Another question: why catapults if you have a flight deck anyway?
I mean flight-decks were the evolvement of catapults, so you solved the problem actually anready. Even a robotic controlled scout (heck even if you say all fighters are controlled by the AI) would be better of starting from within the safe hull than being outside, in danger of an ambush.
I think I may have solved the catapult problem, in a somewhat novel way... put the recon craft in a VLS system. I haven't implemented it yet, but I figure I might be able to get a six- or eight-cell row into the space one WWII-style catapult would have taken. The scouts would land "normally" (Vertical landing on the aft deck), then either load into the tubes from the top, or use an elevator and load from the bottom. Top-loading would be easiest, if the tubes can be opened downstairs anyway to get at the fighter for maintenance...
Tonight I've mostly been working on updating the Iowa-class battleship, which has been lagging behind for a while. The update turned out to be fairly massive, and involved among other things a shortening of the hull by 70 meters(!) and the superstructure by thirty-odd. I've also added platforms for most, but not all, of the AA guns. The guns themselves will have to wait until I'm satisfied with the platforms, I think I spent more time moving the turrets already in place to match their foundations than I did modeling. Irritating...
The posted image is not from the same distance as the previous series, sadly, so the ship can't be directly compared like most of the other ships. The total length of the ship at this point is 900 meters, compared to around 550-600 for the cruisers and 1100 for the Montana-class (which will be shortened some as well, when I get around to it... )
So far tonight, I've managed to bring the Montana (BB-67) up to the same standard as the Iowa (BB-61):
The current overall length is 960 meters or thereabouts, 60-65ish shorter than the Iowa-class. I'm not completely satisfied with the locations of the light AA tubs, but then again there are no *accurate* refs for this class, just speculation, seeing as the real thing was cancelled before building. The layout as is mostly fits the plans I've found, though.
I've also started on yet another battleship class:
This is supposed to be the South Dakota (BB-57), predecessor of the Iowas and probably the most important of the US battleships of WWII, seeing as two of this class (Washington and South Dakota herself) were the only ones to actually engage another battleship (the IJN Kirishima), with the result that the Kirishima was too badly damaged to bring home and had to be scuttled by her own crew. The most any of the others ever did was bombard surface targets and provide AAA cover for carriers...
The South Dakotas were a bunch smaller than the Iowas, so too with this mesh. I started by crunching up the superstructure until it matched the SoDak (single funnel, so no deck between funnels to put AAA guns on, and a different arrangement of the secondary battery, with the added oddness of the SoDak herself only having four secondary turrets on each side rather than five due to having a fleet flag bridge), and shrunk the hull by 10%. Then I fixed up the stern hangar (all the battleships have the same size hangar in the back right now). The result is a ship that's 770 meters long overall.
The turrets are already done, I just haven't bothered putting them in their places yet. The main difference is in the main guns, which will be just a tad shorter than the Iowas', since the real things were 16"/45 calibers rather than 16"/50 calibers. (Which means that the barrels were 80", or two meters, shorter on the South Dakota and North Carolina classes, which had the same guns and turrets).
The heater in my Apache battle armor is on the fritz again. I'm freezing my ass off while my buddies and I in the 8th Platoon, 125th Infantry Battalion, await deployment. Right now, New Jersey is pounding the hell out of Tarawa Asteroid. Named after an ancient warship that sailed Earth's seas, BB-62 has some pretty big shoes to fill to live up to her namesake. But the newest Big J can stomp pretty good.
Her 32 inch electro mags are a site to behold when they light off. Vapor clouds belch out of the long barrels as the rocket assisted shells streak towards their fortified targets. If Jersey were shelling a planet, she'd just let gravity add to the shell's punch, but asteroids like Tarawa don't have much pull so the shell's rockets do the job instead.
We can't hear the guns fire off into space, of course, but while we hide in our dropship, itself hiding behind some small rock, I can see Big J's handiwork through the porthole. Chunks of rock and bent, tortured metal that used to be defense emplacements, spin off into space, creating a hole for us to slip in. Chunks of lizards too. But soon, the guns will be pounding something else, leaving our drop zone alone. Then we'll be going in and hitting the beach.
