So, the Pariah are like Marauders from EVN, except they don't fly around in pimped out Terrapins, used Vipers and jury-rigged Pegasi? Yikes. Better hope you get help from everybody when confronting them, though it sounds like they're universally hated.
This post has been edited by JacaByte : 06 July 2010 - 09:31 AM
When you complete your TC, Delph, will you make all your SketchUp components available for download? Going on that tangent, will you also upload the files for all the ships you've built?
Not many TC developers have been this open with the community (not that I know of), let alone actually willing to hand out most of the components they use to build their ships and stations, so I was wondering if you were planning on doing that as well.
QUOTE (JacaByte @ Jul 6 2010, 08:30 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
So, the Pariah are like Marauders from EVN, except they don't fly around in pimped out Terrapins, used Vipers and jury-rigged Pegasi? Yikes. Better hope you get help from everybody when confronting them, though it sounds like they're universally hated.
They're certainly no favorite of the people, that's for sure. The Pariah Combine are closely related to the Enclave Colonies in that they were both formed by the same cause: massive resource scarcity among the outer colonies immediately following the Orion War. Where the Enclave formed in the hopes of rebuilding and establishing a sovereign outer-territories nation of systems, the populace that would eventually become the Pariah Combine fell back to near-Neolithic practices of idol worship and human sacrifice. Under duress of massive starvation and rampaging disease, many were quick to accept any hope of salvation, if even through barbaric religious rituals. When the Enclave finally stumbled across the cult, it's followers were subsequently uprooted and banished from civilized space. The exiles from several different worlds following different versions of almost the same doctrine incorporated their beliefs and re-titled themselves the Pariah Combine.
As it stands, they are too great in number to engage in a full-on war, and to little is known about their secret facilities to orchestrate any kind of proper offensive. Though the Enclave will shoot any Pariah ships on sight, the NDC are fairly content to leave them be, so long as they never directly assault a Coalition world. Even still though, there is no penalty if an NDC warship is "forced" to defend itself from a possible preemptive strike. After all, that scoutship may have posed a risk to the fleet some day.
QUOTE (king_of_manticores @ Jul 6 2010, 11:14 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
When you complete your TC, Delph, will you make all your SketchUp components available for download? Going on that tangent, will you also upload the files for all the ships you've built?
Not many TC developers have been this open with the community (not that I know of), let alone actually willing to hand out most of the components they use to build their ships and stations, so I was wondering if you were planning on doing that as well.
Every single piece I've used in these later models is in that bundle. I mean it; there's not a single component left out. I actually use the identical library folder that I distributed in order to make every ship you see on the last few pages and beyond.
It's all there, ready to use! It's just a matter of figuring out how to go really crazy with it. 
Delphi; I've got to hand it to you, this whole process is quite admirable. I'm really excited to see someone using Sketchup to do modeling and handing out components to make the ships with. I've just finished glossing through this whole board, and I think it's amazing and I hope you get it finished.
Now, as a suggestion I'd recommend uploading your components to the Sketchup warehouse, so they're easier to access.
I also like that you've got an interesting idea for how to deal with shields, armor, and energy; having the weapons limited by energy is brilliant and having shields recharge quickly without much total capacity makes for an interesting combat concept. I don't know if you've mentioned testing it though, and that would be a really good thing to do before going too far down that road - you'll need extensive balancing and combat will be 100% different from anything EV/O/N has seen.
I saw a few pages ago that someone linked to The Atomic Rocket page, which is an amazing page for real-life technical details and information on space travel and "hard" sci-fi. I recommend you gloss through it. Your concept for how the ships use energy already fits some of the real-life implications of using high-energy weapons- you run out of energy and must recharge before firing again. I also like the discussions on fighters I've seen throughout this entry and your final decision; I've been feeling that in the EV universe, ships have degraded into massive carrier-classes and loosing the real combat advantage of having a huge battle-ship over a ship with 20 fighters. Personally, I'd limit fighter-capacity to 6 or so, as in EVC (Cruiser-class with hawk outfit; in the NOVA engine it's probably possible to limit fighter capacity by using bits to prevent you buying more than 6 or so fighters worth of fighter bay).
Now, if you (or anyone else really) needs help with sketchup/blender/maya/rhino/whatever, I might be able to help. I'm a sketchup expert, and I have used many other programs with varying degrees of success. Sketchucation is an excellent resource for learning more about the program and how it's used.
Edit: Here's a freighter I made using your excellent provided parts combined with a few of my own:
This post has been edited by Meaker VI : 08 July 2010 - 03:51 PM
I'm glad you like my decision on the fighters. I want them to seem like more of a support element than a primary weapon, so that players aren't always just holding back from the battle and watching their target window until the fighters make it go black. Anybody can tell other ships to do their bidding. What takes real starship skill is doing the job yourself, especially when other captains would otherwise fail. Where someone else may pound mercilessly away at their adversary just to have his shields absorb the full brunt of the attack, a clever captain may hit his target with a fighter pair carrying shield-piercing torpedos, before using his high-energy cannons to finish the job.
