Here's a little something I did for fun, just to explore the various options for battleship layouts...
From the furthest to the closest:
* A US-style "heavy" battleship based on the Montana class, featuring the same 4x3 turret scheme as the pre-war Arizona, New Mexico and Tennessee classes.
* A US-style "fast" battleship based primarily on the Iowa class, but also the North Carolina and South Dakota classes. I need to redo her superstructure since I got the order of the secondary turrets wrong...
* A French-style battleship based on the Richelieu. Note the cruiser-style secondary turrets on the aft deck, and quad main turrets. Also, the superstructure is completely wrong, since I reused the US one. Will fix that eventually.
* The fourth ship is based on the British "Nelson"-class, which is seriously oddball in having the superstructure so far aft. I decided to move the engine section back to match, giving it a faster look I think than any of the others.
* The final ship is just the same old heavy cruiser, based rather closely on the Oregon City class.
There are a few other layouts to pick from, but these were some of the most iconic. I'll probably include all of them as "canonical" in my universe once I develop some backstory.
About the armament, my current thinking is that the main guns are mass driver missile launchers, or to put it a little differently maneuvering-projectile railguns.
I've got most of the other ship types fairly well thought out in my head, but these are all human ships in the end - they may have been built with a fair bit of competitive spirit, but they're not built to fight each other. They're built to fight an *enemy*, and I have no idea what that enemy looks or thinks like. Help? :-)
New for tonight (well, last night really) are bow and stern maneuvering thrusters, revised masts, and a different "sub"-structure. I've also rearranged the secondary turrets on the fast battleship to better match the Iowa class.
I've also made some orthographic profiles to show a bit better the differences and similarities between the top and bottom:
The scale is two meters per pixel, which makes the images 2560 meters wide. I'm not sure whether to stick with that, or shrink the ships further - I can actually go down all the way to 440 meters or so overall before the bridge level becomes too small for windows. Of course, that means the boat bay in the back will shrink to minimal proportions....
Currently, the poly count for each of these ships is in the region of 60k, two thirds of which are bound up in the engines. Then again, I haven't even started on adding railings or anything like that yet (or the blasted missile hatches, those things are seriously evil). I *have* removed the interior barrels from the point defense guns, though. (those were also evil, I think they were 500-odd polys each. Imagine 80 of those.)
I'm considering the implications of replacing the anti-fighter guns with various missile launcher types. (they're just placeholders anyway...) Candidates include circular VLS launchers (like the Russian S-300); trainable box launchers (like RAM); or trainable arm launchers (Mk26 style). They all have their pros and cons - S-300 is low profile and has large missiles, but low capacity; RAM can fire a lot of missiles at once but only small ones; and Mk26 can fire lots of medium missiles but not very fast...
I will be adding smaller anti-fighter guns later, based on the placement of the 20 mm cannon that were part of the WWII anti-aircraft suite. I'll have to wait with those until I know the scale of the ships though, since I have several different ideas depending on their absolute size... :-)
I like the new hull shape a look, bulky and speedy at the same time. The size might be a bit over the top. Judging by the turrets I always saw these ships in size of hundreds of meters, not thousands, that mean that those turrets are over-the-top ridiculously large...
For the carrier opening, good sport for it on the aft but perhaps don't make the whole so high. Right now the entire back end is open but don't forget that you'd need ammo- and fuel storage, a closed off hangar level for storage and maintenance etc etc. I'm roughly guessing that a third of the height would suit your purposes.
Also, what are you going to put in place in terms of launching mechanisms and recovery of the ships? Launch catapults in tubes or on the deck like contemporary carriers. How are they going to be recovered? Separate landing strips with safety netting, a 'run-through' deck somewhere so the incoming craft can perform a 'wave-off' instead of crashing into the back of the hangar, VTOL landing pads on an aft landing deck (along the lines of a contemporary cruiser or destroyer, etc etc?
Thinking out design elements like this will automatically help you put the design into place as certain elements will require a certain amount of room or a particular placement on the vessel.
Long time no update, though this doesn't mean I've been inactive.... :-) I've been concentrating my efforts on one ship for the moment, to give myself a baseline towards which I can develop the others. This time that job fell to the Heavy Battleship.
The first order of business: I rescaled the ships again by 60%. I've also recontoured the bow, making it pointier; and reduced the width of the prow and wing guns. Next was the rebuild of the wings, which ended up moving the main thrusters inside again, like one of the very old versions. The holes are hexagonal this time though, which worked better than the quadrangular ones on the last attempt. Then I added similar thrusters to the top and bottom of the bow, stern and wingtips, so the ship now has a complete set. I also added some really basic textures, basically just a honeycomb procedural for the armor tiles, and a noise procedural for the spec channel. That's a work in progress...