Here's another experiment with the wings for the BB-61:
Forward swept wings, two axial guns per side. I've also reprofiled the stern (a pain in the rear due to how many polys I'd managed to split it into...) and redone the hull number using what's *almost* the right font. (The "right" font is only available in sample form, lacking the 0 and 1 among others. So I made do with one that's similar...)
Also, Mikey-B, you're not quite correct on the gun dimensions - all the calibers are doubled, so the main battery is 32" and the secondaries are 10". Other than that, I loved your little vignette...
I, for one, am cheering for the glowy shield generator's, they do look quite good. You coudl always give them a cover with a cool transparent dividing line to show the generator behind it.
I made the changes you suggested, Meph, except I haven't built what goes beneath the window. The shield generators have been placed on the engine pods instead of at the wingtips, on the cruisers they'd go on top and bottom of the pods instead of the outboard surface. (they'll also be smaller, I think.)
I took out the instructions for my 1/350 USS New Jersey kit (the kit itself got binned in a move 10 years ago, but I kept the instructions...) and worked a bit on the materials assignments. Not quite done, but getting there.
Also, I've tried to come up with a decent concept for a carrier. I've got a couple of ideas, here's the first one out:
Flight deck is only on top, the island will be on the starboard side as usual. On the bottom, there's a third engine pod, rather than another superstructure. Not quite sure about this one yet.
I agree with japme, bageras America is a great beast and seeing it used for space would be a combination of the most impressive pieces.
By the way, I just looked at some images and found that the turrests, while accurate to the "original" ships, don't really match the sci-fi theme.
Oh, I do like that new look. you even could have those shield generators be flanked by backup generators or maybe even just a double or triple layout for the larger ships. (Just thinkin' out loud here..).
As for the carrier, I wouldn't focus too hard on seagoing designs, especially for launching craft. It would take more time to fuel/arm a craft, have it go through an airlock/shield, up an elevator and then have it attached to a catapult then it is to fuel/arm it, shove it in an airlock and then launch it out of a tube. For landing a large deck might be good but you'll have to come up with an efficient way to recover the craft from the flight deck, especially during emergencies or rapid recoveries.
I guess I'll have to put the carrier back on hold again, until I figure out a better solution. The main problem is that to stay true to the design philosophy I've been using up to this point, I need to build it so that it is both recognizable as whatever real WWII ship it's based on if you remove the space bits, and as a valid spaceship. Macross has flight decks in space, but they're more modern supercarrier versions, plus they aren't based on specific ships. That makes things difficult...
At any rate, here's a pic of what I've been doing today, so far:
The Iowa-class battleships have reached the point where the details will begin to differ between individual units, so I made a copy of the mesh and changed the hull number to 62. Right now that's about the only change, but eventually there'll be differences in the AA fit and the details of the masts and fire control towers. Iowa (61) had a unique AA suite, and New Jersey (62) had extra flag accomodations. I can't remember off hand the specific differences in Missouri (63) and Wisconsin (64), except that one or the other was sometimes painted differently (lighter gray, with dark numbers).
Also, the shield generators are back on hold as well, until I figure out a design that fits the ships better. That round design didn't quite fit the rest of the concept, so I've shelved it until I've built a ship it'll look good on.. :-)
Ten minutes ago, I was having an argument aboard our dropship with Cpl Rivers about who the scalies are. She was sayin that eggheads back home say they're dinosaurs who left earth millions of years ago. If that's true, I argued, then where are the fossil records? Man I hated her guts. I should've banged her when I had the chance. Too late now, her twitching body is tumbling across space, her legs blown off. She'll be dead in seconds as her blood boils in the vacuum.
