Oh yes, the Orca. For me, it had always been the iconic Centauran ship, my favourite ship on the old forums, and one of my favourite SF fighters designs ever.
Pretty nice Deltan fighter you made there! I wonder how it work better without or with smaller winglets. Then again, I’ve never been a fan of wings and winglets with the Deltan style, so maybe that’s just me.
Also, what are those air intake-looking things around the engine? On one hand, I’m not certain air intakes are necessary on those fighters, on the other hand they are facing backward, so that’s probably not what they are. Cooling devices, maybe, emitting some cooling gas? They would look pretty nice with a bright glow and some engine-like effect from them.
Serving in the Deltan Space Force, this combat spacecraft is designed for low altitude to low orbit operations. Because I think the most attractive experience of Infinity would be entering a planet’s atmosphere from the outer space.
From Pic.1 and Pic.2 we could know that the side pods with wings are replaceable atmospheric combat kits. The wings provide better performance inside the atmosphere, the two triangular holes on both sides are missile storages and the circular sockets are hardpoints for installing weapons such as turrets.
Pic.1
Pic.2
When it comes to the air intake-looking things, let’s take a look at the super cool-looking bottom.
Pic.3
Pic.3 shows a rectangular intake beneath the bottom like the F-16 does. This is the air flow intake of a Magnetohydrodynamic Drive (MHDD, not that harddisk diagnostic tool), which only activates in the atmosphere.
Just like the reverse use of a magnetohydrodynamic generator (Pic.4), In a MHDD (Pic.5), hight voltage turns air flow into plasma fluid and magnetic field pushes the plasma fluid to the “air intake-looking things”.
Pic.4
Pic.5
Because the temperature of plasma flow is very high, the shark gill looking sheets are designed to scatter the heat like what F117 does to reduce thermal signal.
Pic.6
Really? This is exactly in line with what I envisioned as Deltan until now. (At least for small fighter craft. There were some quite nice fighters like the Ferox, and one that was available in the in-engine viewer demo, can’t recall the name. I’d say this design fits in quite well.)
The faction guidelines were posted the day the new forums went live. Anyways, it’s still nice work, and the only ones who have to adhere to the guidelines atm are the current art team members.
I don’t know. Looking at this and, say, the Talon concept in the Deltan FSG, it looks more like the difference between artists’ styles than “this is Deltan, this is not”.
You guys get the final say, obviously, but to my eye, the only thing that Xenos’ work here doesn’t share with the examples in the FSG is that it isn’t quite as “thickset” as they are, and I’m including the work by Luis and InovaeAndre in that’s been included as examples in that. And the large fins.
Unless you guys have radically changed the Detlan style since you last updated the FSGs (to be fair, that was a WHILE ago), Xenos isn’t that far off.
Everything from the way you packed uvs to your texture work / modeling is top notch, well done. Do you have any ingame engine shots using physically based rendering? Trying to figure out what all your maps are. Seems you have your diffuse albedo, a roughness map, occlusion and self illum, but then 2 other middle maps that I can’t quite figure out.
We have not changed the Deltan style guide for many years. This concept just has too many “fins & spikes”. iirc this was one of the main issues with many of the Deltan contributions when the old system was active. I’ve never understood why people seem to associate Deltan with lots of fins and winglets, this is not the case. He did mention the “X-wing” thingies were modules, if I were critiquing a team members’ design, I’d say those would need to be removed. Also see what can be done at the nose instead of that drop fin. The base hull with some minor modification is a good start for a Deltan ship IMO.
I used to be against the fins, like 7 years ago. But since then so many things changed. I’d personally think they could give a very nice and distinct look to deltan ships. Sure, wings don’t make much sense on spacecraft. For small fighters like this it’s believable that they help in atmospheric conditions. TBH the small craft designs found in the design document (I suppose Kristian’s designs?) are lacking in terms of visuals. There always was a duality in Deltan designs (at least contributions wise), with some of them being the blobby designs (mostly represented by spAce and Lucas, the ones that actually made it to the design doc) and some of them being more spacecar/fighter jet-esque (like the already mentioned Ferox for example). I’m disappointed that the team opted to go down the blobby route.
Not to mention that the cultural setting outlined in the document seems to reinforce the feeling that the Deltan are okay with stuff that looks cool just because it is designed to look cool.
At first glance, maybe, but if you think about it fins, winglets, and wings of all types actually limit manoeuvrability quite severely. They make it almost impossible to go any direction but forwards!
Sure, in the current-day real-world this is fine since most forms of propulsion work by intake air (which becomes really finicky at supersonic velocities if the intake is pointing backwards) and the ones that don’t tend to operate at velocities where lifting body aerodynamics are just as effective as wings (really fast or really slow), but in a universe of high thrust engines with infinite specific impulse this would be a huge disadvantage.
I mean, just imagine it: a hostile fighter is behind you, trying to destroy you. Would you rather perform a large turn, reversing your trajectory while presenting a much larger target which can be easily destabilized by a hit to obvious weakpoints… or just flip 180 and blow them out of the sky?
Well you have a point. I’d find it a bit boring if the atmospheric flight model was to be completely thrown out the window. Entering planets’ atmospheres is just not the same without the jet style flights.
From point of the design: Considering the incredible thrusters, spheres would be the most useful ship shape. It gets you uniform air resistance from all angles, and best surface to internal volume ratio (which is kinda important in a spaceship if you ask me). I don’t see the functional spherical spaceships designs around either. Honestly, none of the actual style guide lines depict actually believable spacecraft. Even the people who like saying that Starfold stuff looks “functional” are talking absolute nonsense* (maybe a designs by Timmon could be exception ^-^). Therefore I see no reason not to use such visual elements to reinforce the style of a given faction.
But I get it, people don’t want wings. I’m fine with that, therefore I rest my case on the issue.
And makes absolutely sure you’ll be detected by radar regardless of orientation. Oh yeah, and any hangar bay would have to be 34% larger than with box-shaped ships. Possibly more, I’m not sure how tightly you could pack anything against a curving wall.
Most importantly, though, spherical ships aren’t cool and official INovae policy is that the rule of cool takes priority. Just so happens that a lot of people don’t think winglets are cool.
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