I think the gist of what the thread is asking is along the lines of “more Nautilus X, less Millennium Falcon”.
More Kubrick, less Lucas?
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Please keep in mind that all of our recent artwork has been for a single faction. In fact it has been for a single corporation within a single faction.
This is the first that I’VE heard of that, as far as I know. But if that’s the case, then show us. If all you show is one corporation, then that’s all we know.
A sketch. A WIP render. That’s all we need. If the Kubrickans have something to look forward to, show them. If they don’t, tell them. Otherwise, they’re gonna keep asking.
If it’s crunch time, I get that; say no more, we CAN wait. But we can’t know what you don’t show.
The faction guidelines have the styles clearly spelled out. The closest we have to the OP’s suggestion is the Centaurus faction. That concept art in the guidelines is what we can show at this time. We will not show you anything new on the Centaurus because we do not have anything new on the Centaurs. As explained in the past we are concentrating on Star Fold, as the minimum crowd funding will only contain the Star Fold faction. If funding allows, we will add more factions to I:B.
I don’t think it’s Centaurus stuff that they’re asking for; rather, it seems to me that what is being asked for is a design aesthetic more in line with modern-day rocketry than with traditional depictions of science-fiction spacecraft.
Something similar to this (obviously not as “primitive”):
in place of/alongside this:
Unless, of course, I’ve completely misunderstood what the thread is about.
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That’s not what I see in the OP’s render.
In 2012, NASA physicist Harold White revealed that he and a team were working on a design for a faster-than-light ship. Now he’s collaborated with an artist to create a new, more realistic design of what such a ship might actually look like.
That is the very beginning of the article linked in the OP as the source of the image. A little research tells me that Mr. White is indeed involved in research into non-netonian propulsion and did indeed design the ship linked in the OP, based on current non-newtonian propulsion theories.
It is no less ‘real’ than the Nautilus-X.
Non-netonian proplexion
Ugh. Not this again. White’s research is more overblown than a haystack in a hurricane. His lab basically works on figuring out what kind of energy distribution is necessary to optimize the Alcubiurre metric. We’re not even capable of producing those energy distributions, however, as they require particles with negative mass. To have him out there working on concept art for a warp enabled ship is putting the cart so far before the horse, the horse is going to die of old age before it ever catches up.
This publicity stunt currently has as much basis in reality as Star Wars does. There’s a reason that ship in the OP looks like a sci-fi model from the 1970s: It’s the only reference point Dr. White and his artist have to work from.
I hope Sonny’s having fun, and I’m sure there’s some interesting advancements to be made in the field of GR theory from his work, but unless negative mass exists, we’ll all be waiting an exceedingly long time for the USS Enterprise to beam us up.
more in-line
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Larry+Niven’s+Known+Space+Art
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=space+shuttle
yes. that is correct.
I hope Sonny’s having fun, and I’m sure there’s some interesting
advancements to be made in the field of GR theory from his work, but
unless negative mass exists, we’ll all be waiting an exceedingly long
time for the USS Enterprise to beam us up.
He’d probably have more fun with your butt than negative mass.
Uhhh… What?
And even if they somehow got their hands on negative mass and built the thing, and somehow optimized it so it wouldn’t require a few Universes worth of energy to run it, there would still be problems like the bubble filling with instant-death radiations, or emitting a planet-destroying gamma ray burst when stopping…
While we’re talking about Sonny, just for fun, could his q-thruster thingie could be used a free-energy machine? Somehow I can’t work the math right.
More on-topic, seeing the OP concept made me remember why my most prefered ships on the old forum were often Centauran ones (even though I would play Deltan, given the choice).
More contenporary-looking ships like Nautilus-X-inspired ones would look good, but they would look as out-of-place among the others than a galley at the battle of Midway.
Just skimming the Wikipedia article, no. I don’t believe there’s any claim that they could be used as a free-energy machine, either. There’s a different between free propellant and free energy.
You’ve heard of the quantum foam, right? The basic gist of the quantum foam is that fluctuations in the vacuum energy of empty space cause the spontaneous production of matter/anti-matter pairs (usually electron/positron pairs, but there’s no reason higher mass particle pairs can’t be produced given higher fluctuations). These particle pairs a) pop into existence, b) live for a few small fractions of a second, and then c) collide, paying back their mass energy to the vacuum.
It’s possible to interrupt this chain of events at point b) by separating the two particles, thus preventing annihilation. The thing of it, though, is that the vacuum energy must be repaid from somewhere. If it’s not going to get it back from the particle’s mass-energy, it has to come from something else.
This is the mechanism that underlies Hawking’s classical theory of black hole evaporation. The particle/antiparticle pair are created just above the black hole’s event horizon. One of the particles (particle A) are created flying in the direction of the event horizon. By conservation of momentum, the other particle (particle B) is created flying in the opposite direction. If Particle A crosses the event horizon, and Particle B is created with enough momentum to escape the black hole, that mass energy is lost to the vacuum. It needs to be repaid from somewhere, though, and it’s repaid by the black hole. In spite of the fact that the black hole has just absorbed a massive particle, the black hole actually loses mass.
