[Quanto]

You really do need to stop using sketchup.
A good program that is a smooth transition from Sketchup is Silo. Its not free, but its the easiest professional modeler out there.

[Thaeris]

I personally dislike SketchUp... quite a bit. However, you are free to make use of the program which suites you best. For the record, I've seen several lovely SketchUp models in the past which look as good as anything else produced in a different program. Brother Byron's models are a great example of this.

And, I know what you feel when I read your post. Again, I used to model much in a similar fashion as you. Here's an example of the UXV I was speaking of - the first two images are of the ship with AC3D's two different shader types applied to it, smooth and flat shading:





However, those shaders don't cross over very well unless they're applied with the proper software. Here's the ship when it's either shaded completely flat or completely smooth:





So, is this a bad model? Not really. There's no sloppy geometry, there's no ugly boolean messes lying around that someone didn't bother to clean up, etc. But, the factors which I illustrated in my previous post do apply here. Lighting issues. UV mapping. Subdivsions, if I was nuts enough to ramp up the polycount enough to use it on a mechanical model (not to mention other tricks I'd need to pull to get that to work). So, in many regards, though the model works, the approach is poor and perhaps a bit out-dated. As you can see, he lighting can be fixed manually to an extent, but in general the advice of the prior post is still of great utility.

[swashmebuckle]

Random thought: how about for the badge logo, a Jolly Roger with crossed browning machine guns?

Arsenal

Since the early twenties, the key strategic assets of Europe's nation states have been their secured industrial districts, hubs of fabrication and trade found just outside major cities.  Kept internally safe from the threats of espionage and sabotage by rigorous (some would say inhumane) security measures, the facilities within the protected zones are where the bulk of critical research and manufacturing occur, and a loss of important personnel or a lengthy halt in production can result in vital contracts going to rival countries, potentially placing the entire nation at a long-term disadvantage.  In the late twenties, the external defenses of these areas consisted of multilayered barrage balloon "walls" to guard against low-altitude attack (sometimes with explosives, parachute link systems, or machine gun mounts) and a combination of heavy anti-aircraft emplacements and interceptor squadrons to bring down the emergent high-altitude bomber treat. 

These measures proved effective in the low-intensity air wars that frequently broke out between squabbling countries at the time, but the introduction of Flugstein would turn the conventional thinking on its head.  Though early Flugstein ships were not capable of remaining aloft to dominate an airspace for days or weeks at a time as are modern designs, the potential still existed for a naval force to drive into the heart of its enemy's territory and rain down fire on their infrastructure with impunity.  For this reason, modern battleships reign as the undisputed heavyweights of the skies, but they are only one component of a set of counterbalancing military technologies, the diversification of which has gone far beyond what even the most forward-thinking analysts could have predicted.  For a time, it seemed as though the only effective counter to a heavier-than-air ship was another (preferably larger) ship, but a number of high and low tech defense mechanisms were soon pioneered that made foreign airspace dangerous even for the most powerful vessels.

The direct track favored by long-neglected ground forces was the deployment of heavy artillery in an anti-ship role.  While larger weapons and improved fuzes have been continually developed, these defenses suffer from several fundamental problems.  First and foremost, they are required to hit highly mobile and extremely distant targets--with new Flugstein ships traveling faster and at higher altitudes every year, artillery is hard pressed to keep pace.  Secondly, it is difficult to fire without revealing a battery's position to its lethally armed target.  This problem is usually addressed through the adoption of smoke decoys--in France's controversial Maginot line, numerous blasts are produced almost simultaneously by means of an electronic signal activated with each firing.  Finally, the armor that modern Flugstein vessels possess is many times thicker than that of conventional aircraft.  Sensitive external components such as propellers and communications equipment can be destroyed, and the concussion of a nearby airburst is always dangerous to the crew, but the actual penetrative damage required to bring a ship down can only occur with an extremely lucky direct hit.

The most widely adopted and effective anti-ship technology has proven to be the fielding of large fleets of dive bombers.  These craft, while fast and nimble enough to evade anti-aircraft fire, can carry powerful torpedoes and deliver them with a high degree of precision, the steep angle of attack negating the target's ability to quickly evade on the vertical axis.  Because a Flugstein grid must be located in the upper half of a ship in order to keep it right-side-up, a single well-placed torpedo can knock out a vessel's most critical component, and the sheer kinetic power of the dive means that simply adding additional armor to a ship's topside will likely never become cost effective.  Because of these developments, most battleship designs sacrifice the greater efficiency of single-grid systems for a safer distributed approach.