The idea behind the energy-draining guns is based primarily just around the idea of human greed on the field of combat. There has never really been such a thing as a conservative war, in which each side tries to make do with the firepower afforded them. They'll drain national coffers, test dangerous prototype weapons, and sell all their contracts to the lowest bidder at the drop of a hat. The NDC could technically design ships that carry weapons suitable to their reactor size, but their rationale argues that a ship can deal with a temporary loss of main power if it results in a deadlier assault. In the game's history, several NDC crews have suffered casualties during combat despite never taking a single direct hit, but rather because life support was lost in areas of the ship after the energy was redirected to the weapons.
That's a nice ship you made there, by the way. It reminds me a bit of a fly, probably on account of the forward 'wings'.
QUOTE (Meaker VI @ Jul 8 2010, 11:15 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
I saw a few pages ago that someone linked to The Atomic Rocket page, which is an amazing page for real-life technical details and information on space travel and "hard" sci-fi.
I do believe it was I...
QUOTE (JacaByte @ Mar 16 2010, 07:31 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Hmm... http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3l1.html
So in reality Delphi should hold me responsible for his sleepless night. 
QUOTE (Delphi @ Jul 9 2010, 10:13 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
I'm glad you like my decision on the fighters. I want them to seem like more of a support element than a primary weapon, so that players aren't always just holding back from the battle and watching their target window until the fighters make it go black.
Which is exactly what I didn't like about NOVA; you can fit a ship with 10 or 20 fighters BEFORE sliding the bits around, and 30 or more without changing any limits on number of bays but with other edits. I liked it much better in EVC, where I always used fighters on capital ships to soften up an enemy cruiser. They were too expensive and hard to replace to just throw around, but they had missiles which were great. Once they'd spent them, I'd recall them and relaunch.
QUOTE (Delphi @ Jul 9 2010, 10:13 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
The idea behind the energy-draining guns is based primarily just around the idea of human greed on the field of combat...
And that's a great reason to do it that way. But it also fits tremendously well with the realities you've now read about in using inter-stellar combat: I'm going to fire at you from thousands of kilometers away with a laser, which, on contact, needs to deliver enough heat to melt or blast away your 6" titanium armor and whiffle-shield, with a melting point of 8000 degrees F. That's going to take a ton of energy, and isn't something we have the capacity to do right now because we can't figure out a way to carry enough fuel to move such a system around.
QUOTE (Delphi @ Jul 9 2010, 02:45 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Meaker, I'm personally holding you responsible for the fact that I stayed up for the entire bloody night reading that Atomic Rocket site. Good read; thanks for the post.
That has got to be one of the most well researched sci-fi sites out there, which is why I'm letting JacaByte take responsibility for you not sleeping 
If it's any consolation, it was like 90 degrees here last night, and I live in a place where air-conditioning isn't normally installed so I didn't sleep either.
QUOTE (Delphi @ Jul 9 2010, 02:45 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
That's a nice ship you made there, by the way. It reminds me a bit of a fly, probably on account of the forward 'wings'.
QUOTE (Sp3cies @ Jul 9 2010, 03:26 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Those canister thingies underneath look tight dude.
Thank you both; I've been working with Sketchup for about the last 6 years for many creative projects, and was actually recently considering and working on making my own component set for building ships with. But, being OCD, went about it completely differently. Rather than making somewhat random, non-specific parts, I made very specific parts that each had a use (such as the canisters and arms holding them). I've also got rectangular containers, with several variants on both the cylindrical canisters and rectangular one (fighter bay, military-space, turret mount, cargo space, skeletal frame), some basic structural truss pieces, some basic engines, and various weapon systems. This random all-purpose piece system works much better than mine did by itself.
If I could recommend something that might speed up anyone's modeling (I made that ship in something less than an hour), it would be to make components out of similar parts of your ship. For example, I made the center of the ship, and then anything that was mirrored around that center I made as a component that I copied and flipped. I saw that in one of the example fighters used groups to do the same thing, but using components instead makes it so that any changes that happen to one component happen to the other.
QUOTE (Sp3cies @ Jul 9 2010, 07:53 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
I actually did exactly what you did what with being quite OCD myself. I have now found though that those specified pieces give a finishing touch to the things I create with Delphi's pieces.
Funny thing... I was doing that:
What I liked about using specific pieces is that they can be used to give the ship character. Instead of an ambiguously large long ship with a large front-end, it's now an IDA Frigate remastered (I love IDA frigates), albeit possibly larger. Similarly, the other ship I've made could be a fighter, it could be a cruiser, but with those canisters it's definitely a freighter, and a reasonably sized one at that (Large-Courier/smuggler, maybe?).