In the quantum vacuum thruster, the matter/antimatter pair are separated by a strong electric or magnetic field. That field, which is generated by the ship, needs to contain a huge amount of energy. When the particles are separated, it’s the electric/magnetic field that repays the energy to the vacuum. The electric/magnetic field is also used to accelerate the newly captured particle pair away from the ship, generating thrust.
So, the ship still needs to be able to generate a huge amount of energy. Significantly more, in fact, than would be required if they carried propellant along with them. But they’d get away without having to carry the mass of that propellant, and without running the risk of running out of propellant.
The whole concept, basically, is built on the idea that we’ll overcome the energy production side of things.
While I’d like to see more hard sci-fi spaceship designs in games, scientific realism is a bit of a trap in Infinity’s case. It would just invite scrutiny that can’t be rewarded.
That said, you can get a lot of believability out of an admittedly unrealistic art style if you design ships that are internally consistent and follow their own set of rules.
I still think serious attention should be paid to Infinity’s ships’ internal hardware. All ships are supposed to have jump drives and warp drives, but we still have no idea what either looks like or how they’re supposed to fit into the ships we’ve seen so far.
You don’t have to invent a theoretically working jump drive (don’t try, you’ll just look silly), but at least come up with some basic rules for what they need.
How big are they generally relative to the ship? How do they scale as the size of the ship increases? Do they have a distinctive or recognizable shape (Distinctive is good, it’ll help Infinity stand out)? Do they have to be separated from certain parts of the ship, or do they need to be positioned in the exact center? That kind of thing.
Similar rules can apply to the warp drive, the impulse thrusters, the crew compartments, and so on.
This presents unique design constraints, which work wonders for creativity. You now have to problem solve to design a “working” spaceship, and the result is a more believable design.
Listing the colors and angles present in an art style doesn’t tell us anything about the underlying design philosophy. This is what leads to the “box with thrusters” criticism so often leveled. Besides the stipulations regarding paneling and greeble, there’s no reason to design anything other than a box (besides Rule of Cool, which doesn’t help the game feel any more believable). And if there is, it’s not really coming through.
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This is the crux of the point I was trying to make in the OP. I didn’t express it as well as Timmon has here. I’d like to see space ship designs that have an internal consistency with thought given to the purpose of each component we can see.
It’s the difference between a game asset that is attempting to reproduce a real prototype and a model that is a work of imagination. The objects modelled on a real prototype have a consistency of style and reality that is rarely seen in assets that are entirely fictional.
What we often see when looking at the texturing of space ship is that the texture artist is trying to use all the cool looking effects he has available to him simply because they are there. When bump mapping was first introduced it seemed that every surface suddenly became bumpy and scratched just because the artists wanted to show off the engine’s ability to shade uneven surfaces. For real prototypes it’s usually the case that surfaces don’t have visible scratches and are very smooth.
Sometimes less is more. In reality we normally find one material that works and use that material everywhere. Hull plating is likely to look the same across a range of ships that have all found a certain material to be the most effective for the job of being the outer skin of a ship. There might be three or four basic types of hull plating materials (civilian, military armoured and military stealth), all would be consistent in terms of specularity and smoothness with perhaps just the colour of the paint job changing.
Another area where ships often looks bad is seemingly random panel lines in textures. This is again mainly a job for the texture artists to decide upon a consistent set of rules. Have a mechanism in mind for how panels are placed and attached to craft and apply it across all ships. I dislike the overly obvious panel seams that seem to be made larger than necessary simply to give a purpose for having a normal map. But if you decide that the technology of the universe results in highly visible panel seams, then it should be applied the same on every ship.
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The last thing I will say on this topic is we plan to release MOD tools. Then the sky is the limit for those who wish to design to whatever criteria they deem appropriate. 
Not good enough. Go start over. Kickstarter can wait 'till next decade.
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This discussion topic has well summed up my thoughts on spaceship games problems. It is not just the form over function argument. It is also the conceptualization of what something is for. Many of the contributions in the past, make the assumption “magic” . This ends up creating an artistic design that doesn’t make sense given the expectations of the objects’ nature. I have often had this discussion with those in the forums as well as IRC in the past. I have concluded that for most, the desire to make an magic airplane overwhelms the desire to make a practicable spaceship.
We see the instance above in several forum posts that sort of miss the point. It’s not about “needing more rings” or “add pods” or the “rust is wrong”. It’s really about not having put any thought into a concept not just in design, form over function, but what one is trying to achieve. Is it a spaceship? What does a spaceship do? What is the artist’s or public’s expectations? If the public expects that spaceships are extensions of airplanes, then airplanes will dominate the design. There is no sense in this and people will bend over backward to somehow explain this logical fallacy. Examples of this are wings, sidedness, many many rocket engines. the list goes on. ProjectRho has spent a great deal of time talking about this subject.
Crayfish makes wonderful points but in the end no one will listen. Why? Because their expectation of a design trope is vastly different from the realities of the world. Something many of us escape. In the end, cookie-cutter spaceships, indistinguishable from other spaceship game designs will be churned out with thoughts mostly on, what seems expected. In the end, I’ll put up any industrial design artists spaceships against the vast majority of what I see in today’s “spaceship games”. Why? Maybe intellectual or artistic laziness.