Perhaps the most exotic solution (and one that did not emerge until larger supplies of Flugstein became available in the late thirties) are air mines.  These deadly contraptions are essentially a bomb, a battery, and a Flugstein cell wrapped in a thick sphere of armor.  Set up with an initial push by the minelaying team, the field's altitude is controlled by a powerful ground-based radio transmitter, with each mine being calibrated to float in a slightly different height range.  In order to prevent the mines from destroying each other, the bombs are controlled by a set of electromagnetic trigger mechanisms that will only detonate when multiple points come into contact with a ship's hull.  Unless deflected or destroyed by massed flak or machine gun fire, these small menaces can bring down ships of any size.  Furthermore, for the amount of Flugstein required to achieve acceptable performance in a destroyer, hundreds of mines can be produced, potentially bringing down many ships for a tiny fraction of their cost.  These fields can be transported and operated by small crews working from an inexpensive minelayer airship, and the mines themselves are small and easily recoverable, making minelaying units highly economical (though also highly dangerous) branches of military service.

Leverage

With the notion that the Flugstein ships were the final word in air combat dispelled, countries sought ways to regain traction in their power projection schemes.  The first logical element to emerge was the long range escort fighter.  Although these high-endurance planes are evenly matched or surpassed by dedicated short-range air-superiority fighters and interceptors, they are more than capable of handling cumbersome dive bombers or assisting in mine-sweeping efforts, clearing the way for the heavy vessels to do their jobs.  The majority of these types are ground based, but convoy protection duties and the deployment of battlegroups far from home has led to drop hangars being installed on most larger Flugstein ships.  In practice, this has proved to be somewhat problematic, as recovery without a landing strip is impossible for fighters not specially designed to be used as parasite planes.  Because such models have to make significant compromises to be successful in a trapeze recovery, their specifications are often not up to military standards.  To address this need for in-flight recovery, dedicated Flugstein carriers became critical components of every fleet by the mid thirties, with the largest of these capable of deploying entire wings of fighters and dive bombers.  Many strategists believe that the carrier will eventually replace the battleship as the dominant class of warship, but a lack of long-range bombardment capability and the fragility of the flight deck and Flugstein grid have so far limited their potential uses.  Supermassive designs combining carrier decks with heavy guns have been proposed, and recent advances in power plants and materials science have made it theoretically possible to produce a truly formidable mobile base, but no vessels of this type have yet appeared.

A secondary effect of long-range fighter cover becoming available was the resuscitation of high altitude bombing as a viable option.  Though vulnerable to fighters and anti-aircraft fire, fixed-wing bombers can move much faster than fleet vessels and are the only viable option for quickly hitting enemy infrastructure.  Because massed fire makes the airspace directly above most hardened targets unnavigable even for the most heavily armored Flugstein ships, these bombers are the only means of delivering bunker-busting weaponry in cases where a battleship cannot be risked.  To repel such bomber attacks, lighter and far more agile Flugstein vessels have been introduced.  The armor on these corvettes allows them to shrug off the attacks of escort fighters while delivering a devastatingly precise close-range flak barrage to bomber formations.  The natural reaction for a wing when intercepted by such a ship is to scatter, making the individual bombers far more difficult for their escorts to defend from enemy fighters.  As this typically results in horrific casualties and the failure of the mission, bomber crews are rigorously trained to instead open their formation and dive while weathering the storm until their adversary can be outdistanced.  Though any ship fast enough to engage in a running battle with fixed-wing aircraft will make a hard target for dive-bombers, these lightest Flugstein ships are no match for the guns of heavier classes and can easily be obliterated by the coordinated efforts of frigate or destroyer packs if cornered far from support.

