[[Concept]] Ships for Species: Chato'matou'Gormoshk

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shrinkshooter
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Re: [[Concept]] Ships for Species: Chato'matou'Gormoshk

#16 Post by shrinkshooter »

Well, this is good! It's better for me because it gives me much more leeway and much fewer restrictions when thinking about shape and size. But aside from thruster locations to maneuver in a resistance-free environment and weapons arrangement, what should I take into account when thinking about the shape? pd wants me to avoid arbitrariness, which is a given; but I'm afraid that unless there are many factors involved with the shape, the shape actually is arbitrary. Like I just said, shape would be determined by thruster location and weapons arrangement. I know it might also take into account how a species walks, but probably less so; perhaps how the species likes to "flavor" their designs? The Enterprise's saucer section detaches in emergencies; that has to do with shape, and I guess I could design something in the same fashion. I'm open to suggestions.
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Re: [[Concept]] Ships for Species: Chato'matou'Gormoshk

#17 Post by utilae »

shrinkshooter wrote: Well, this is good! It's better for me because it gives me much more leeway and much fewer restrictions when thinking about shape and size. But aside from thruster locations to maneuver in a resistance-free environment and weapons arrangement, what should I take into account when thinking about the shape? pd wants me to avoid arbitrariness, which is a given; but I'm afraid that unless there are many factors involved with the shape, the shape actually is arbitrary. Like I just said, shape would be determined by thruster location and weapons arrangement. I know it might also take into account how a species walks, but probably less so; perhaps how the species likes to "flavor" their designs? The Enterprise's saucer section detaches in emergencies; that has to do with shape, and I guess I could design something in the same fashion. I'm open to suggestions.
One thought I have with the crystal ships is whether they are built in space or launched from the ground. You could imagine that crystals grow in the ground, so they would grow the ships on the ground and then launch them in space. But the problem is that if FreeOrion decideds for instance that to keep things simple, all ships are built at shipyards which are in space, then you have to go from that point of view.


Overall I think we are all nitpicking this a bit too much. I say, don't do any changes to the race story. But design the ships with maximum freedom. Take what you can from the story to describe the ships. What you are doing is attaching the image of the race to the ships. So when the story is read, you can look at the ships and think that is what you would imagine them to be like. Sometimes even if the story does not describe what a ship will look like, you can still apply parts of the story to the ship design.

Example thoughts
===============
Highlighted by eleazar in this thread (No 1 in highly developed :) ) is my race the Gyisache.
Eleazar Thread:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1642
Gyisache:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=99

From my race description, they are cowardly and like sheep. They are the prey, being hunted. They attack only when their advantage is overwhelming and even then they take as long as necessary to prevent losses.

So to design a ship for them, I would imagine that speed and manuevarability would be very important. And especially the ability to retreat. Also, sensors and stealth, because they want to be sure there is no predators in an area before going there, and either way, they don't want to be seen and therefore want to avoid conflict. So there ships would consist of many small ships, a flock of small ships that move and act as one.

See, now mine is probably one of the easiest races to design a ship for. Because what I stated their is how I would imagine sheep or a school of fish, which is what this race is like.

Good luck

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Re: [[Concept]] Ships for Species: Chato'matou'Gormoshk

#18 Post by Tortanick »

from the design document:

Shipyards and ships under construction appear in battles in the appropriate system. These can be targeted and destroyed, providing a strategically important target in battles that can be attacked without destroying all enemy ships in the system.

While it doesn't ever explicitly say it, it looks like all ships are built in orbit, unless it means you can see a big building on the side of the planet from space.

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Re: [[Concept]] Ships for Species: Chato'matou'Gormoshk

#19 Post by pd »

utilae wrote:One thought I have with the crystal ships is whether they are built in space or launched from the ground. You could imagine that crystals grow in the ground, so they would grow the ships on the ground and then launch them in space. But the problem is that if FreeOrion decideds for instance that to keep things simple, all ships are built at shipyards which are in space, then you have to go from that point of view.
However, the Chato'matou'Gormoshk could still have a way to actually grow crystals in space. What we call a shipyard could be an "orbital crystalline garden" for them. Be inventive! If it's visible in space combat, then we are going to have to build it in 3D. It makes sense to apply the same design language to it like we do with ships.

