After testing the new BP release quite a bit, one thing kept popping up that there was no answer or bugfix for: The Sanctus is kind of an eyesore. It's incredibly inefficient even for tilemapping's standards and it's one of the older models used in BP aside from the Kulas.
Normal, uparmored Sanctus already seenNothing fancy, it's basically the old design already used in blueplanet. When making it, my main goal was to clean up some messy modeling and streamline it a little bit. It's entirely remodeled, but I liked the original design enough so it stayed. However, thanks to Matth asking for an uparmored one, this lead the way for two variants of the Sanctus as well, as follows:
Pre-refit Sanctus, pre-warIt got me thinking. How do you uparmor what looks like an already uparmored design, which lead me to another point: What is it uparmored
from? This bred the concept, the Sanctus we see in WiH is a hasty refit done for the war, with armor panels thrown on (instead of being built in) and cargo removed, since the military freighter idea was built out of a need to defend against GEF attacks, but would be so utterly useless against the advancing Tev fleet. It's a perfect fit too, since the armor plating on the original design looked slapped on as opposed to built into the design itself. Out of this thinking was the Pre-refit Sanctus, which would be what the various UEF fleets would have been operating in the pre-war and early-war stages, but mostly phased out by the time of WiH.
Second refit SanctusOf course there's still the further up-armoring too, on the opposite side of the spectrum. Despite the hasty refit of the Sanctus military freighter, the ship was never truly a terribly strong combatant. Some inherent design flaws surfaced, such as the relatively poor firing coverage, limited arc on the main cannons, and the still rather lacking armor. Unfortunately, the UEF military's infrastructure and supply getting hit hard by WiH's end doesn't allow them the luxury of a full rebuild. So my idea was to rectify these in a design while still looking to be the same ship, but further upgraded to the best of the UEF's capabilities at the time. The fore armor paneling is brought in a little bit to the centerline and their support is a stronger, unified mass. It loses the two forward mass drivers in exchange for two mass driver turrets on the top and bottom, which offers it greater firing flexibility against capital targets and the smaller missile launchers were forfeit in exchange for heavier VLS tubes on the side. The engines received some armor paneling as well.
Props go to Steve-O for the original design as well for providing some inspiration for the new engine and topside design and to the BP team for putting up with my stupid questions.