No point in landing a dropship on the nearly nil-gravity asteroid, so they drop us off and we EVA to the beach while they scurry back to safety. Hellcats from the Lexington keep strafing the beach, but there are still plasma gun nests picking us off as the Marines land. I look over to the Big J, her attention drawn to a scaly battlecruiser that "surfaced" back into normal space and wiped out a couple of our cruisers.
We still don't know how they can drop into hyperspace and keep track of normal space, but it's as effective a "cloaking device" as any from the old Star Trek reruns. I heard a rumor though, that they have really small hyperspace capable UAVs the size of a Jeep that are *really* hard to spot.
Big J pivoted on her side a bit as she let lose a volley from her thirty twos. Scaly plasma fire shot down most of the shells but a few made it through, their nuclear warheads detonating on their shields. Out in space you don't get the blast effects like you do dirtside, but the heat and radiation can overwhelm deflector shields with enough blasts. But if just one shell penetrates into the ship's interrior, it's over.
I don't watch the usually spectacular fireball as one of their cruisers go because all around me, plasma fire is trying to wipe me from the black sky. I'm about to hit the beach, I hope I live...
***
Interesting flattop. Maybe to keep it in the spirit of WWII, you could have large hatches on the "flight deck" that lead to the hangar deck below. Maybe some kind of plasma window (more info here) that keeps air in and vacuum out. Fighters would fly through the plasma window to the hangar deck below for servicing.
And thanks for those links, too. I didn't know force fields were starting to be considered hard SF... (Not that my ships have ever been totally hard SF, I'm just not as blatantly anti-physics as Trek or Starwars)
Here's a view of the assembly line (literally!) I've been working on tonight:
Hull numbers, main batteries, and collision lights have all been added, and I've got the secondary batteries of the first three ships done. BB-63 has a different color scheme, based on the one the real thing wore in the Persian Gulf in 1990/91. I'm considering building a shipyard around these things just for the heck of it, what do you think? :-)
OK, today was tedium squared, but it had to be done. To celebrate, I made an extra big render, only to see that I'd missed doing the secondary battery on the ship closest to the camera. She'll have to wait until the morning though, but in the mean time, have the render anyway:
I'm using a thumbnail this time because the image is in 2560 x 1440. It depicts all eleven battleships I've managed to churn out so far, starting with the four South Dakota-class ships at the back, the six Iowa-class ships in the middle, and the Montana nearest the camera. The scene at this time has just shy of a million polygons, but by the time I've added all the AA guns, that'll probably have doubled. There are 1500-odd moving (well, movable - constraints have been added, but no motions) parts, including nearly 400 secondary gun barrels, more than 200 main guns, and somewhere around a hundred and sixty turrets. Plus the AA guns on the Iowa...
I'm not going to do any kind of fleet action with this whole lot, but I thought it was nice to have them all in one spot for a pic. :-) Never did happen in real life, the closest instance was a one-day maneuver with all four completed Iowa-class ships after the Korean War...
Looks good. Number 63 seems to have a bad painting of its number tho. :flippy:
Impressive count on the moving parts.
Looking at some space-based carriers that kept true to the common seabased ones, you'd either have to go by the Macross idea of a carrier.
Or work more along the lines of Wing Commanders Tiger Claw (which could open and close her launch-tracks with her outer hull-casings and thus would give at least some protection):
Or like Starlancers Coalition Carriers (Here the Pjotr Vesily- Class)
Generally I have to say, while you can go with a naval-based ship for the most common classes, like cruiser, frigate and battlecruiser (and what all else lies there), trying to make that form for a carrier is very odd. While those ships above look cool and all, they defy any sense. LAunching a space-fighter from the "hull" and also taking them back from there is too risky. An attack could render the tracks inoperable and the ship cannot launch any more fighters, or a fighter could get shot while starting, exploding on deck and whatnot.
Number 63 has a different color scheme than the rest, since I found a few photos of the real BB-63 from when she went to the Persian Gulf where she had been painted a lighter gray with dark gray numbers. I thought that looked cool, so I decided to use it for my own BB-63. I have a couple of other ideas for paint schemes other than white numbers on gray, but it was easier to just use the standard colors to start with. One of these days I'll just have to make the fancy WWII camo schemes for some of these...
