[Black Wolf]

Well, I've been working on this for a couple of days now, same deal as that little outpost I threw up a few weeks back, taking it up to work to UV it, looking for sme last minute suggestions.

The design is somewhat odd, I'll grant, though there're reasons for that. Firstly, I've tried to take influence from the FS1 Vasudans - the Satis-y nose, the Aten-y engine. Secondly, the backstory requires that it was thrown together as quickly as possible rather than designed with the Vasudan's customary artistry. Essentially the idea is that after the Great War and before the permanent détente that would lead to the GTVA, the Terrans and Vasudans basically fell into a sort of weak Cold War/arms race. They cooperated on some things, but didn't totally trust each other. When it became apparent that the Terrans would be able to fit heavy beams onto their Fenris and Leviathan hulls relatively easily, the Vasudans needed something to quickly level out the playing field while they were developing the Sobek, and so they threw together this thing.







It's a bit hard to visualize how it works in 2d, so here's the 3ds File

The backstory also serves nicely to explain why we never saw these in FS2 - as a basically prototye design, they were difficult to maintain, crew intensive and notoriously finnicky in the field. The Vasudans only made a few of them, and retired them when the Sobek came online in decent numbers.

Obviously, there'll be some kind of fancy beam cannon turret on the end of those tubes, haven't designed it just yet, similarly I'll probably steal the multiparts from the aten for the round pads on the back, so it'll have six turrets altogether. Those external "carapace" type armour plates will be destroyable, and make use of subsystem dependent armour types so that attacking them does only, say, a quarter of the damage of attacking the main hull inside. The reactor (that little cylindrical thing under its own carapace there in the third picture) is also an independent submodel, and will be destroyable. The carapace will be tilemapped, which will annoy some people I'm sure, but the idea is that if someone wants to use it for a different time period, it can be made to fit into that period with a few clicks in PCS2 - changing it to a Typhon texture, for example, might make it useable in the TV War era as a missile cruiser rather than a beam boat. The concept is the same as Galemp's Mekhet.

So, any suggestions or comments would be good at this point, though I'll probaby only be tweaking it for a couple of days before I head off to work.

[Mobius]

For a moment, I thought this was the Vasudan mobile equivalent of the Ganymede. "Reconstruction" is a bit ambiguous.

Nice design, can't wait to see it in action, really. My biggest issue, however, is that it looks like an early prototype of the Mekhet, so I would personally prefer a more original design. This is not meant to be an offense or anything, of course.

[Hades]

So far, it doesn't really look Vasudan. It looks like a real blocky engine with a couple armor plates and smooth detail slapped on, more reminiscent of a hover-car or something.

[Mobius]

It looks Vasudan if you have the Mekhet in mind, though.

[Black Wolf]

So far, it doesn't really look Vasudan. It looks like a real blocky engine with a couple armor plates and smooth detail slapped on, more reminiscent of a hover-car or something.

Fair call, I worried about that myself, but luckily the Vasudan design ethos is broader than most people tend to remember. The engines are designed to look like the top half of the Aten engines (See here for VA's gallery of the HTL Aten WiPs, or here for a direct look), and the nose is a pretty overt copy of the Satis (a perfect fit for the whole "hovercar" design if ever there was one). There are one or two other satis inspired bits as well - the prongs that stick out, and the pattern on top of the front part.

Actually, I think we've... kind of fooled ourselves as a community as to what Vasudan design actually is, because we tend to keep looking at the same models - I'm no exception to this either, generally. The Satis and Ma'at are nothing at all like the Aten, Sobek and Hattie, and the Typhon's something all to itself, really, as is the Bast. The Amun could pass as Terran with a retexture (See the GTT Hunter to prove it). While the design here is unusual, for a mod ship, I think that for the timeframe in which it's meant to fit, it does have clearly discernible Vasudan design elements. Just not the ones most people are used to.

[headdie]

http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/images/Mekhet.jpg

while I can see the similarity with the forward protrusions, that is it.  I have to agree with Hades that in it's current for it dosn't look Vasudan.

Normally I am a fan of your designs but as a suggestion the back edge of the upper armour plates want making more ovoid than right angle, although separate armour hulls is new to Vasudan designs the tail section of the Sobek has fins which coulp provide a good template. 

It might also be worth making the forward section of the main hull come to a rounded point, or perhaps do a Typhon/Sobek nose would be a better idea.

Also the main hull has two large expanses of flat hull, the bottom and a slight smaller area on the top. Vasudan craft normally only have large expanses of flat on the bottom, the top is usually a curve all over, see Mentu, Aten, Isis, Thoth, Tauret, Seth.

By and large though the concept is intriguing and I look forward to seeing how you develop it.