I’m a big fan of the ‘aerodynamic shield bubble’ idea that was mentioned around. The ship can be as blocky as wished, but its shield has a simple form (probably an ellipsoid or sth) for which there are known aerodynamic formulae. There are two advantages:
Calculating aerodynamics becomes doable with a general rule, while following real-world physics close enough
Aerodynamics stops being a concern when modelling the ship
The second point doesn’t mean a ship shouldn’t look functional, on the contrary it justifies pretty well the tank + engines design of the SFC. The general shape of a ship is still of some importance, though, you don’t want your areospace fighter to look like a billboard.
It would be great if the shield itself was slightly visible when looking close enough and paying attention, for example with a small deformation at the edge of the bubble, around the ship. If there ever are atmospheric effects (shut up, let me dream) the shield would be used as the source of the mach cone, condensation, reentry fireball and such…
I actually dislike Elite Dangerous’ aesthetic, the ships look unimaginative and weapons are sort of bolted onto gimbaled ports and don’t follow any of the ship lines and curves. Star Citizen somewhat suffers from this too, weapons don’t look like they belong to the ship and look like they bolted weapons on civilian ships. There’s a general sense of “make it because it looks cool” rather than having a marriage between design and lore.
I’ve always been in favor of the Homeworld style, particularly Homeworld 2 and the latest Deserts of Kharak where weapons are part of the vessel, integral to its entire design and often the thing a vessel centers around. If you make weapons too small (like in EVE Online for example) you will end up looking at the ship and finding weapons nothing more than T-Rex arms - surely to grab your attention (heh) but ultimately dwarved by rest of the ship.
What i’m saying is not in terms of “bigger because orc likes big axe” but more in the sense of the scale of importance and attention. This is a game about spaceship fights and weapon models should definitely be part of the entire ship design, perhaps even what the ship is center around.
This one shows how the entire design is centered around the main gun. It has 4 sentry guns to defend against small pesky harassers but just by looking at it, without knowing anything about it, you understand its main role - frontline long-range assault.
In contrast you may look at this one and figure out that it’s smaller, as it has the same (single) sentry battery, and has a bunch of antennas, relatively larger engines and no main gun leading me to guess that it is probably some sort of scout/exploration vessel.
I hope the above two examples are good enough to explain my design language - it’s not about bigger weapons. It’s about telling a story about a ship: where it came from, why it exists, what is its role and how it works. You can let the player see and understand this at a glance with good design or let the player be confused as to what it’s suppose to do with bad design.
The A-10 is built basically to haul that big gun around. Literally, that’s why it’s designed that way.
That’s one of the reasons I’m hyped about the current direction for the bomber. Regardless of whether or not it’s origin was a mining ship, it screams that it has gobs of armour and bombs. Which is exactly what you want when flying a bomber.
I 100% agree that ship design should be centered around it’s function. Followed closely by ‘rule of cool’. But the rule of cool shouldn’t supersede the function of the craft.
That depends on what you’re trying to communicate. I believe the Astralis faction favours form over function, somewhat like an MacBook Air where they create a single-form structure and incorporate all the functions as part of the hull rather than greeble-filled modules. This would indicate a very specialized mentality where each ship serves only one function and is very inflexible (like not being able to swap weapons or modules). With comparison to other factions that can modify existing ships for different purposes (ship variants) the Astralis feel like they design an entire ship from scratch for every particular role. This indicates that each ship should be more expensive but that much more powerful at their intended role. From just the aesthetic i remember, it could translate into a faction that has more expensive but more powerful ships as part of the game mechanics and balance.
In comparison the current faction can have ship variants based on the same hull. One might have some modifications that favours missiles, another can have ECM capabilities with a reduced firepower, etc… Astralis could have a Fighter that would only work with plasma cannons and a bomber would have to be a completely different ship with different charactersitics and behaviour as opposed to a slight variation on the same platform.
INovaeGene, INovaeAndre and INovaePanu all left the development team a few months ago. This is presumably because the Kickstarter didn’t bring in as much money as was hoped and so they couldn’t afford to keep them on.
I really, really wish Keith would talk about that.
There’s a lot I could say, but if INS wants to keep it all under the rug, then so be it. I’m not happy about it, but I’m sure Kieth, Flaven, et al aren’t either.
There isn’t any sweeping things under the rug. I cannot talk about it regardless of whether or not I want to. I understand some of you are unhappy about that but there isn’t much I can do about it.