For now the carriers are on hold while I work out the details of the ships I *do* know how to build. Right now I'm working on some "static" versions of the gun batteries, for scenes where the guns will be in the rest position. Having to keep track of a hundred-odd parts for each ship (with more coming, since there's a bunch of AA to be added), with dozens of ships in the scene, eats a bunch of resources...
Visually, nothing has changed since yesterday, so no render just yet. I'll probably have some later tonight (local time is GMT +1), once I've gotten the North Carolinas started. ;-)
Here's a pic from yesterdays efforts. Just noticed I'm missing a couple of AA mounts here and there, but that's an easy fix. :-) The differences between individual ships are going to become more apparent over time, I'm just getting started at this point. :-)
O,_,O
Halsningen fran Tyskland!!!!!!
You're closer than I thought. I thought you were somewhere over the Atlantic because of what you said about the digi-pens shipping.
About the update: Nice looking. About the prongs of the wings: Are there always two on every wing or will smaller ships have only one and bigger ships even three?
The digi-pen is still sitting on my bookshelf, I'm afraid. I've been meaning to send it several times now, but then there's an emergency of some kind and I forget about it. I'll see if I can manage to get it shipped during this week. Mea culpa.
The wing prongs are something of a size indicator right now, two for battleships, one for cruisers, none for destroyers. The older-model battleships (the ones furthest from the camera in the group shot) don't have any right now, that's a bit of an oversight. I'm probably going to change the design some, right now they're just rescaled versions of the nose gun.
I don't really know if there are any bigger ships to build in this universe for now. The only things planned during WWII that were bigger than the battleships were things like the Habakkuk iceberg/carrier, and I figure that would be represented by a converted asteroid instead of a ship. Haven't got a clue how to build it, though. :-)
It's okay, now that I know why I haven't received any box yet, I can take some deep breaths and forget about worrying that the postal offices have lost it.
Ah, so that's what these prongs are for, okay. You plan to have them fire as well, or be sensory stuff? (Or delete them anyways?)
About the Habakkuk: Well, along a slow floating beast, I remember the Gatlantis, the Homebase of the White Comet Empire. :P
Well, I think sensors would be the most appropriate, though guns would be easier to do. I really need some practice making sensor spines and stuff, so I can replace the standardized bow sensor cluster with individual arrangements for each ship. (that would really help reinforce the fact that these aren't merely repaints of a single mesh, they're actual different meshes. :-))
Apropos different meshes, I added a couple of ships to the line today. Meet the North Carolina and Washington:
I've also substantially remodeled the superstructure of the South Dakota class, and shortened the hull by a bit over thirty meters. The South Dakotas were the shortest and most compact of all the US battleships of the 1940s. Now they look the part! This image should also make clear the differences between the South Dakota herself (BB-57) and the rest of her class, though I just noticed that I'd forgotten to remove the gun tub on turret 2 (SoDak didn't have one there, it would have gotten in the way of the flag bridge's line of sight.)
Assuming I can find some decent pics of the North Carolinas, they'll be getting a similar superstructure remodel real soon now. As will the Iowas, eventually. (And I thought I was done with them...)
I've mostly quit using photos of the real things now for references - they're usually taken from too far away, and most of the stuff I need to see in them is hidden under a ton of various junk (and a gazillion sailors). Plus, the photos are nearly always black and white... so I've started using photos of built-up plastic kits instead. Much easier to see stuff there, since there aren't any sailors and the lighting is chosen so that the details are visible. :-)
I haven't been able to find any really good shots of the BB-55 yet though - the only built-up models so far have been way too low rez for me to get what I need from them. Iowa-class models are much easier, though, so I've started on updating them instead for now.