The above image is an orthographic profile, and scales so that 1 pixel equals 1 meter. The overall length is in the region of 920 meters give or take. The antenna farm up front is as close as I've ever come to greebling, and it doesn't look all that good up close right now. It's also pretty poly-intensive, though nowhere near as bad as all those thrusters (89 of them, including the big one I've fitted in the back for now, at 1200-odd faces each). Embedded in the tips of the wings are the main shield generators, or at least that's what I think they are. These are just placeholders, I haven't built the real things yet but they'll look somewhat similar.
Rather than mount the defensive weapons flat on the (leaning) deck, I've decided to try making some recessed pits for them. I haven't filled them yet, mostly because I'm still uncertain what kind of weapons to use here. I did however dig up my old VLS model, and I've added some launchers on the foredeck. The current total is 768 cells, though I'm planning to add another 512 cells on the aft deck, for a total of 1280. That should make the idea of attacking from directly above or below a slightly less appealing notion. :-)
Left to do? Lots and lots. For starters, all the turrets are currently completely fixed, and the turret bodies of the main battery are solid blocks. That needs fixing, and all of it needs rigging for animation which will be a major chore. With the ship size being down to somewhat believable proportions, I can also add human-scale details which will be visible from some distance, which will be a long term job. Don't expect exposed pipes etc though.
Where to begin... I reproportioned the hull again by cutting out an 8m thick slice in the horizontal plane and rejoining the halves. Then I scaled the hull back up until the superstructure rested on top of it properly again. After that, I spent a few hours trying to figure out a better look for the wing, and ended up with the above after much trial and error. Finally, I reshaped my engine mesh to add a pod shell to it, and stuck one in the back of the wing. I wasn't completely satisified, since the big battleship is supposed to be slower, and the really huge engines kind of made it look speedier than intended. So I stuck those wings on the heavy cruiser, and replaced the single big engine with two smaller ones. Success!
Next, I performed a much needed facelift on the secondary turrets, though they're too far away in these pics to see the differences. (closeups take forever to render.) Also, I worked some on the turret mounts.
Finally, I redid most of the battleship superstructure - though only the top so far. I'm thinking about how to differentiate better between the top and bottom, and I'm not completely sure how to go about that.
That shape is really being fleshed out and it shows. It's looking much more purpose-built.
One major comment though, personally, I'd resize the turrets of the large ship to about the same size of the ones on the smaller ship. It's really throwing off the sense of scale and even suggests that the big ship is nothing more than a percentile scale-up of the smaller ship. At a pixel per meter, those gun barrels are humongous in any case. Or perhaps go for a compromise in turret-size by scaling up the ones from the smaller ship and scaling down the ones on the big ship. It'll help identify the size a lot better.
Meph: I'm emulating WWII design here, and part of the thinking of the era was that it was better to have a smaller number of bigger guns that could actually penetrate your opponent's armor, than a large number of smaller guns whose shells would bounce off harmlessly. Building a battleship started with determining what thickness of armor would be needed to survive the shells of your opponent's biggest guns, and what guns would be needed to penetrate his armor. Then you build the smallest hull capable of holding the big guns out of the smallest quantity of heavy armor. Due to various limitations (political, economical and physical) and build time, the result was usually relative parity, sizewise.
In any case, what this means is that nearly all WWII ships had a similar ratio of main turret size contra hull size, and those that didn't are often referred to as under-gunned. And since I'm following the same design philosophy more or less, the same holds true for my ships.
Where you should look for scaling cues instead is the secondary battery, as well as the electronics fittings once I get around to them. The secondary battery on all US ships larger than a destroyer (and the main battery of the destroyers themselves), was made up of the same standard turret from some time in the mid thirties well into the fifties. Also, air defense guns were also standardized from the very early 1940s onwards. I've been using the same method my ships, using the same mesh for the secondary turrets and anti-fighter turrets at the same absolute size on all ships. The wing guns are also the same size on both of these ships, as are the shield generators embedded in the wingtips. I'll be continuing this trend once I get started on real detailing, using the same objects wherever appropriate. That should help the scaling issue.. :-)
Yep, though I haven't figured out what to do with the bottom half (makes no sense to mirror the flight deck), so I haven't started on it quite yet.
Today has mostly been spent thinking stuff through, but I did manage to get a bit of modeling work done at least, and I finally got around to arranging a scene where all the ships in this batch can be rendered the way I want to show them without having to move the camera or the ships any. (lots of cameras, tricky arrangement of ships and lights).
First off, the big brute (BB):
New features for today include the masts, the gunnery direction tower, a platform for the port and starboard secondary battery directors, and the primary battery directors. The positioning for all of these except possibly the forward secondary director is final, though the meshes aren't. Now I can finally start on detailing... Also, lifeboats.
The heavy cruiser (CA):
Actually, this one is unchanged compared to yesterday, but I thought it deserved its own render.
