[IPAndrews]

Babylon 5 has one obvious example of a ship that puts clusters of retro thrusters on the end of wing like pylons to increase it's turning speed. I can't remember what it's called though.

[MarkN]

In Babylon 5 all the mian eirth fighters (the Starfury series if fighters), and the main Minbari fighter (the Nial), have their engines on the ends of pylons. As for the effect of this, according to the basic physics involved, (levers), doubling the distance that the thrusters are from the centre of rotation, doubles the rate of rotational accelaration for the same thrust level, allowing much smaller thrusters. However, there is a counter to this in that moving the thrusters out on the end of pylons then causes the mass of the craft to move further out, reduceing the rotational accelaration, which may make a carft with light narrow pylon with only the thrusters on the end of them and the rest of the engines in the centre of the craft actually superior to a starfury type craft with the entire engines on the end of the pylons. (thinking about it a starfury uses i's main engine power for manouvreing, and so this wouldn't be an option there).

[Admiral Edivad]

@MarkN



Welcome to the HLP Station. Exits are located to the right, left, up, down, and 4th-dimensionally. However all of them are blocked, except the 4-d one, and no one's yet figured how to reach it. Somebody says there is anoter one in the 5th dimension: if you find it, let us know! In the event of a landing of any kind, you can and will be used as a flotation device. We are currently suffering from technical problems from time to time, which may cause the lights go out at any instance, and sometimes even the basic life support fails for some time. At these times, stay calm and composed; for these cases the station system automatically drops a computer from the roof above you with FSO installed and ready. They have independent power sources. Please keep all appendages within the installation at all times. Do not feed the resident Shivan Carl as he will become voracious and chew your leg off. You can find him in the ventilation duct. Throw him your lunch and hope he is not hungry and leaves you alone. Flamethrowers can be found under your seat but due to financial constraints have been re-filled with holy water. Phased Plasma rifles (40 watt range of course) can be found in storage lockers. To prevent act of n00b, however, these can only be opened by Moderators, Volition or a hyperintelligent shade of BluE. Please remember that any attempt to use the ASCII characters 0046h, 0053h, and 0033h in sequential order will result in you being trampled by the whole FreeSpace community. Your trampled remains will be fed to Carl so that the rest of us don't have to carry around so much food for lunch. If you shall go in the Vasudan section of the station and find a boxes labelled “Headz”, please don’t open them, unless you are a Vasudan. Trust me on this one.... In the event of catastrophic hull failure please board the nearest lifeboat which is pre-programmed for autonomous flight to our sister station the Game-Warden outpost. Thank you and enjoy your stay at Hard Light station as long as you will!


Back on topic:
how about creating ships with unconventional simmetries, for example radial with 3/5/7 axes? (like a star, if what i wrote is uncomprehensible in english...)

[bizzybody]

Here's an engine upgrade package, free of charge to all Galan Aerospace customers who bought any of the A-SymM series of fighter craft.

The ones I had on these models were quite... crappy. This model will load with the under-wing pairs and single central nozzle in position for the bi-wing and asymmetrical versions. Just delete/copy/move as required for other versions. These started as 12 sided cylinders and went better from there. (Y'know, gas flow efficiency happens to be much better when the pipe is a closer approximation of a cylinder than an octagon...)

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[MarkN]

Admiral Edivad:
I once saw a LEGO model of a fighter with 5-fold symmetry. It looked just enough odd to make you look again.
Maybe the next in the ASymM series, perhaps the bomber with 5 equally space wings and one of them being horizontal to one side.

[Titan]

what are they to be used for? a heavy assault? a interceptor? I need an interceptor for my campaign

[bizzybody]

Hmmm, people download my stuff, but does anyone do textures and pof them etc for FS2?

[Getter Robo G]

I collect all SORTS of stuff... If I got your permission to bash parts or whatever, I'd look into using some of it probably 

[bizzybody]

Anything I've posted on this forum, use for whatever you want.

[ssmit132]

Hmmm, people download my stuff, but does anyone do textures and pof them etc for FS2?

I did pof and texture (not that good :, I was just testing the idea ) the Mark 7 and made a table for it . I could upload it tomorrow as a Christmas present. (That is if I'm not too busy playing with my new laptop! )

[Getter Robo G]

I might want to steal your tri-configuration pods and elongate them to be missiles? 

[bizzybody]

Oooo? Did ya replace the dummy 'weapons' on the body with real ones?

[Getter Robo G]

haven't got around to doing anything yet. Sometimes I will look at a ship and inspiration hits me about a piece of it. Like the Star Wars Razor fighter, the engines make cool missiles.

[ssmit132]

Oooo? Did ya replace the dummy 'weapons' on the body with real ones?

Sorry, no. I used them to put the gun points in the right spots though. I'm not real good at modelling. Just to let you know, I used all the dummies-as slots. That made 11 weapons. I split that into 1 primary bank with 3 points - that can load all the nice guns - and another bank with 7 points, which can only load weaker weapons. 7 Circes do some serious damage to shields though. I haven't uploaded it yet because I am using the Laptop I mentioned in my previous post. It works like a dream by the way.

Oh yeah. Merry Christmas!

[bizzybody]

Have you put the upgraded engine package on it? What about the pods on the wings? Those also need weaponry!

[ssmit132]

Have you put the upgraded engine package on it? What about the pods on the wings? Those also need weaponry!

I didn't add the new engines. The pods have weapons though. (Secondaries)

[bizzybody]

Please, pleeeeaaaaaseeee use the new engines. *Wishes real hard for the crappy original engines to just go the bleep away.*

[ssmit132]

Please, pleeeeaaaaaseeee use the new engines. *Wishes real hard for the crappy original engines to just go the bleep away.*

I said that I'm not a good modeller. So I just insert the new engine package and move them to fit? BTW I put thruster glows on the old engines and they looked alright, although it would look better with some more texturing.

[bizzybody]

Yup, just delete the old engines/nozzles, load up the new. Depending on which variant, delete one or both under-wing dual engines and copy/move the central nozzle sideways. The nozzle's axes are located the same as the original so you can just note the coordinates of the old ones and manually enter them into the Object Properties panel in trueSpace.

I wish there was a tSx for trueSpace that could copy and paste any/all the position/rotation data from the Object Properties panel. Another thing that'd really be slick is a way to select a face and make all its vertexes aligned on one axis.

That's always been a problem with tS, when you scale an object or especially when you scale or move _part_ of an object, it has 'jitter'- where points that start in identical but opposite coordinates do not move _exactly_ identically. That's why I love the Mirror Modeler function in tS 6.6. Anything I want to be perfectly symmetrical, I chop in half then mirror and weld it. That's how I did the symmetrical versions of this ship.

Another cool feature of Mirror Modeler is what it does to UV mapping. It makes the map for each side a perfect mirror image. You can even get two way mirrored UV mapping by first cutting a model in half, mirroring, then cutting and mirroring again 90 degrees to the first cut and mirror. Could probably do that a third time. Hmm, a cube cut and mirrored three ways should make a UV map of 1/4th its surface which would be two way mirrored on each face of the cube.

[ssmit132]

Attached the ship. I haven't had time to add the new engine package, but I thought you might want a look.

Edit: Ack! It's missing a texture! I'll re-upload it now aswell as some pictures.

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