a few things...
The main turrets have been modified slightly and have gotten some individual detailing added. I've also built some staircases or whatever the navy speak for those is - I've only installed a couple of them and both are visible from here, but more are to come when I'm not as tired.