With so many types of ships and squadrons in play, improving communications and reconnaissance is a critical military priority.  Easily-intercepted radio transmissions are by far the most effective way to organize units in the field, so elaborate systems for encoding and decoding transmissions have been developed, and code-breaking is now a very well funded area of research.  Perhaps an even more important application of radio technology is in national propaganda, where government control of the airwaves keeps morale high with reports of heroic victories over the foreign menace.  Some believe that these one-sided news services have actually contributed to the disillusionment of those living in border regions, where contradictory reports of events can often be picked up from across the border.  Radio communications are also critical in transmitting the data collected by the various national radar networks which most countries independently developed during the thirties.  With thousands of airships over every nation at any given time, the tracking of foreign military vessels is a daunting task even for the most well-equipped groups.  The difficulty of this endeavor is further compounded by the presence of entire decoy battlegroups whose sole purpose is to confound enemy intelligence services, and the importance of keeping tabs on all enemy vessels has been illustrated by a number of devastatingly successful covert operations.  Most famously, the Viennese industrial safe zone was heavily bombarded as a result of the 1938 Salzburg plot, an incident in which the Ottoman destroyer Samsun was smuggled halfway around Europe within the shell of a reconditioned freighter.

Unique events such as these notwithstanding, the lack of firm information on enemy strength and the economic strain of fielding large fleets of Flugstein ships in peacetime had resulted in a pronounced defensive focus in military strategies by the end of the thirties.  Piracy and war via proxy were as popular as ever, but it made no sense for countries to risk their most valuable assets in an attack if there was no guarantee that another neighbor would not then step in to take advantage of the situation.  While this suited corporate interests, the public was slow to forget any offense committed by foreign nations, and the heady atmosphere inspired by state propaganda and two decades of steadily accumulating air power led majorities in most countries to believe that another war would quickly and permanently settle their old grievances.  Fittingly, the trigger for war arrived in the form of another German aerospace development.

The Mannheim Rocket

Wernher von Braun was born to an aristocratic family that played a prominent role in the Weimar government.  With the collapse of that regime in 1924, the von Brauns found themselves unwelcome in a Berlin now dominated by their political enemies.  As their original homeland was now a part of Poland, the family elected to join the burgeoning expatriate community in Zurich, where Wernher grew up surrounded by wealth and the wonder of flight.  When the Kaiser began to mobilize his private army in 1930, he opened an academy in Zurich "for the advancement of aeronautical technologies" which was, in point of fact, little more than a new military research facility funded by sources throughout Europe.  Von Braun enrolled in the institute's first class and, by the end of the decade, had become recognized as the preeminent rocket scientist of his time.  While his personal passion was the development of spacefaring technologies, von Braun's designs for long-range suborbital rockets were faster than conventional aircraft and could strike at enemy infrastructure directly, with minimal risk.  Given where the money for the development came from, it was inevitable that these technologies would end up in the hands of Germany's enemies. 

The first (and to date, only) major deployment of these weapons was the French attack on German heavy industry which followed a protracted series of border skirmishes in August of 1939.  While these early weapons proved ineffective in penetrating the heavily reenforced bunkers of the major manufacturing sites, a miscalculated trajectory resulted in damage to a football stadium in Mannheim.  Fortunately, the facility was empty at the time, but the appearance of this indiscriminate and ignoble weapon truly alarmed Europe.  When the rockets' origins were revealed, the German government seized on the public's shock and horror as an opportunity to launch their long-hoped-for war on the Kaiser's private Imperial army.  On September 2nd, the Reichstag declared that the Wilhelm and all who supported him were traitors to be shot down on sight, and their opening move was an assassination attempt which involved the battleship Bismarck leveling his family estate in the Netherlands.  Wilhelm was actually ballooning in Italy at the time, having developed effective means of decoying German intelligence throughout the thirties.  Because the Kaiserliche Marine lacked even primitive Flugstein ships in the early days of the conflict, Germany's initial strategy involved bribing neighboring nations into helping them bottle up the Imperialist forces over Switzerland until the royal family could be killed by their agents.  Unfortunately for them, the Loyalist Reichsmarine's efforts were hamstrung by the immediate (and clearly not spontaneous) defection of Generaloberst Manfred von Richthofen along with a significant proportion of the fighter corps.

Through the end of 1939, the Reichsmarine was held at bay by massed fighter and divebomber attacks, but due to the ideological nature of the conflict, the Imperialists gained little from these victories.  Wilhelm's objective was to spark a popular uprising, and while the conflict made him more popular than ever around Europe, the Mannheim Rocket incident and the aging of his support base at home meant that his hopes of returning to power were simply unrealistic.  Berlin's much more achievable aim was to finally eliminate the Kasier's challenge to their legitimacy, and their patience with Switzerland soon ran thin.  Seeing that their position was compromised by hosting an army that had no profit motive, the Swiss brokered a deal between Wilhelm and Emperor Franz Ferdinand whereby the Imperialist fleet could be moved to Austria-Hungary in exchange for support from the Kaiser's backers.  The story of how the old friends had reconciled after almost a quarter century played well in the European press, and Imperialist forces now receive backing from political factions around the world who are eager to see Germany drained by a prolonged war.

