Armada II - Dawn of War

[Fireball_VI]

Yard is a bit changed and ingame now, just kinda found out I over-wrote my photos of it. Regardless all I did was change the red lighting, felt there was too much so I put more space between all those red lights, I also made the lights a lot brighter looking.

Now i'm working on a T-8 Frontier Ship. This thing...it's role is yet unkown to me (undecided.).
Fasa has it as an assault ship, that carries thousands of troops with a transporter that can transport I think 50 troops at a time?
So my first thought is this can serve as a Colony ship (Colonists instead of troops). It also has 2 large shuttle bays so it can also serve as a vessel that can invade other starships by launching small shuttlecraft that attatch to the hull (already a Klingon special weapon).
Then it can also serve as an assault ship to swoop in and beam people onboard to other ships and take them over that way.

Now it is possible to have all of this in one ship, but then theres no way that this ship could possibly be made to be cheap because you're getting too much for too little.

But there in lies another problem balance wise, if your spending an arm and a leg for a colony ship that will only vanish once you colonize a planet?
It looks like i've got some thinking to do lol.

[starfox1701]

Use the same hull for different missions, ie same model for colony ship and assult ship or have the the ship lunch an expendable colony shuttle sans fleet ops patch.

[Fireball_VI]

Good idea, I dont like doing that sometimes because it makes me feel cheap
but the only 2 options I see are design another colony ship (doesnt seem necesarry here, this ship seems to fit the early tos era perfectly)
or use the ship with 2 different missions.
If I go with the "everything in one" ship I believe it would be a mistake balance wise. The "assault ship" would require a rather large crew investment because of it's nature. On the other side of that the Federation can have themselves a colony ship with little expense and I can't reason as to why I should over-charge the Federation.

In my mod planets will soley be used for crew and some of them for my third resource
In refrence to the fleet ops patch, that was my initial idea, but i'm still worried about the price.
Perhaps I can go with 2 missions, while only being able to construct one? The species 8472 ships have the ability to upgrade (thats how you make a ship/station etc in the first place for them).
Perhaps I can have it built as a colony ship, and then allow someone to upgrade to the assault ship, but on another side that seems like more trouble for a player than it's worth.

Gotta get to texturing this thing soon.
Oh and btw the model stands at 879 polygons, one of the things I love about the "slab sided" TOS klingon ships, they can be had with low poly counts because of thier shape.

[Fireball_VI]

Sorry for the double post, here's an interesting little tidbit (while i'm working on unwrapping the model) to show what I do to texture my ships.
I unwrap everything, take a screen cap of that, put it in a texture, wrap those textures around the ship and thats my starting point.
It is easy for me to keep the scale reletively simular by looking at the size of the squares on the model.

[starfox1701]

Also you will be stuck with the 8472 cacoon

[Fireball_VI]

Originally Posted by starfox1701

Also you will be stuck with the 8472 cacoon

Is that hard coded? I have not really looked into the specifics of that, just always figured it would be possible.

[Jetfreak]

Lovin the updates, you really produce some high quality stuff.

[starfox1701]

The proccess works like this I think. When you start to evolve something the SOD aperars and starts growing. Once it covers the original ship that vessal dissapears. When the evolution time is up the SOD explodes and the "evoled" ship apears. I think you can change the SOD but the effect is a hardcoded script so even a yard SOD would look funny when used for an evolution. But the evolution would work perfectly for refiting. It may well be worth the minor pain of the Cacoon to get the ability.

[Fireball_VI]

Thanks for the info Starfox, interesting, if that effect wasnt hard coded it would open up a completely new regiment of possibilities in modding. Upgrading and refitting ships.

Anywho the Assault ship is done, here are some renders.

For a colony ship version, while i'm not a fan of kitbashes, I could kitbash this one by removing the shuttle bays, the top nacelle and instead sticking a nacelle each where the shuttle bays used to be.
I'll try it soon and see if it comes out okay, with a name like Frontier transport I just cant help but want this to be a colony ship aswell, in the meantime enjoy this. Sorry for the lighting rig, couldnt be bothered to set up fancy, figures that this is the best way to convey the most details anyway.

edit - also need an opinion, I was considering putting "forcefields" in place of the shuttle bays (with an interior visible obviously.) I think it would distrupt the look of the ship, but at the same time is it good to have assault shuttles fly out of a closed shuttle bay? What are everyones thoughts?

[Fireball_VI]

Well I woke up a couple of hours ago and started playing around with different configurations and came up with this for the colony ship variant.

Reasons for changes? Vessel is not as heavily armed, doesnt need to be, it's a colony ship. No more shuttle bays because the ship doesnt need them, it will use it's mass transporters to beam down to a planet, have not figured out how to make this show ingame yet though.
Why 2 nacelles versus 1? This ship is often sent out independantly and without escort, it needs the extra speed.

Anywho here they are together, next is damage model/textures.