I agree with the rest, as it is basically what I've said before.

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Re: [[Concept]] Ships for Species: Chato'matou'Gormoshk

#20 Post by Kharagh »

shrinkshooter wrote:And according to his profile Kharagh hasn't been around since Fri Apr 27, 2007. After almost a year I doubt I can contact him anyway even if I needed to.
Hey guys, as you can see I am still around. :) Unfortunately I have not had very much free time on my hands during the last months so I have not commented on any of the recent topics. However I still visit the site every few days and have a look at the new ideas and the new art that are presented by our more active members.
I will try to be a little more active in the forums in future; I really love this project and I eagerly await every release and every design decision that is made which brings the project forward another step.
So expect to see me more often from now on.

Now to the topic at hand:
@shrinkshooter
Similar to utilae and Tortanick I don't think race descriptions should be changed to fit a design, however I fully agree with utilae that the ships should be designed with as little restrictions as possible. Just look at the race description and imagine how a ship of that species would look like. The important thing is not to explain every last twist and angle in your design, but to make the design look as if it could have been designed by the associated species.

That said, I must say that I rather like your first drafts of crystalline ships (especially the cruiser concept) and that I am looking forward to seeing more detailed ones like pd requested.
Use your imagination and try differrent approaches, if we can not use an idea for one race, we might use it slightly changed for another one.

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Re: [[Concept]] Ships for Species: Chato'matou'Gormoshk

#21 Post by shrinkshooter »

Hi Kharagh. Good to see you're still around. :)

I rethought the process as suggested by utilae, and I'm throwing these ideas out there, which should allow me to better design these ships. As for being crystalline, perhaps there is a material that is grossly abundant on the species' homeworld that can be reformed with electrical signals just like their bodies?

Unfortunately there seems to be a lot against this species. Although thanks to their symbiosis they can now move and "see," among other things, the Chato'matou are still at their core themselves, as least that's what it seems to me. They couldn't see anything before the symbiosis, so their powers of detection are probably not very good. They can move as well, but once again thanks to the symbiosis; since they were never used to getting anywhere fast or needed to rush anywhere, they probably don't really know the meaning of haste; what I gather from the story, they really didn't have to get anywhere quickly, so their ship speed would probably be relatively low. Additionally, without any natural predators or war among them, they probably don't understand the notion of weapons either. So, this race is essentially an exploration race, one that does not totally understand concepts of movement, war, and sight. The one saving grace I can think of is that they have a very high defense. Existing on such a hot planet (hopefully with such a high pressure) has made them and much of the materials on the planet very hard and resistant to damage. So, I'd imagine that if I were playing as this species, the best strategy would be to colonize, set up defenses (sort of clashes with the weapons idea, but shields and such should be ok), and spend time researching. They should be geniuses at researching, and if you can end the game with researching transcendance, this is the species I would pick to do it. Colonize, hunker down, transcend. Tada, game over. Of course easier said than done, but this species seems to take its time with things, or at least I think it should.

So what does this mean for ships? They're slow, have few if any weapons (or they develop them slowly, which clashes with research, so i don't know), have bad detection, and high defense. Keep in mind that I'm reflecting the species in the ships; just because the species themselves are slow or don't comprehend war all that well doesn't mean that they can't make fast ships with powerful weapons. I understand that. But if I'm to design such ships, I need to know these basics: slow or fast? Good weapons? Defense? etc.

So I suppose I'll start another round of crystalline ships, but if I'm using the above guidelines, don't expect them to be too different from the ones already drawn.
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Re: [[Concept]] Ships for Species: Chato'matou'Gormoshk

#22 Post by Tortanick »

shrinkshooter wrote: I rethought the process as suggested by utilae, and I'm throwing these ideas out there, which should allow me to better design these ships. As for being crystalline, perhaps there is a material that is grossly abundant on the species' homeworld that can be reformed with electrical signals just like their bodies?
I don't know too much about material science, but sand is the same chemical as quartz crystal (silicone dioxide), or if you remove the oxygen it can become silicone crystal. Since they're from a desert world they sand is grossly abundant :) I doubt silicone is a good spaceship material, but quartz could probably do the job, I remember hearing once that a submarine going to record depths used solid specially grown quartz for the windows because nothing else will do.

