[Black Wolf]

One of these days I'm actually going to get around to finishing something. Meh.

Anyway, that "Vasudan" Gunship I posted awhile ago was voted not Vasudan enough, so I decided to give it up as a new species ship. I've since expanded on that (They now have a fighter, cruiser type thing and a destroyer, which I'll probably scrap for being ****). Anyway, I eventually got tired of flowing designs and decided I wanted to play with angles a bit. It strikes me that the vast majority of species are going to get into space with mechanical stuff rather than organic, so I decided to try my hand at non terran mechanical designs, and I got this.

[Black Wolf]

And then I kind of kept going, ended up with a shorter, more compact seeming design.

[Black Wolf]

I then tried doing something in a similar style, but for a freighter. I'm not so sure I succeeded - it certainly didn;t come out how I expected it to. I've still got a lot of polies to play with, so I may add some more detailing to bring it in line with the others, or I may scrap it and begin again. It's supposed to be self contained, for the record - no cargo containers.

[Black Wolf]

A bit irked with the way the freighter went, I went back to combat ships and came up with a longer looking design which took awhile to grow on me, but now I'm pretty happy with. There are some poly errors up the front which I think I can fix, but overall this is probably the best example of what I was aiming for.

I'm going to UVMap one of these now, and start texturing, but I'm not sure which one. I was hoping people might have some reccomendations as to which one they'd most like to see textured?

[Grug]

I like the last one the most.

The first one has a good concept, but those arc's need to be way bigger. They just seem a redundancy to have a thin structure go out like that.

And they all still look part terran-ish.
If your going for a new design, throw somethings in there that havn't been done before or are rare.
Like thrusters not at the back of the ship, midway or near the front. Other assorted design mechanisms as well.
Try and pick a similar theme that they all stick too.

Those four do have a theme, but at the moment its that they are all 'box like'.

But yeah, keep em coming.

[NGTM-1R]

GTFr Vela redux...?

For FS, boxy is Terran, and Terran is boxy. Without textures those can easily pass for Terran craft. However, I think you might have struck something you could use as a common design element for a new species: more vertical design, as opposed to the horizontal design of...well, every existing Freespace species. Even the Shivans build their ships more flat then they do vertically.

I would suggest the corvette first.

[Kosh]

Are those ships supposed to be Terran designed?

[FireCrack]

Terran = boxy
Vasudan = smoth domed
Shivan = SPIKES!!!!!!1!1

So yeah, ships taller than they are wide, ships taller than they are wide or long, curved ships, cylindrical ships, ships made of strange geometric primatives...

[KappaWing]

Originally posted by ngtm1r
However, I think you might have struck something you could use as a common design element for a new species: more vertical design, as opposed to the horizontal design of...well, every existing Freespace species. Even the Shivans build their ships more flat then they do vertically.

You mean like the EAD Lindos? One or a few ships like that within a species look pretty cool, but a whole fleet of them? That would be a tad overdone.

[Bishop]

I think they would make great pre-Terran-Vasudan war ships. Actually, they could well be the first ships ever which have hit space, dirrectly from earth.

[TrashMan]

According ot what some people think, if the ships it's boxy it HAS to be terran. There's no way any of a zillion or so other intelligent species may decide to be boxy, non-organic designes?

Oh please...Such a gross simplification, by which no matter what ship you design, it will allways fall under the "terran", "vasudan" or "shivan" category.

[StratComm]

That's only partially correct, as there are designs that are distinctly none of the above.  However, in Freespace Terran = boxy because they are the only race to ever have boxy ships and so people tend to pool untextured ships that look boxy and mechanical into the terran category.  However, texture it in such a way that it doesn't bear much resemblence to Terran ships and no one will question that it's a different race.

[WMCoolmon]

They don't look Terran. They look sort of EA, but not really.