The present conflict retains the possibility for massive escalation, so most of the powers have adopted a wait-and-see attitude and are trying to avoid coming down on either side.  Every nation is at the negotiating table with the Loyalist government, but most also provide some assistance to Austria-Hungary, as a resolution of the German Civil War in either direction is potentially disastrous for Europe.  The Kaiser's defeat would leave Berlin in a dominant position that would benefit her allies in the short term, but inevitably lead to their becoming satellite nations of the German powerhouse.  Because of their massive investments over the past twenty years, the United States is assumed to be firmly behind the sitting German government, so it is uncertain that even a coalition of all the remaining powers could overcome a reunified Germany.  The alternative outcome is possibly even worse; with the resurgence of the old alliances exposing deep ideological fault lines throughout the industrial world, an Imperial victory could release a wave of anti-corporate sentiment, undermining each individual government's power base and leaving them prey to communism, fascism, and other undesirable regional and global political forces.  Through the summer of 1940, a dynamic balance was maintained through careful behind-the-scenes negotiations at the League of Nations, but the world would soon be taken to the brink by the appearance of an unlikely Imperial ally from the east.

Only a couple more entries to go, then someone just has to make the game part woohoo!

[Unknown Target]

Has anyone considered how to simulate gravity and air resistance in FSO, for this mod?

I'd be very interested in any solutions you might have come up with.

Cheers.

[starlord]

gravity would be swell for atmospheric missions: Imagine capital airships falling to their death as they explode...

[Unknown Target]

I agree.

I'm working on a project that's similar enough to the basic idea for this mod (it has airships), that there is probably a lot of stuff I want that this one needs or would use as well. It is, however, not steampunk and the aircraft are designed to at least have a chance of being feasible, pulling from my knowledge of aerodynamics design. I'm doing it as a Freespace mod to make a free demo while my coder gets herself up to snuff on XNA engine programming.





I'd be interested in anything related to getting gravity to work easily. If someone could show me how to install and use scripts, I saw one on another page.

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=72106.0

If someone could tell me how I should go about using this, I'd greatly appreciate it.

EDIT: I believe I've gotten it working. Do I just place it in my data/tables directory as "Scripts.tbl" or something?
Also, what would be great is a "minimum speed" variable in the ships.tbl. Does that exist?

Thanks.

[Titan]

Wouldn't it be better to use another game? 

[General Battuta]

He said:

I'm doing it as a Freespace mod to make a free demo while my coder gets herself up to snuff on XNA engine programming.

[Titan]

durr

[crizza]

Hm...Thaeris carrier looks to modern in IMHO.
Look at carriers in WW2 and you'll know what I mean, even modern carriers have not such a fancy island.

[Thaeris]

Mr. Crizza,

That was an example for use in modeling techniques, and that ship is one which is speculated to enter service around 2020. It was never proposed for use in this mod.

[Unknown Target]

I've got a story, gameplay ideas, and some concept art and models for a mod like this. Would anyone be interested in working with me? I specifically need modelers and converters at the moment. I'd like one or two more people if at all possible.

Some newer examples;





EDIT: More art. Still looking for volunteers!




You can get the full (4096 x 2048) view here;
http://invertedvantage.deviantart.com/art/Best-to-Bug-Out-190587759

[Titan]

That's... freaking awesome.... 

[Droid803]

Flying islands wheeee!

[starlord]

Oh look! Stormhawks!

[Unknown Target]

Never seen that show. Looks cool though.

[-Sara-]

Floating islands, awesome. Almost feels a bit like the arcade game Tyrian with those. Going to look forward to how this progresses.

[Unknown Target]

Bump with a WIP. The old airplane model I had (the one in the render above) would be too much of a pain to fix up for FS2, so I'm starting from scratch with a new one.



More to come.

[Scooby_Doo]

I know its not a real plane but it looks cool

LOL that's where I got my Liberator from

[Thaeris]

I'm going to shamelessly promote this here, as someone here might have a serious use for this software:

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=73575.0