This is my wedding gift to the Jigalypuffs. It is the new Federation Colonyship II, designation CS-134 JIGALYPUFF

WWooooohhh great really great job Kenneth!!

indeed, she's coming along nicely

Wow Kenneth! You've really excelled yourself with the new colony ship! The ship looks like it is a "real" colony ship - it is more functional than any other Federation ship that i've seen so far; there are pipes and tanks all over it, and it certainly doesn't look like it was built for combat!

The only nitpick I have is the saucer doesn't seem to match it somehow - at least not in the the first picture. The saucer doesn't look like it was designed to be taken apart and made into *whatever* the colony needs, unlike the rest of the ship.

It may simply be the texturing is different (The colouring and panelling is slightly different) or merely the fact that it doesn't have the tanks and pipes that the rest of the ship has.

Alternatively, does it have to have a saucer-shaped...er...saucer? Perhaps it could be made into a pod like on the old Troop Transport? That would be more in keeping with the design of the ship. But then again, saucers are more in keeping with Federation ships in general. Hmm...

Anyways if changing the saucer means ripping the model apart and rebuilding 90% of it, feel free to ignore me. As usual i'm thinking about minute details that like don't matter to most other people.

Don't take my comments other than mere suggestions - you've got a beautiful model that is a vast improvement over what BOTF offered. Be proud of all your hard work, it was most definitely worth it!

Thanks for the feedback. I am getting closer to where I want to be with ships.

That is a good point about the texture. I figured ship design this way. Only the shuttles in the Star Trek universe land on planets. The big ships stay in orbit. So a colony ship would have a lot of parts to be moved from orbit to planet surface. That is why I gave it bulky shuttles and odd parts stacked on. What is left in orbit would become a civil space station for the new world. That is the saucer section for the most part. That is why I used different textures. The parts have different end uses. The saucer is like a federation ship or station and the other stuff will be down on the beach front property with a view of the sun set.

That do you do with the warp pods? I could use them in my barbecue or a turbo on my Subaru? If it seams that far off I can try to redo the texture file before game release.

What do you mean by the "Warp pods"?

If you mean the tanks, then I think they are fine as they are. If you mean the Nacelles, then as you said, they are a part of the ship like the saucer. I imagine the Plasma conduits and whatnot would be used for energy structures and planetary shields and things, but the rest would probably become a sort of autonomic command structure that would guide the creation of the colony.

We could mnake it complex and have it in as another model that is always built when a new colony is formed...

Nah, too complex. The model is fine as it is. If you have any ideas of your own, then go ahead and try them. The model is your beautiful baby and only you can be sure when it is ready.

While the site was down I refined the texture based on your good suggestion. That kind of help makes a big difference as I often get so close to the work over time that big issues like that blow by me.

I do recall that in Enterprise they talked of how the earliest colony ships were striped down to build the colony. In later higher technology there might be parts of the ships that would be sent back to the shipyard like an empty moving van.

Standing back from all that I would say we should make them look cool and not get too mixed up in the explanation. It is a game about a fantasy. Your suggestions have made it look better.

nacelle: (definition from startrek.com)
That part of a star ship's hull that houses the warp drives -- usually an outboard pair of symmetrical cylinders or pods, and in Federation designs running parallel to the ship's line of flight.

I guess I was thinking of the pods as the cylinders that contain nacelles.
(or am I confusing nacelles with subspace field coils - wish some of this was real stuff)

Corvallan Raider texturing needed!

Any volunteers ?

This 3d model is needed for game ship list and for image of Corwallen special structure!

3ds file stored in sharepoint.

That is a very nice design. I like the sleek look. I would texture but I am trying to fill up the Federation ship list at this point to make things like the beta testing possible.

Are some of the connecting roads loose? (slightly out of place)

Put me down for the Federation's Transport I. I am looking for feedback about the design before I go on to the texture. Does anyone know if we still have the Transport II and III? Are these models and the designer long gone so I should also plan to build these ships?

No hurry Kenn,you can texture Corwallen raider when you finish your current tasks.( Yes, there are some loose roads)

Tranporter is nice only tanks at bottom of ship are to big for ship construction.

Regards

I understand that Eon_Janus and the other Transport ships are still around. If he and the others could load their models up to sharepoint along with the 270 x 225 2d images that would be great.

I have been toying with the idea of stretching out the transport to give a forced persecutive impression of greater size. What do you think or does it mater?

As I told Matress, I was indeed working on it for some time but in the last few months I completely stopped modelling for different reasons which are not important. But I'll see if I can get my hands into making that transport, and might also try and texture it (though I don't know if I'll have THAT much spare time). I'll let you know what my limitations are so you can decide what is best. Also, if you wish to have a go at those transports left by all means do so, if my models are not used it won't matter, I do this just to learn and have some fun while doing so.

About the Transport III, I have made the Yorkshire a while ago (and textured it if I remember correctly) and sent it to someone (Jig, Matress, can't really remember that either). But I'll send it to Matress soon anyway. Again if you wish to do it anyway feel free to do so, your work will probably be better than mine

I like more stretched version

the stretched version looks fine. Just bring the saucer a little bit up-front, meaning give it some more height and thickness, then it'll be perfect

As I said in my PM to you just now, Eon, you sent the model to Jig. It's probably been lost in the depths of his computer so send it to me and i'll upload it to Sharepoint for you.