The other ship is there for my opinion of approximate scale. Those round canisters are about the same size as the rectangular ones, so the smaller ship is probably the same mass and rough dimensions as a 3x3 block of the rectangular containers on the larger ship. Without the containers, my first ship could be much smaller (though I illustrated it as the same size).
QUOTE (DarthKev @ Jul 9 2010, 10:30 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Both of those are incredible, Meaker. Careful, Delphi, looks like you have competition!
Pfftt... That's false. I have neither the time to make a ton of ships nor a machine running NOVA currently plugged into anything (Sadly, very sadly), and thus can't compete with Delphi's dogged endurance. I wish I could do this all the time, but I'm getting paid to do other things and I'm happy to be being paid. Fortunately, I do get paid to keep most of my skills up, so I won't be going dull any time soon.
I do wish I could figure out a good, standard way to render my ships so they're the same quality and direction as stock NOVA stuff though, I've never quite been able to figure out how to get that set up. I think I could do it with Sketchup, mine version's got a rendering engine and I can set the camera and sun angles using section planes and the sun times/dates, but I'm still not positive I'd get it right. And I'm not sure whether they're supposed to be orthographic or in perspective; orthographic would be way easier.
I'm pretty sure Delphi exports into Bryce for rendering. There's a free, legal older version of Bryce hanging around somewhere, and I'm sure Delphi will explain how he renders.
QUOTE (Meaker VI @ Jul 9 2010, 04:38 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Pfftt... That's false. I have neither the time to make a ton of ships nor a machine running NOVA currently plugged into anything (Sadly, very sadly), and thus can't compete with Delphi's dogged endurance. I wish I could do this all the time, but I'm getting paid to do other things and I'm happy to be being paid. Fortunately, I do get paid to keep most of my skills up, so I won't be going dull any time soon.
I do wish I could figure out a good, standard way to render my ships so they're the same quality and direction as stock NOVA stuff though, I've never quite been able to figure out how to get that set up. I think I could do it with Sketchup, mine version's got a rendering engine and I can set the camera and sun angles using section planes and the sun times/dates, but I'm still not positive I'd get it right. And I'm not sure whether they're supposed to be orthographic or in perspective; orthographic would be way easier.
Nova handles its graphics in perspective. You can see this from the foreshortening visible on the Federation Carrier when it turns away from the camera. Also, perspective can be simple as well, if you're using SketchUp's animation functionality. Simply make the ship rotate through a full 360 degrees of motion, usually at increments of 5° or 10° per frame. That's the method I use in Bryce, and it works fairly well. Of course, you could always do ships in orthographic projection, but it makes some longer/larger ships appear weird, when their distant edge looks just as big as the nearer one.
In a completely unrelated direction: what's everyone's opinions on the Apollo 11 - 17 moon landings? I for one started as a skeptic, but through analysis of the available evidence and the science that backs it up, as well as independently verifiable research by third parties, I'm thoroughly convinced it occurred.
Also, Meaker VI, I just realized what your avatar picture is. Marathon was an amazing series. Kudos to you.
QUOTE (Delphi @ Jul 9 2010, 07:58 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
In a completely unrelated direction: what's everyone's opinions on the Apollo 11 - 17 moon landings? I for one started as a skeptic, but through analysis of the available evidence and the science that backs it up, as well as independently verifiable research by third parties, I'm thoroughly convinced it occurred.
Are you kidding? I'd have thought you'd never have doubted the missions, just watch Mythbusters. Given the fact that we had to do something convincingly enough that the Russians would believe it, and silence several thousand workers and sailors who built rockets, launched rockets and picked up astronauts after re-entry, I'd say there is American trash on the moon with the brain power of modern washing machines. Hear that? There are American washing machines on the moon!
I was going to go into a long speech about how we undoubtably went to the moon, but then I read Jaca's post. He pretty much summed it up, not to mention the fact we didn't have the capability back then to build a vacuum chamber big enough to fake the hammer/feather test while still making it appear to be on the moon.
The Pariah are kinda like the reavers from firefly, or to me they sound similar. Also, I'd been away for a few weeks and there was lots to catch up on, amazing ships delphi! Beautiful! Although, can I make a request for the enclave ships that you put an arrow as to which way they go, they look like they could go forward or backward.....
Lots of interesting developments, tons of cool ships, I think I'm going to have to create a ship, I really will. This will be tough!
Dang, Jaca stole my thunder on the Mythbusters stuff. Basically, it would cost more money to fake going into space than it would to actually go there. The final nail in the coffin is the prismatic reflectors. If you took a high powered laser and a CCD detector, you could find the landing site and confirm it for yourself.