The O1 level (the first raised deck level) has been redone, and the O2 level is brand new. I've repositioned all the secondary turrets, and built new foundations for them. The decks will have raised edges once I'm done with their layout, but unlike the real thing I'm not going to do any overhangs from the O1 or O2 levels - my explanation being that the walkways would of course be covered completely and pressurized on a spaceship. (besides, they'd be a pain to model.)
I still need to install the flag bridge decks underneath the navigation bridge - I'm going to build two different sections for this part, one for a fleet flag ship (South Dakota and Iowa had fleet flag bridges, and one of the Montanas would have had one as well), and the other for a division flag ship (all the others had one of these). I also need to redo the aft deck house, and build some more platforms for the fire control tower (AKA the "wigwam", as I learned yesterday...) and the area behind the bridge. Stay tuned. :-)
Posts
I mean flight-decks were the evolvement of catapults, so you solved the problem actually anready. Even a robotic controlled scout (heck even if you say all fighters are controlled by the AI) would be better of starting from within the safe hull than being outside, in danger of an ambush.
Tonight I've mostly been working on updating the Iowa-class battleship, which has been lagging behind for a while. The update turned out to be fairly massive, and involved among other things a shortening of the hull by 70 meters(!) and the superstructure by thirty-odd. I've also added platforms for most, but not all, of the AA guns. The guns themselves will have to wait until I'm satisfied with the platforms, I think I spent more time moving the turrets already in place to match their foundations than I did modeling. Irritating...
The posted image is not from the same distance as the previous series, sadly, so the ship can't be directly compared like most of the other ships. The total length of the ship at this point is 900 meters, compared to around 550-600 for the cruisers and 1100 for the Montana-class (which will be shortened some as well, when I get around to it...
Cheers,
SP
So far tonight, I've managed to bring the Montana (BB-67) up to the same standard as the Iowa (BB-61):
The current overall length is 960 meters or thereabouts, 60-65ish shorter than the Iowa-class. I'm not completely satisfied with the locations of the light AA tubs, but then again there are no *accurate* refs for this class, just speculation, seeing as the real thing was cancelled before building. The layout as is mostly fits the plans I've found, though.
I've also started on yet another battleship class:
This is supposed to be the South Dakota (BB-57), predecessor of the Iowas and probably the most important of the US battleships of WWII, seeing as two of this class (Washington and South Dakota herself) were the only ones to actually engage another battleship (the IJN Kirishima), with the result that the Kirishima was too badly damaged to bring home and had to be scuttled by her own crew. The most any of the others ever did was bombard surface targets and provide AAA cover for carriers...
The South Dakotas were a bunch smaller than the Iowas, so too with this mesh. I started by crunching up the superstructure until it matched the SoDak (single funnel, so no deck between funnels to put AAA guns on, and a different arrangement of the secondary battery, with the added oddness of the SoDak herself only having four secondary turrets on each side rather than five due to having a fleet flag bridge), and shrunk the hull by 10%. Then I fixed up the stern hangar (all the battleships have the same size hangar in the back right now). The result is a ship that's 770 meters long overall.
The turrets are already done, I just haven't bothered putting them in their places yet. The main difference is in the main guns, which will be just a tad shorter than the Iowas', since the real things were 16"/45 calibers rather than 16"/50 calibers. (Which means that the barrels were 80", or two meters, shorter on the South Dakota and North Carolina classes, which had the same guns and turrets).
Cheers for now,
SP
The glowing ring thingy is meant to be the main broadside shield generator. Not sure how well it fits the overall ship design, though. Comments?
Also, a couple of views of the whole lot:
Same deal as usual, scale is 1 meter per pixel.
And a perspective shot done in Maxwell.
Cheers,
SP
Well a sideways placed shield genertor placed that obvious almost screams for being shot.
The heater in my Apache battle armor is on the fritz again. I'm freezing my ass off while my buddies and I in the 8th Platoon, 125th Infantry Battalion, await deployment. Right now, New Jersey is pounding the hell out of Tarawa Asteroid. Named after an ancient warship that sailed Earth's seas, BB-62 has some pretty big shoes to fill to live up to her namesake. But the newest Big J can stomp pretty good.