I don't know if growing quartz requires electricity, or weather skilled electric manipulation would help, but since the Chato'matou'Gormoshk are smarter than us, and we can grow quartz, I imagine that even if their physiology doesn't help much they'll figure it out, especially if they don't have much else to work with.


As for the rest of your post, as I said before, when thinking about how to design the ships it probably isn't all that important to think about how the race behaves ingame, and mixing the two issues could confuse both. Especially since how races behave ingame isn't planned to be discussed until 0.8 so it may change drastically from what your working with today.

Essentaully if you look at your post you went throguh three stages,
1) How dose this race behave, mostly taken from the culture and physiology section of the race design post.
2) How would (1) affect their gameplay strategy.
3) How would (2) affect their ship design.
It would probably be best if you skipped (2) and just went striaght from (1) to (3)

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Re: [[Concept]] Ships for Species: Chato'matou'Gormoshk

#23 Post by shrinkshooter »

I was just thinking about the engines. I did a little research on wikipedia and I made a few choices, but this has me stopped dead: I was going to say that this species has a certain kind of propulsion system, but then I thought of the tech tree. If we're going to customize ships, then obviously you can upgrade the engines. Upgrading the engines means going from a more inefficient, weaker system to a more efficient, more powerful one. If we're going to use relatively realistic upgrades, for example from liquid fuel to nuclear to matter-antimatter propulsion, then I can't very well go ahead and say "this species uses matter-antimatter propulsion" because it would be in the tech tree and the player would need to unlock it and then customize ships with it. How does this pertain to designing a ship? Well, a ship using a simple combustible liquid fuel engine is going to need to be bigger than a ship with matter-antimatter propulsion, because the latter is more efficient and gives more energy per unit size (we'll assume the species has learned how to make a small, efficient design of matter-antimatter like we've made laptops compared to the past's football-field large computers).

I don't know if this is nitpicking or not, but to me this is a possible conflict with other game elements further down the road. For the moment I'm going to go ahead and use the idea I thought of, but I'm aware of the possibility that it might get turned on its head. :(
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Re: [[Concept]] Ships for Species: Chato'matou'Gormoshk

#24 Post by pd »

You shouldn't concern yourself with such gameplay or realism issues. It's just how things are at the moment, with a single techtree and having different kind of ships per race. I imagine it's not that hard to replace certain conflicting technologies on a per race basis in post 1.0, maybe even earlier. After all it's just some text and icons in terms of content, that has to change.
Additionally, without any natural predators or war among them, they probably don't understand the notion of weapons either.
This could be interpreted in a complete different way as well. For example, they might not know how to treat other living beings. There is no morale which forbids hurting or even killing because they don't have an understanding of what this means. Therefore they might be grim, inexorable warmongers(unknowingly), who have no value for other life and who only want to turn each and every planet in the galaxy into giant crystalline balls.

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Re: [[Concept]] Ships for Species: Chato'matou'Gormoshk

#25 Post by Tortanick »

shrinkshooter wrote: I don't know if this is nitpicking or not, but to me this is a possible conflict with other game elements further down the road. For the moment I'm going to go ahead and use the idea I thought of, but I'm aware of the possibility that it might get turned on its head. :(
Don't worry about what kind of engine it is at all, just label it "engine" and make it look like the sort of thing the Chato'matou'Gormoshk would design.

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Re: [[Concept]] Ships for Species: Chato'matou'Gormoshk

#26 Post by shrinkshooter »

Okay. So, from almost strictly an aesthetic perspective, but trying to keep arbitrariness at bay, I have the following so far. It's not very detailed and it's only for the weakest ship, the scout, so it can be easily discarded if need be. HOWEVER, this is here less as a "is this good?" purpose and more of a "if you think this isn't what we need, tell me what you think we should do with it and I'll make the changes" kind of thing.

Image

The underside of the scout ship is flat so it helps it glide through atmosphere, since scouts might want to be able to enter planets' atmospheres and do some close-up recon. The crystals in the back are arranged in an omnidirectional array, a theme I plan to keep on all this species' ships; on this ship, the array houses a slew of different scanners and sensors. There is a place in the back of the ship in the middle of the array where the engine is located. The engines do not interfere with the crystal array's scanning/detection abilities. Thrusters are located on every extreme vertex of the wings (the corners) and the nose of the ship, and on some of the crystal array subunits. For its size it has a relatively powerful engine but cannot go far.