Nice to see you haven't gone missing like so many other people over the last three years though.

...

I prefer the stretched look as well. The "tank" version looked a bit like the Federation Battleship from Starfleet Command, so people might make comments about copyright blah blah blah.

I'll post a screenie for you when I get home, Kenneth. I'm in work right now so A) No game, and B) Work would kill me if I did have it with me.

It will be useful for you ideas-wise, especially when you get to texturing.

Thanks guys for the improvements. I am still not completely happy with it myself and am working it over to get a better look. The image will help.

When done I hope to get a 2D image of it with the arm deployed and construction on an outpost underway. This might be used when a station is ordered up to represent the transformation.

Welcome back Eon. We need all the models uploaded that we can muster. Even an un-textured one might be usable for testing the code.

It's unbelievable! Out of the blue my PC just decided to NOT let me use Photoshop. I was saving the texture for the York from a PSD when suddenly it crashes, and now I can't even reinstall it because it seems to just crash because of the program's very name ¬¬ If anyone has a suggestion, please let me know. (it also affects my Uni projects, so I really need to make it work)

I'll see if I can get it to work today, else I'll upload the model without the texture so you can work with it until I can finally find the problem.
At least I'll spend some time working on the London as well...

(BTW, which was the polys limit we could work with? I keep forgetting that ^^u)

do you have vista?

never heard of such a crash. Maybe using gimp in the meantime?

poly limit is roughly 100k, which means compared to botf (1-2k) rather "unlimited".
but it's best to keep them as low as possible since then even older pc's can still run the game.

Sorry about the problems. It is not a today rush job by any means. There is still a lot of work to do. I do not want to take over your ships unless I have to. I just want to think some day we will have all of them uploaded by someone. Knowing what ships really are done or being worked on means no duplication of effort.

Skeeter was saying keep the polygons under 4,000. Is that about right?

????
I see my current Federation Transport I model already has 3,788 polygons. That turns into a 116 KB file in 3ds format. Some of my earlier models are more than that but under 4,000 polygons. Will this be a problem? Do I need to rebuild the models that are over 100KB in the 3ds file format?

lol no. I meant 100k as in 100.000 no kb

well at least some guy in our german forum meant that state-of-the-art 3D engine could handle such a poly count today though no one might ever reach that or need to reach it

mail sent to Matress with the Yorkshire, hope it is useful. I'll start working on the London this very night, but it might take a while.

So a 4,000 poly should be ok. Does that number include the texture file. That would make the difference.

I'd say don't worry about that. Since all projects will most probably be using a pre-programmed 3d-engine like ogre3d, it'll be of no question, since they can handle that fast enough. If not, then blame me for the need of lowering the poly count of all ships afterwards lol

anyway Eon, could you make a screenshot (200x150) of your transporter the way Kenneth did with his Edwards-Class in the same or similar angle? We'd be glad to use that in our ship pic list. a black background would even be better than white since the transparency algo of gimp leaves some unsmooth edges and black is exactly the color we need!

btw. kenneth your pic already made it in-game (well next release ).

The SharePoint site puts in a white background layer for the thumbnail images on the image library pages . That white background is what you see through the transparent parts of the image I made. The files I load up there in .png file type have just the ship on a blank, transparent, surround. Are you not getting a transparent background when you download the images from SharePoint? Is there a white background layer you could take out or replace?

We are using 270 x 225 .png in the image library.

Ok, sorry for my tardiness but I wasn't online last night due to a rather annoying sister.

Anyways, to my knowledge, the polygon limit is 4000 - you can go up to about 6500 for Bases and other stationary structures because they are larger and will be less common than the ships themselves.

Orbital batteries have always been planned to be in, so yes, we need models.

We don't necessarily need an orbital battery model per Empire, they could all be generic for the time being, but if people want to make more...no complaints.

Here's the ship pics, Kenneth:

Beauty Shot


Front


Side


Below


Light Damage


Medium Damage


Hull Breach!


I noticed that you aren't going with the "tanks" anymore which is a shame...but I still prefer the newer tankless version.

You could always try making them part of the ship, like the twin-primary hull of this Battleship.

Anyways, the textures might be useful.

That is very helpful. I will keep the dual tanks. I wish we could get the builder of that ship to work on our ship list.

Also remember what the Ferengi would say about your sister. Never put family before business.

I had some kind of "divine revelation" or something today. By looking at Kenneth's work with his transport and taking into account the Yorkshire, I thought it would be cool to use the London to show some kind of "link" or relation between the other two. What I mean is that, since I never really liked the shape or design of the London Troop Transport, I would like to re-design it (that is, make it quite different from what it was in BOTF, yet maintaining the class name and some minor similarities to it) so that it shows some traits and shapes similar to those of the Transport I and others which could be an early version of what is to come with the Yorkshire. In simpler words, I just want to make the London as somewhat of a hybrid between the ¿Phobos? and the Yorkshire, representing the evolution of the first one and the ancestor of the latter.

What do you guys think?