Her 32 inch electro mags are a site to behold when they light off. Vapor clouds belch out of the long barrels as the rocket assisted shells streak towards their fortified targets. If Jersey were shelling a planet, she'd just let gravity add to the shell's punch, but asteroids like Tarawa don't have much pull so the shell's rockets do the job instead.
We can't hear the guns fire off into space, of course, but while we hide in our dropship, itself hiding behind some small rock, I can see Big J's handiwork through the porthole. Chunks of rock and bent, tortured metal that used to be defense emplacements, spin off into space, creating a hole for us to slip in. Chunks of lizards too. But soon, the guns will be pounding something else, leaving our drop zone alone. Then we'll be going in and hitting the beach.
And that really makes me scared.
- SWII in HD..
****
Pretty dang cool ships you've got!
Here's another experiment with the wings for the BB-61:
Forward swept wings, two axial guns per side. I've also reprofiled the stern (a pain in the rear due to how many polys I'd managed to split it into...) and redone the hull number using what's *almost* the right font. (The "right" font is only available in sample form, lacking the 0 and 1 among others. So I made do with one that's similar...)
Also, Mikey-B, you're not quite correct on the gun dimensions - all the calibers are doubled, so the main battery is 32" and the secondaries are 10". Other than that, I loved your little vignette...
Cheers
SP
For the FSW, why not try giving the trailing edge a longer runoff to make it a more triangular shape. I think that might look a lot better.
I made the changes you suggested, Meph, except I haven't built what goes beneath the window. The shield generators have been placed on the engine pods instead of at the wingtips, on the cruisers they'd go on top and bottom of the pods instead of the outboard surface. (they'll also be smaller, I think.)
How's that?
SP
Also, I've tried to come up with a decent concept for a carrier. I've got a couple of ideas, here's the first one out:
Flight deck is only on top, the island will be on the starboard side as usual. On the bottom, there's a third engine pod, rather than another superstructure. Not quite sure about this one yet.
More later,
SP
CVX-100 USS America by *bagera3005 on deviantART
HMS Broadsword cvf-50 by *bagera3005 on deviantART
USS United States CVX-80 by *bagera3005 on deviantART
Personnally I think that the America would be the best of the three...
As for the rest of your ships, I like then A LOT!!!
By the way, I just looked at some images and found that the turrests, while accurate to the "original" ships, don't really match the sci-fi theme.
As for the carrier, I wouldn't focus too hard on seagoing designs, especially for launching craft. It would take more time to fuel/arm a craft, have it go through an airlock/shield, up an elevator and then have it attached to a catapult then it is to fuel/arm it, shove it in an airlock and then launch it out of a tube. For landing a large deck might be good but you'll have to come up with an efficient way to recover the craft from the flight deck, especially during emergencies or rapid recoveries.
At any rate, here's a pic of what I've been doing today, so far:
The Iowa-class battleships have reached the point where the details will begin to differ between individual units, so I made a copy of the mesh and changed the hull number to 62. Right now that's about the only change, but eventually there'll be differences in the AA fit and the details of the masts and fire control towers. Iowa (61) had a unique AA suite, and New Jersey (62) had extra flag accomodations. I can't remember off hand the specific differences in Missouri (63) and Wisconsin (64), except that one or the other was sometimes painted differently (lighter gray, with dark numbers).
Also, the shield generators are back on hold as well, until I figure out a design that fits the ships better. That round design didn't quite fit the rest of the concept, so I've shelved it until I've built a ship it'll look good on.. :-)
Cheers,
SP
Ten minutes ago, I was having an argument aboard our dropship with Cpl Rivers about who the scalies are. She was sayin that eggheads back home say they're dinosaurs who left earth millions of years ago. If that's true, I argued, then where are the fossil records? Man I hated her guts. I should've banged her when I had the chance. Too late now, her twitching body is tumbling across space, her legs blown off. She'll be dead in seconds as her blood boils in the vacuum.