The destroyer (DD):
Basically, except for the overall dimensions and the bridge complex, this is an all new mesh - the hull, wings, and guns were all replaced completely, and the bridge structure is only still there because I haven't figured out what the new one will look like. At least this pic will give a closer look at the new secondary turret.
Here's the usual fleet perspective view:
The ships in this pic that still have their old-style wings are a Light cruiser (CL), a large cruiser (CB) and a fast battleship (BB). Note the floating missile launchers and turrets, I must have left off in the middle when I worked on them last. Haven't bothered fixing them yet.
And here's the nifty part about all this - a top view:
And a side view:
Of all the ships at the same time, in 1 meter per pixel scale.
Now for some design thoughts.
The main weapons used on these ships are hypervelocity missile launchers - basically mass drivers that fire rocket-assisted projectiles. The reason for these is that the shield tech is pretty much only vulnerable to overloading by excessive KE and need to be battered down before explosive- or energy weapons are of any use. If the shields are down, though, the ships exterior fittings (including the shield generators) are vulnerable to conventional explosive warheads and shrapnel effects. Thus, to take one out you either rely on sneak attack (hit an unaware ship from subspace with torpedoes), or you need to expend a large amount of hopefully inexpensive ordnance to get the shields down so you can do some damage with bombs, missiles and energy weapons.
On hyperspace and subspace: Hyperspace is the medium for faster-than-light travel, and it kind of works through universal constants being---variable. As you ascend into hyperspace, distances shrink rapidly, but so does the energy required to keep a given mass from reacting to the environment. The scale of this increase is such that a big ship can't generate enough to sustain high-level hyperspace travel, while a smaller vessel can. This is what makes starfighters tactically viable - they're light enough that they can ascend really high, and they can cross the range at which their enemies can detect them in realspace faster than they can react. Their problem is that as you ascend, the speed of light goes down, so onboard sensors don't work very well for seeing things in lower levels of space. This means that attacking fighters need to be well briefed on where to find their targets.
Subspace is the exact opposite - traveling between two realspace locations using subspace as the medium is really slow. Also, the energy curve favors large ships, and it's actually easier to look "up" into realspace, because the speed of light is higher. This means a ship can go deep and hide from ships in realspace while still seeing them well or even better than normal, as well as being able to launch attacks.
In both cases, specialized sensors exist that allow ships to look "down" easier, though they're delicate beyond belief at present and have a short MTBF. There also exists equipment to jam hyperspace detection.
What all of the above means is that I've invented a way to have starfighter knife-fights (really high level hyperspace); stalking submarines; effective bombing runs and brutal battleship batterings without violating my own internal laws of physics... :-)
Of course, someone else will probably have come up with this before, and in that case I want a link so I can find the book, as it'll need reading. :-)
Indeed, the shield idea is good, the hyperspace/subspace seems a bit confusing though. So basically subspace is some kind of sluggish 'stealth' medium? A bit like viscous pea soup that prevents enemy sensors from penetrating but also prevents ship from attaining any decent speeds?
Yes, you've got it more or less right, though the space itself isn't pea-soupish, it's just as empty as real space. What changes is the fundamental constants like c and pi and other stuff like that... One of the things about subspace is that c goes up as you descend, so communications lag decreases tremendously - hence subspace radio being FTL...
I've kind of spun loose on the "space is an ocean" trope - my ships look like ships, realspace, while 3D, is the surface of the ocean, hyperspace is the sky, and subspace is the depths of the sea... And like real oceans, while only people traffic the surface, there's a lot going on in the sky and in the water...
Today's modelling session (and some of last nights, too) was mostly spent fixing up those ships that still used the old wings etc. That's pretty boring, and my test renders are too damned big to post (I render in 2pix per meter scale to check for errors). But once I was done with all that, I started on building some actual detail for my battleship citadel. Here are the results so far:
For those of you who don't know much about WWII ships, the cone-shaped things with ears on top of the towers are the directors for the main battery. The "ears" are optical rangefinders, and the top piece rotates to track targets (and when in central control mode, the turrets will follow.) The smaller turrets with the flappy lids instead of guns perform the same function for the secondary battery, with the main difference that it's not all that obvious which gun is slaved to which director.
The raised platform on top of the bridge is actually the top of the heavily armored conning tower, where the ship's real bridge is located. The open platforms that enclose it are actually just observation decks, which have been fitted with backup maneuvering consoles etc. This is another real-world thing - old battleships had conning towers with 17-inch armor, which naturally means no windows. So they built a balcony around the tower with windows on for the bridge crew to see what they were doing. in actual combat the bridge crew would go inside and shut the (massively thick!) doors...
I've been laying out some ablative armor tiles for the deck, wings and sides. It's a pain in the rear, especially since I'm trying to restrict myself to identical hexagonal tiles. The front deck is done, but I think I'll need to add some more to the wings as well.
