my newest fighter

@Edladner

Love the fighter, it goes well with your other ships, feels very WW2 to me, especially that fighter which gives off the 60s transitional vibe. It also looks very functional for all environs.

@Turkwise

Good points about the videos, I was also trying to keep them short. I'll eventually be filling out the rosters of ships with more variants, so eventually I'll take a new video.

My newest creation, a heavy patrol ship

Quoting erischild,

reply 831

 

Some people seem to think they can't design ships.  The wonderful examples here seem to scare them off.  This is hopefully a reminder that simple can be epic.

The ship has 6 identical parts and no animation tricks.  All the weapons are shrunk and hidden in the rings.  Laser beams originate mysteriously from secret places.  It looks like silent menace when gliding across the map.  (to me, anyway)  I wish I could hide the cube starter in the center, but it actually looks okay as is.

I encourage people to throw something together and see what happens.  Remember that aliens don't have to design anything like humans do.  It doesn't have to make sense to anyone else.  It makes an interesting level of ownership and immersion.

 

This reminds me of the machine with the rotating rings from Contact. I'll definitely do a ship based on that.

That's one of my favorite tricks with the new ship designer.  I have posted about it on the forums.  I did one based on Altarian parts called "Orbiter" in the first beta with shipyard and I had Contact in mind.  So, I enjoyed your reference.

And then I couldn't resist playing with the concept again and then one of the family sat down with me and then worked with me for a couple hours and then this is what happened.  It's callled "Spinner".  It has no weapons; it is strictly for fun and decoration.  I have no intention of hurting my poor little system with a massive fleet of fully animated ships until the devs have announced a couple of optimization passes.  But one or two can't hurt, I guess.

The matched rotating pairs is an exercise in reflections and rotations across the X, Y. and Z axes.  Then, six prime numbers were used to create the pseudo-random tumble.  It looks like a never ending sequence, but it is actually a three minute loop.  During that loop it does not seem to repeat configurations and does the original three perpendicular pair arrangement just once in the loop.  It also has a stage where all six rings are horizontal.  Note the two synchronized ships in the fleet and the one rotating inside the shipyard.

I usually fuss with making sure that surface textures don't move past one another on animated parts, or that parts don't physically go through each other.  It stretches the suspension of disbelief to come up with "how does that work, really?" for some of the visuals.  I abandoned all that in this project.  The three-axis nature of things was not going to cooperate.  It impresses me that the artwork and graphics programming does so well with these deliberate physics/graphics artifact.  At any given moment, if you take a screenshot, the textures look like that;s how they made the ship out the factory.  It looks planned and deliberate, if maybe by different planners. 

If seeing graphical glitches in 3D models bothers you, as it often does me, don't look too closely!

Sorry for dominating the thread.  I'm going back to pushing constructors around....

Link to video here

Quoting GiggleFish,

reply 835

 

I wanted to experiment with designs that weren't the usual linear design and came up with this:

Reduced 57%

Original 985 x 608

Reduced 69%

Original 826 x 564

Reduced 49%

Original 1074 x 885

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, I'll have to get to grips with the animations at some point too.

That would be one hell of a starbase.

garyc_sr This designer is many times better than one in GC2 and they say it will get even more dev time before release.  Here's my latest.

All right, I decided to create my first starships! They aren't very functional yet, as I built them solely for the aesthetics.

Here's the Lil' Fighter. It is basically my own version of the already in-game fighters made by Stardock:

Here's the Larissa Class, my Millennium Falcon:

And here's the Jupiter class - on the image, you see "Bismarck Class", but I decided to change the name as Jupiter feels more appropriate. Bismarck would be the name of an individual ship, not of the entire class. As the ship designer isn't available in the menu yet, I had to made it in the campaign's shipyard, and because I didn't have advanced ship building technologies, I had to use the "Small starter" cube, so technically this isn't a huge ship like I want it to be.

Seen from other angles:

At first, I had no idea of how I could make a long ship look decent. I didn't know which parts to use, or where to put them. So I just started throwing in several parts, adjusting their location and size, and there you have it.

Starus if you are editing your ships during a game, you must match all the techs you used to make the ship before it shows up.

Thats not the problem.

Well, unfortunately, it appears that this was the case.

But I ain't really pissed off, as I can remake that ship rather easily - well, I still remember which parts I used, and I have images of it. But before I make it again, I will wait for the Designer to be available on the menu. That way (I hope) I will have all things unlocked and thus be able to create a true dreadnought, to be used later in my games.

Were your ships armed with weapons. defense and armor modules? Did you build any of the Hyperion improvements on any planets?

There is indeed a bug that prevents ships from show up in designer and shipyards until Hyperion Shrinker , Logistics and Supply buildings are built.

Bug is that even Armed or equipped ships should show up as grayed out and unavailable for building even without building any Hyperion improvement  but do not show up at all not even as grayed out in ship designer and shipyards menu's until after all three buildings are built.

This bug has been reported and should be fixed in beta 5.

Starus the issue must be with some tech used on the bismark kept it from showing.  The only ships that grey out are ones you have met the tech requirements but not the resource requirement.

NEVER design a ship when you have the hyperion project built.  You have all kinds of fun ever seeing them again because of bonus system.  That could explain a ship with only missles and an ion drive.  The numbers can vary so wildly.  I lost 17 ships designing them in game.  I only got them back when a planet had a huge military bonus, I puyt the acadmy on it, the hyperions next to it and was able to see my ships again.  I promptly deleted the equipment and saved them.  Now I never design once I start playing.

The unlock code is all you need.  Study the game eras and you can see what is available at certain stages the way you play and equip them so.  Shrinking has a big effect on the availability of a ship.

If you want contact me at edladner on steam and I'll add you as a friend and to the ship builders group (we have 14 of the best builders there).

Nice design and creativity ... the non-linear approach introduces styles beyond the WWII motifs.  

The 3-armed stylings is perhaps a homage to Erik Bethke's Taldren (Starfleet Command's Orion Pirates--may it RIP)!?