No point in landing a dropship on the nearly nil-gravity asteroid, so they drop us off and we EVA to the beach while they scurry back to safety. Hellcats from the Lexington keep strafing the beach, but there are still plasma gun nests picking us off as the Marines land. I look over to the Big J, her attention drawn to a scaly battlecruiser that "surfaced" back into normal space and wiped out a couple of our cruisers.
We still don't know how they can drop into hyperspace and keep track of normal space, but it's as effective a "cloaking device" as any from the old Star Trek reruns. I heard a rumor though, that they have really small hyperspace capable UAVs the size of a Jeep that are *really* hard to spot.
Big J pivoted on her side a bit as she let lose a volley from her thirty twos. Scaly plasma fire shot down most of the shells but a few made it through, their nuclear warheads detonating on their shields. Out in space you don't get the blast effects like you do dirtside, but the heat and radiation can overwhelm deflector shields with enough blasts. But if just one shell penetrates into the ship's interrior, it's over.
I don't watch the usually spectacular fireball as one of their cruisers go because all around me, plasma fire is trying to wipe me from the black sky. I'm about to hit the beach, I hope I live...
***
Interesting flattop. Maybe to keep it in the spirit of WWII, you could have large hatches on the "flight deck" that lead to the hangar deck below. Maybe some kind of plasma window (more info here) that keeps air in and vacuum out. Fighters would fly through the plasma window to the hangar deck below for servicing.
And thanks for those links, too. I didn't know force fields were starting to be considered hard SF... (Not that my ships have ever been totally hard SF, I'm just not as blatantly anti-physics as Trek or Starwars)
Here's a view of the assembly line (literally!) I've been working on tonight:
Hull numbers, main batteries, and collision lights have all been added, and I've got the secondary batteries of the first three ships done. BB-63 has a different color scheme, based on the one the real thing wore in the Persian Gulf in 1990/91. I'm considering building a shipyard around these things just for the heck of it, what do you think? :-)
Cheers,
SP
I'm using a thumbnail this time because the image is in 2560 x 1440. It depicts all eleven battleships I've managed to churn out so far, starting with the four South Dakota-class ships at the back, the six Iowa-class ships in the middle, and the Montana nearest the camera. The scene at this time has just shy of a million polygons, but by the time I've added all the AA guns, that'll probably have doubled. There are 1500-odd moving (well, movable - constraints have been added, but no motions) parts, including nearly 400 secondary gun barrels, more than 200 main guns, and somewhere around a hundred and sixty turrets. Plus the AA guns on the Iowa...
I'm not going to do any kind of fleet action with this whole lot, but I thought it was nice to have them all in one spot for a pic. :-) Never did happen in real life, the closest instance was a one-day maneuver with all four completed Iowa-class ships after the Korean War...
Cheers for now, though.
SP
Impressive count on the moving parts.
Looking at some space-based carriers that kept true to the common seabased ones, you'd either have to go by the Macross idea of a carrier.
Or work more along the lines of Wing Commanders Tiger Claw (which could open and close her launch-tracks with her outer hull-casings and thus would give at least some protection):
Or like Starlancers Coalition Carriers (Here the Pjotr Vesily- Class)
Generally I have to say, while you can go with a naval-based ship for the most common classes, like cruiser, frigate and battlecruiser (and what all else lies there), trying to make that form for a carrier is very odd. While those ships above look cool and all, they defy any sense. LAunching a space-fighter from the "hull" and also taking them back from there is too risky. An attack could render the tracks inoperable and the ship cannot launch any more fighters, or a fighter could get shot while starting, exploding on deck and whatnot.
For now the carriers are on hold while I work out the details of the ships I *do* know how to build. Right now I'm working on some "static" versions of the gun batteries, for scenes where the guns will be in the rest position. Having to keep track of a hundred-odd parts for each ship (with more coming, since there's a bunch of AA to be added), with dozens of ships in the scene, eats a bunch of resources...