The bad curvature matching is because I've been doing it all by hand... I think there are tools somewhere to do a better job automatically, but the UI for them is non-obvious and I haven't had the patience to figure it all out. So, I clone each tile, rotate it and position it by hand until I've got one quadrant done, then I clone the whole thing... Besides, the (minor) discrepancies add a bit of character. :-D
Yesterday was mostly spent rigging the main and secondary guns - while I did have the main turrets positioned and pivoted separately, the secondary turrets were all one object. That's been fixed, so now each turret can rotate individually, each gun barrel can recoil; and they all elevate properly, either singly (the big guns) or in pairs (the secondaries). Finally, I made up some targets for the main battery and its directors, so I can rotate the lot of them to face the same way with a minimum of fuss. The secondary battery is a bit trickier this way, because the directors face N, E, S, W while the guns are grouped NE, SE, SW, NW - there's no obvious mapping between directors and guns. So I'm leaving that part be for the time being.
Then I wasted a bunch of time on playing around with special effects and not getting what I wanted (a "canned" main battery firing sequence that won't require cut-and-pasting a gazillion different channels every time I want to use it...) The most I got was some semi-decent stills and some nice examples of what can be done in post-production from L2K (of the Macrossified Vipers...)
(Above pic rendered by me, composited and post-processed by L2K)
I also embarked on replacing the present point defense turrets (which are also all static) with some better looking ones, though that went completely south for some reason and I wound up with main gun barrels sticking out of my secondary turrets and bridge sections instead of main turrets. I don't know how that happened, I just know that after I finally tracked down an uncorrupted autosave (with the old guns still in place...) I called it a night.
So this morning I started in a different place, and attacked the problem of the aft hangar bay and the flight deck(s). The well deck is a classic, thirty-plus meters tall, a hundred or so meters deep, and aside from some ribbing on the walls, it's completely bare for now. I need to go play some star wars games to see if I can figure out something more to detail it with... :-)
The flight deck has been more fun to deal with so far. I've installed a couple of lifts (for reference, they're 27 x 15 meters each), and three catapults with blast deflectors (haven't animated those yet, they're a pain in the neck due to the angles).
Oh yes, I've also figured out the perfect (well, almost) constraints for the elevators, so they can be raised and lowered smoothly with minimal work (just pitch them up or down, their pivot is a hundred meters aft of the ship...)
The hangar bay, when finished, will be able to hold at least eight reconnaisance craft (depends on how far forward I extend it.) It still needs to be lit (well, so does the well deck) and decorated. (Then again, it's pretty well closed off to the outside, so you won't be seeing much of whatever I put in there anyway...)
For the underside, I'm hoping to do something different, but I don't know what just yet. Right now the plan is to put some large grav plates on the underside of the wings (as soon as I design something for the purpose); and maybe some drop pods (Spacemarine style!) under the aft deck. Since this isn't a dedicated planetary assault vessel, there won't be very many of them, but there's room for maybe a couple of dozen pods, I think. :-) And the well deck would hold the transports for retrieving them post-mission.
The fences are articulated and can be raised or lowered by individual sections. I tried using textures for the fence itself, but the results fell way short of what I had in mind, so I bit down and made a hard mesh using square rods instead. The poly count didn't end up too bad anyway, mostly due to the grid being much coarser than it should be (it won't show up if I make it thinner...). I figured out some clever tricks to get the pivots positioned right despite the complex rotations involved, which I'm feeling moderately proud of myself for.
Next up: I have no clue. I'll see what I wake up thinking about... :-)
Your point defense has one weakness: it cannot fire towards the ship’s bottom. OK, you’re going for contemporary naval look, but you either need to flip the lower turrets upside down, or let them sit directly on the rear hull, so their shooting hemisphere is pointed aft. Or a third option: put turrets on both sides of the pedestal.
The point defense emplacements are in the middle of a revision, right now. The way it was arranged in the above pics was just temporary, while I decided which looked better. RL has been intruding today, so I haven't had time to finish the revision yet. Gimme a few hours, though... :-)
not bad.. Meph has a point.. look at most US battleships and the turrets for each can be swapped... it was the guns themselves that tended to be the major overhaul each time.. the easiest thing to do actually is work out what 'caliber' your guns are.. scale to that cal and then build the turret/barbet around that.
of course meph some ww2 battleships did have BIG ASS guns and turrets.. the Yamato's turrets each weighed as much as a japanese light cruiser and you can actually put a Mir submersable in the barbet length wise and still have enough room perhaps for one or two more of them... and the Iowa's weighed as much as a Destroyer..