I threw in some added wing designs because I'm not sure which one would look best. The main body of the ship is relatively short, since it is manned by one lone pilot and not intended to house that pilot for any extended period of time. The vast array of sensors located on the ship surpass the need for any windows, but at the fore of the ship a kind of one-way mirror crystal slab is built into it in case power fails. The Gormoshk, who were predators of darkness, can see very well in the black of space and in case a scout ship's systems went offline, the Chato'matou could use the Gormoshk's sensitive eyes to see things outside the ship.

As an added "oh, what the hell," I just drew the species from what I remember of the description. You can ignore the pencil writings.
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Re: [[Concept]] Ships for Species: Chato'matou'Gormoshk

#27 Post by Tortanick »

While I'm not in a position to say if these are the "what we're looking for" I absolutely fell in love with your drawing of the Chato'matou'Gormoshk, its absolutely as cute as a button, the contrast with between the Chato'matou and the Gormoshk is perfect. It looks alien and that expression is priceless! Apart from the fact the "claws" on the side of its mouth are supposed to have 3 fingers its also very accurate from the description.

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Re: [[Concept]] Ships for Species: Chato'matou'Gormoshk

#28 Post by shrinkshooter »

Tortanick wrote:While I'm not in a position to say if these are the "what we're looking for" I absolutely fell in love with your drawing of the Chato'matou'Gormoshk, its absolutely as cute as a button, the contrast with between the Chato'matou and the Gormoshk is perfect. It looks alien and that expression is priceless! Apart from the fact the "claws" on the side of its mouth are supposed to have 3 fingers its also very accurate from the description.
Thanks! That really is a great thing to hear! Initially, I hadn't remember the claws on either side of the mouths, and by the time i remembered it was a little short on space to put anything more than small mandibles there.

While sitting in O-Chem class today, I designed the fighter for this species. It's a little more in-depth than the scout and even though there's a lot of info on the sheet I'll explain everything so there's no confusion.

Image

So here we have 2 fighter possibilities. The first, in Figure 1, is a Burr-style ship. This consists of a crystal array and a large bored-out crystal that serves as the housing and propulsion of the engine. In case you can't read about the crystal on this scan, it says "Crystal arrays are (in general) modular. Each subunit crystal can be replaced with one that is loaded with sensors, thrusters, a cloaking generator, fires weapons, and other systems. This allows for greater flexibility on uniform ship designs." This ship type concentrates on the array itself, since it consists of little more than the array and a means to push it around. As stated, the array is fully customizable, and with omnidirectional configurations, the ship can fire in different directions without the need to turn. This allows for greater agility, accuracy, and defense (since it can fire almost directly behind it). The engine crystal can be several different designs; i wasn't sure which to pick so I made a few of them.

In figure 2 we have the Jet-style ship. This ship concentrates less on agility and more on firepower. It has a large crystal for firing a much more powerful beam than the Burr fighter, several different designs of which I have listed below the picture. The array on this ship is smaller and less flexible than the Burr ship, and because of this it lacks as much agility, because on the Burr ship, multiple thrusters are located on the tips of the thruster subunit crystals. Because of the lack of a larger array, and thus a less capable turning ability, the ship requires use of wings to turn faster. These wings would protrude symmetrically from the base body and have thrusters located on the tips. The various configurations are shown on the paper.

Anywhere it says "current" on the paper refers to a configuration/type that is drawn in the actual figure on the ship.

I have my own opinion as to what ship type and configurations for it would look coolest, but I'd rather like to hear what other people think.

edit: a couple of other things: the engine on the Jet ship is indented into the back of the array, just like on the scout ship, and the thruster crystal also houses a sensor system to make up for the scanning lost through a smaller array than the Burr ship.
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Re: [[Concept]] Ships for Species: Chato'matou'Gormoshk

#29 Post by utilae »

Comment about the creature image:
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111oneoneoneoneone

That's quite awesome. And matches the description closely.

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Re: [[Concept]] Ships for Species: Chato'matou'Gormoshk

#30 Post by shrinkshooter »

utilae wrote:Comment about the creature image:
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111oneoneoneoneone

That's quite awesome. And matches the description closely.

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......Wow. Perhaps I should draw some of the other races? o_O
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