Visually, nothing has changed since yesterday, so no render just yet. I'll probably have some later tonight (local time is GMT +1), once I've gotten the North Carolinas started. ;-)
Cheers,
SP
GMT+1, where are you from then, I'm also in GMT+1?
Here's a pic from yesterdays efforts. Just noticed I'm missing a couple of AA mounts here and there, but that's an easy fix. :-) The differences between individual ships are going to become more apparent over time, I'm just getting started at this point. :-)
More later,
SP
Halsningen fran Tyskland!!!!!!
You're closer than I thought. I thought you were somewhere over the Atlantic because of what you said about the digi-pens shipping.
About the update: Nice looking. About the prongs of the wings: Are there always two on every wing or will smaller ships have only one and bigger ships even three?
The wing prongs are something of a size indicator right now, two for battleships, one for cruisers, none for destroyers. The older-model battleships (the ones furthest from the camera in the group shot) don't have any right now, that's a bit of an oversight. I'm probably going to change the design some, right now they're just rescaled versions of the nose gun.
I don't really know if there are any bigger ships to build in this universe for now. The only things planned during WWII that were bigger than the battleships were things like the Habakkuk iceberg/carrier, and I figure that would be represented by a converted asteroid instead of a ship. Haven't got a clue how to build it, though. :-)
Cheers,
SP
Ah, so that's what these prongs are for, okay. You plan to have them fire as well, or be sensory stuff? (Or delete them anyways?)
About the Habakkuk: Well, along a slow floating beast, I remember the Gatlantis, the Homebase of the White Comet Empire. :P
Apropos different meshes, I added a couple of ships to the line today. Meet the North Carolina and Washington:
I've also substantially remodeled the superstructure of the South Dakota class, and shortened the hull by a bit over thirty meters. The South Dakotas were the shortest and most compact of all the US battleships of the 1940s. Now they look the part! This image should also make clear the differences between the South Dakota herself (BB-57) and the rest of her class, though I just noticed that I'd forgotten to remove the gun tub on turret 2 (SoDak didn't have one there, it would have gotten in the way of the flag bridge's line of sight.)
Assuming I can find some decent pics of the North Carolinas, they'll be getting a similar superstructure remodel real soon now. As will the Iowas, eventually. (And I thought I was done with them...)
Cheers for now,
SP
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/North_Carolina_class_scheme_XVI.jpg
The North Carolina Recognition Drawning:
http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~vandy-1/h68516.jpg
And two nice shots of it:
http://i219.photobucket.com/albums/cc171/xTyrant/Uss_north_carolina_bb-1.jpg
http://military.discovery.com/technology/vehicles/ships/images/north-carolina-625x450.jpg
I've mostly quit using photos of the real things now for references - they're usually taken from too far away, and most of the stuff I need to see in them is hidden under a ton of various junk (and a gazillion sailors). Plus, the photos are nearly always black and white... so I've started using photos of built-up plastic kits instead. Much easier to see stuff there, since there aren't any sailors and the lighting is chosen so that the details are visible. :-)
I haven't been able to find any really good shots of the BB-55 yet though - the only built-up models so far have been way too low rez for me to get what I need from them.
The O1 level (the first raised deck level) has been redone, and the O2 level is brand new. I've repositioned all the secondary turrets, and built new foundations for them. The decks will have raised edges once I'm done with their layout, but unlike the real thing I'm not going to do any overhangs from the O1 or O2 levels - my explanation being that the walkways would of course be covered completely and pressurized on a spaceship. (besides, they'd be a pain to model.)
I still need to install the flag bridge decks underneath the navigation bridge - I'm going to build two different sections for this part, one for a fleet flag ship (South Dakota and Iowa had fleet flag bridges, and one of the Montanas would have had one as well), and the other for a division flag ship (all the others had one of these). I also need to redo the aft deck house, and build some more platforms for the fire control tower (AKA the "wigwam", as I learned yesterday...) and the area behind the bridge. Stay tuned. :-)
SP