That's essentially what I've done, actually. The triple turrets all started out as the same mesh, but each class has a resized version with the same relative size as the calibers of their real-life counterparts. IRL, the calibers used in US triple mounts from 1930s production on were 6" (light cruisers); 8" (heavy cruisers); 12" (Alaska-class "large cruisers") and 16" (battleships). So I built a basic turret, and made 75%, 100%, 150% and 200% scale versions, with slight variations in the turret casing proportions to match the drawings in my Jane's reprint (Jane's Fighting Ships of World War II, which is a reprint of the 1946 version with a couple of extra pages stuck in to deal with those ships that didn't survive the war...) Also, I'm not quite done with the triple turrets yet anyway, since I haven't made any cut-outs for the barrels yet for example. Work will continue...
I finished up replacing the stern point defenses, and added a few more sections of fence. Then I added a balcony of a sort above and below the hangar aperture, and removed the shield...
I've also replaced the point defense guns on the citadel. The new guns have gotten some pedestals so that they can make good use of their 15degree maximum depression angle.
The new turrets are a significant polygon hit - not quite as bad as when I first built them, since I've stripped off a bunch of stuff from them, but they're still around 10k each. Twin six-barreled gatlings will do that. These particular examples are 30 mm, and can depress 15 degrees and elevate 85 degrees, so they give plenty good coverage allround. Right now, there are 24 of these installed, while the plans call for 40+. I'm replacing some of them with missile launchers, though...
Posts
From the furthest to the closest:
* A US-style "heavy" battleship based on the Montana class, featuring the same 4x3 turret scheme as the pre-war Arizona, New Mexico and Tennessee classes.
* A US-style "fast" battleship based primarily on the Iowa class, but also the North Carolina and South Dakota classes. I need to redo her superstructure since I got the order of the secondary turrets wrong...
* A French-style battleship based on the Richelieu. Note the cruiser-style secondary turrets on the aft deck, and quad main turrets. Also, the superstructure is completely wrong, since I reused the US one. Will fix that eventually.
* The fourth ship is based on the British "Nelson"-class, which is seriously oddball in having the superstructure so far aft. I decided to move the engine section back to match, giving it a faster look I think than any of the others.
* The final ship is just the same old heavy cruiser, based rather closely on the Oregon City class.
There are a few other layouts to pick from, but these were some of the most iconic. I'll probably include all of them as "canonical" in my universe once I develop some backstory.
About the armament, my current thinking is that the main guns are mass driver missile launchers, or to put it a little differently maneuvering-projectile railguns.
I've got most of the other ship types fairly well thought out in my head, but these are all human ships in the end - they may have been built with a fair bit of competitive spirit, but they're not built to fight each other. They're built to fight an *enemy*, and I have no idea what that enemy looks or thinks like. Help? :-)
SP
New for tonight (well, last night really) are bow and stern maneuvering thrusters, revised masts, and a different "sub"-structure. I've also rearranged the secondary turrets on the fast battleship to better match the Iowa class.
I've also made some orthographic profiles to show a bit better the differences and similarities between the top and bottom:
The scale is two meters per pixel, which makes the images 2560 meters wide. I'm not sure whether to stick with that, or shrink the ships further - I can actually go down all the way to 440 meters or so overall before the bridge level becomes too small for windows. Of course, that means the boat bay in the back will shrink to minimal proportions....
Currently, the poly count for each of these ships is in the region of 60k, two thirds of which are bound up in the engines. Then again, I haven't even started on adding railings or anything like that yet (or the blasted missile hatches, those things are seriously evil). I *have* removed the interior barrels from the point defense guns, though. (those were also evil, I think they were 500-odd polys each. Imagine 80 of those.)
I'm considering the implications of replacing the anti-fighter guns with various missile launcher types. (they're just placeholders anyway...) Candidates include circular VLS launchers (like the Russian S-300); trainable box launchers (like RAM); or trainable arm launchers (Mk26 style). They all have their pros and cons - S-300 is low profile and has large missiles, but low capacity; RAM can fire a lot of missiles at once but only small ones; and Mk26 can fire lots of medium missiles but not very fast...
I will be adding smaller anti-fighter guns later, based on the placement of the 20 mm cannon that were part of the WWII anti-aircraft suite. I'll have to wait with those until I know the scale of the ships though, since I have several different ideas depending on their absolute size... :-)
Cheers,
SP
For the carrier opening, good sport for it on the aft but perhaps don't make the whole so high. Right now the entire back end is open but don't forget that you'd need ammo- and fuel storage, a closed off hangar level for storage and maintenance etc etc. I'm roughly guessing that a third of the height would suit your purposes.
Also, what are you going to put in place in terms of launching mechanisms and recovery of the ships? Launch catapults in tubes or on the deck like contemporary carriers. How are they going to be recovered? Separate landing strips with safety netting, a 'run-through' deck somewhere so the incoming craft can perform a 'wave-off' instead of crashing into the back of the hangar, VTOL landing pads on an aft landing deck (along the lines of a contemporary cruiser or destroyer, etc etc?
Thinking out design elements like this will automatically help you put the design into place as certain elements will require a certain amount of room or a particular placement on the vessel.
The first order of business: I rescaled the ships again by 60%. I've also recontoured the bow, making it pointier; and reduced the width of the prow and wing guns. Next was the rebuild of the wings, which ended up moving the main thrusters inside again, like one of the very old versions. The holes are hexagonal this time though, which worked better than the quadrangular ones on the last attempt. Then I added similar thrusters to the top and bottom of the bow, stern and wingtips, so the ship now has a complete set. I also added some really basic textures, basically just a honeycomb procedural for the armor tiles, and a noise procedural for the spec channel. That's a work in progress...
The above image is an orthographic profile, and scales so that 1 pixel equals 1 meter. The overall length is in the region of 920 meters give or take. The antenna farm up front is as close as I've ever come to greebling, and it doesn't look all that good up close right now. It's also pretty poly-intensive, though nowhere near as bad as all those thrusters (89 of them, including the big one I've fitted in the back for now, at 1200-odd faces each). Embedded in the tips of the wings are the main shield generators, or at least that's what I think they are. These are just placeholders, I haven't built the real things yet but they'll look somewhat similar.
Rather than mount the defensive weapons flat on the (leaning) deck, I've decided to try making some recessed pits for them. I haven't filled them yet, mostly because I'm still uncertain what kind of weapons to use here. I did however dig up my old VLS model, and I've added some launchers on the foredeck. The current total is 768 cells, though I'm planning to add another 512 cells on the aft deck, for a total of 1280. That should make the idea of attacking from directly above or below a slightly less appealing notion. :-)
Left to do? Lots and lots. For starters, all the turrets are currently completely fixed, and the turret bodies of the main battery are solid blocks. That needs fixing, and all of it needs rigging for animation which will be a major chore. With the ship size being down to somewhat believable proportions, I can also add human-scale details which will be visible from some distance, which will be a long term job. Don't expect exposed pipes etc though.
Cheers,
SP
Where to begin... I reproportioned the hull again by cutting out an 8m thick slice in the horizontal plane and rejoining the halves. Then I scaled the hull back up until the superstructure rested on top of it properly again. After that, I spent a few hours trying to figure out a better look for the wing, and ended up with the above after much trial and error. Finally, I reshaped my engine mesh to add a pod shell to it, and stuck one in the back of the wing. I wasn't completely satisified, since the big battleship is supposed to be slower, and the really huge engines kind of made it look speedier than intended. So I stuck those wings on the heavy cruiser, and replaced the single big engine with two smaller ones. Success!
Next, I performed a much needed facelift on the secondary turrets, though they're too far away in these pics to see the differences. (closeups take forever to render.) Also, I worked some on the turret mounts.
Finally, I redid most of the battleship superstructure - though only the top so far. I'm thinking about how to differentiate better between the top and bottom, and I'm not completely sure how to go about that.
Orthos, as usual(?) in one meter per pixel scale:
Cheers!
One major comment though, personally, I'd resize the turrets of the large ship to about the same size of the ones on the smaller ship. It's really throwing off the sense of scale and even suggests that the big ship is nothing more than a percentile scale-up of the smaller ship. At a pixel per meter, those gun barrels are humongous in any case. Or perhaps go for a compromise in turret-size by scaling up the ones from the smaller ship and scaling down the ones on the big ship. It'll help identify the size a lot better.
In any case, what this means is that nearly all WWII ships had a similar ratio of main turret size contra hull size, and those that didn't are often referred to as under-gunned. And since I'm following the same design philosophy more or less, the same holds true for my ships.
Where you should look for scaling cues instead is the secondary battery, as well as the electronics fittings once I get around to them. The secondary battery on all US ships larger than a destroyer (and the main battery of the destroyers themselves), was made up of the same standard turret from some time in the mid thirties well into the fifties. Also, air defense guns were also standardized from the very early 1940s onwards. I've been using the same method my ships, using the same mesh for the secondary turrets and anti-fighter turrets at the same absolute size on all ships. The wing guns are also the same size on both of these ships, as are the shield generators embedded in the wingtips. I'll be continuing this trend once I get started on real detailing, using the same objects wherever appropriate. That should help the scaling issue.. :-)
Cheers!
SP
Today has mostly been spent thinking stuff through, but I did manage to get a bit of modeling work done at least, and I finally got around to arranging a scene where all the ships in this batch can be rendered the way I want to show them without having to move the camera or the ships any. (lots of cameras, tricky arrangement of ships and lights).
First off, the big brute (BB):
New features for today include the masts, the gunnery direction tower, a platform for the port and starboard secondary battery directors, and the primary battery directors. The positioning for all of these except possibly the forward secondary director is final, though the meshes aren't. Now I can finally start on detailing... Also, lifeboats.
The heavy cruiser (CA):
Actually, this one is unchanged compared to yesterday, but I thought it deserved its own render.
The destroyer (DD):
Basically, except for the overall dimensions and the bridge complex, this is an all new mesh - the hull, wings, and guns were all replaced completely, and the bridge structure is only still there because I haven't figured out what the new one will look like. At least this pic will give a closer look at the new secondary turret.
Here's the usual fleet perspective view:
The ships in this pic that still have their old-style wings are a Light cruiser (CL), a large cruiser (CB) and a fast battleship (BB). Note the floating missile launchers and turrets, I must have left off in the middle when I worked on them last. Haven't bothered fixing them yet.
And here's the nifty part about all this - a top view:
And a side view:
Of all the ships at the same time, in 1 meter per pixel scale.
Now for some design thoughts.
The main weapons used on these ships are hypervelocity missile launchers - basically mass drivers that fire rocket-assisted projectiles. The reason for these is that the shield tech is pretty much only vulnerable to overloading by excessive KE and need to be battered down before explosive- or energy weapons are of any use. If the shields are down, though, the ships exterior fittings (including the shield generators) are vulnerable to conventional explosive warheads and shrapnel effects. Thus, to take one out you either rely on sneak attack (hit an unaware ship from subspace with torpedoes), or you need to expend a large amount of hopefully inexpensive ordnance to get the shields down so you can do some damage with bombs, missiles and energy weapons.
On hyperspace and subspace: Hyperspace is the medium for faster-than-light travel, and it kind of works through universal constants being---variable. As you ascend into hyperspace, distances shrink rapidly, but so does the energy required to keep a given mass from reacting to the environment. The scale of this increase is such that a big ship can't generate enough to sustain high-level hyperspace travel, while a smaller vessel can. This is what makes starfighters tactically viable - they're light enough that they can ascend really high, and they can cross the range at which their enemies can detect them in realspace faster than they can react. Their problem is that as you ascend, the speed of light goes down, so onboard sensors don't work very well for seeing things in lower levels of space. This means that attacking fighters need to be well briefed on where to find their targets.
Subspace is the exact opposite - traveling between two realspace locations using subspace as the medium is really slow. Also, the energy curve favors large ships, and it's actually easier to look "up" into realspace, because the speed of light is higher. This means a ship can go deep and hide from ships in realspace while still seeing them well or even better than normal, as well as being able to launch attacks.
In both cases, specialized sensors exist that allow ships to look "down" easier, though they're delicate beyond belief at present and have a short MTBF. There also exists equipment to jam hyperspace detection.
What all of the above means is that I've invented a way to have starfighter knife-fights (really high level hyperspace); stalking submarines; effective bombing runs and brutal battleship batterings without violating my own internal laws of physics... :-)
Of course, someone else will probably have come up with this before, and in that case I want a link so I can find the book, as it'll need reading. :-)
Cheers,
SP
I've kind of spun loose on the "space is an ocean" trope - my ships look like ships, realspace, while 3D, is the surface of the ocean, hyperspace is the sky, and subspace is the depths of the sea... And like real oceans, while only people traffic the surface, there's a lot going on in the sky and in the water...
Today's modelling session (and some of last nights, too) was mostly spent fixing up those ships that still used the old wings etc. That's pretty boring, and my test renders are too damned big to post (I render in 2pix per meter scale to check for errors). But once I was done with all that, I started on building some actual detail for my battleship citadel. Here are the results so far:
For those of you who don't know much about WWII ships, the cone-shaped things with ears on top of the towers are the directors for the main battery. The "ears" are optical rangefinders, and the top piece rotates to track targets (and when in central control mode, the turrets will follow.) The smaller turrets with the flappy lids instead of guns perform the same function for the secondary battery, with the main difference that it's not all that obvious which gun is slaved to which director.
The raised platform on top of the bridge is actually the top of the heavily armored conning tower, where the ship's real bridge is located. The open platforms that enclose it are actually just observation decks, which have been fitted with backup maneuvering consoles etc. This is another real-world thing - old battleships had conning towers with 17-inch armor, which naturally means no windows. So they built a balcony around the tower with windows on for the bridge crew to see what they were doing. in actual combat the bridge crew would go inside and shut the (massively thick!) doors...
That's about it for now, cheers!
SP
If you declare the sun a pea, you're quite accurate again...
I've been laying out some ablative armor tiles for the deck, wings and sides. It's a pain in the rear, especially since I'm trying to restrict myself to identical hexagonal tiles. The front deck is done, but I think I'll need to add some more to the wings as well.
Cheers,
SP
Cheers.
Yesterday was mostly spent rigging the main and secondary guns - while I did have the main turrets positioned and pivoted separately, the secondary turrets were all one object. That's been fixed, so now each turret can rotate individually, each gun barrel can recoil; and they all elevate properly, either singly (the big guns) or in pairs (the secondaries). Finally, I made up some targets for the main battery and its directors, so I can rotate the lot of them to face the same way with a minimum of fuss. The secondary battery is a bit trickier this way, because the directors face N, E, S, W while the guns are grouped NE, SE, SW, NW - there's no obvious mapping between directors and guns. So I'm leaving that part be for the time being.
Then I wasted a bunch of time on playing around with special effects and not getting what I wanted (a "canned" main battery firing sequence that won't require cut-and-pasting a gazillion different channels every time I want to use it...) The most I got was some semi-decent stills and some nice examples of what can be done in post-production from L2K (of the Macrossified Vipers...)
(Above pic rendered by me, composited and post-processed by L2K)
I also embarked on replacing the present point defense turrets (which are also all static) with some better looking ones, though that went completely south for some reason and I wound up with main gun barrels sticking out of my secondary turrets and bridge sections instead of main turrets. I don't know how that happened, I just know that after I finally tracked down an uncorrupted autosave (with the old guns still in place...) I called it a night.
So this morning I started in a different place, and attacked the problem of the aft hangar bay and the flight deck(s). The well deck is a classic, thirty-plus meters tall, a hundred or so meters deep, and aside from some ribbing on the walls, it's completely bare for now. I need to go play some star wars games to see if I can figure out something more to detail it with... :-)
The flight deck has been more fun to deal with so far. I've installed a couple of lifts (for reference, they're 27 x 15 meters each), and three catapults with blast deflectors (haven't animated those yet, they're a pain in the neck due to the angles).
Oh yes, I've also figured out the perfect (well, almost) constraints for the elevators, so they can be raised and lowered smoothly with minimal work (just pitch them up or down, their pivot is a hundred meters aft of the ship...)
The hangar bay, when finished, will be able to hold at least eight reconnaisance craft (depends on how far forward I extend it.) It still needs to be lit (well, so does the well deck) and decorated. (Then again, it's pretty well closed off to the outside, so you won't be seeing much of whatever I put in there anyway...)
For the underside, I'm hoping to do something different, but I don't know what just yet. Right now the plan is to put some large grav plates on the underside of the wings (as soon as I design something for the purpose); and maybe some drop pods (Spacemarine style!) under the aft deck. Since this isn't a dedicated planetary assault vessel, there won't be very many of them, but there's room for maybe a couple of dozen pods, I think. :-) And the well deck would hold the transports for retrieving them post-mission.
Cheers,
SP
The fences are articulated and can be raised or lowered by individual sections. I tried using textures for the fence itself, but the results fell way short of what I had in mind, so I bit down and made a hard mesh using square rods instead. The poly count didn't end up too bad anyway, mostly due to the grid being much coarser than it should be (it won't show up if I make it thinner...). I figured out some clever tricks to get the pivots positioned right despite the complex rotations involved, which I'm feeling moderately proud of myself for.
Next up: I have no clue. I'll see what I wake up thinking about... :-)
SP
Nice work, I like the detailing on the aft flight deck. :thumb:
of course meph some ww2 battleships did have BIG ASS guns and turrets.. the Yamato's turrets each weighed as much as a japanese light cruiser and you can actually put a Mir submersable in the barbet length wise and still have enough room perhaps for one or two more of them... and the Iowa's weighed as much as a Destroyer..
That's essentially what I've done, actually. The triple turrets all started out as the same mesh, but each class has a resized version with the same relative size as the calibers of their real-life counterparts. IRL, the calibers used in US triple mounts from 1930s production on were 6" (light cruisers); 8" (heavy cruisers); 12" (Alaska-class "large cruisers") and 16" (battleships). So I built a basic turret, and made 75%, 100%, 150% and 200% scale versions, with slight variations in the turret casing proportions to match the drawings in my Jane's reprint (Jane's Fighting Ships of World War II, which is a reprint of the 1946 version with a couple of extra pages stuck in to deal with those ships that didn't survive the war...) Also, I'm not quite done with the triple turrets yet anyway, since I haven't made any cut-outs for the barrels yet for example. Work will continue...
I finished up replacing the stern point defenses, and added a few more sections of fence. Then I added a balcony of a sort above and below the hangar aperture, and removed the shield...
I've also replaced the point defense guns on the citadel. The new guns have gotten some pedestals so that they can make good use of their 15degree maximum depression angle.
The new turrets are a significant polygon hit - not quite as bad as when I first built them, since I've stripped off a bunch of stuff from them, but they're still around 10k each. Twin six-barreled gatlings will do that. These particular examples are 30 mm, and can depress 15 degrees and elevate 85 degrees, so they give plenty good coverage allround. Right now, there are 24 of these installed, while the plans call for 40+. I'm replacing some of them with missile launchers, though...
That's it for now, it's time for lunch!
SP