LEGION: Microspace

QUOTE (of doom @ Apr 13 2009, 03:54 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

sorry i have to say no. the amount of detail i have seen from you so far i could assemble with spare parts from my lego box.

Oh well, it was worth a shot.

Other people might be interested. would you mind telling me how you do your models?

This TC in general really interests me. If I were to do a lego TC, I know that all my ships would be overly complicated, trying to look like normal spaceships while being made out of lego. Yours are very minimalist. Good stuff. As for your story and the whole AC thing, I can see where you are coming from.

QUOTE (of doom @ Apr 13 2009, 04:16 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Other people might be interested. would you mind telling me how you do your models?

It's fairly simple, really.

1. Dowload LEGO Digital Desginer from LEGO Factory.
2. Make awesome ships with pieces that are available for purchase.
3. Upload to LEGO Gallery.
4. ???? (probably buy)
5. Profit! (not really, but it's nice to know people like your models)

Do you accept submissions for LEGO models?

And another I made by grabbing random pieces and goofing off.

This post has been edited by Geek : 13 April 2009 - 11:17 PM

Maybe. I might make a "true-scale" graphics plug, turning these abstract little fighters into something a little more detailed. That said, I've got most of the ships worked out, though if you could come up with anything in Microspace scale it would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: And now for the nightly Shipyard Update: we look at the lighter strike craft of the Core Worlds Confederation!

Confed Interceptor
With its strong shields and powerful engines, the Interceptor is perfect for chewing on heavy strike craft with few anti-fighter weapons.
(Yes yes, I know you've seen this one already. I'm just trying to keep them together.)

Confed Heavy Fighter
Plenty of guns to threaten corvettes, and enough space left for a ship-busting torpedo.

Confed Gunship
The boundaries of the word "fighter" are stretched by the size of this strike craft, which carries enough torpedoes to fell a cruiser.

Confed Patrol Ship
This medium ship bristles with enough light turrets to dissuade all but the most hardcore of pirates.

Tomorrow: the Confederation's mighty captial ships!

This post has been edited by Ianator : 14 April 2009 - 12:52 AM

More ships for you!

Confederation Destroyer
The backbone of any Confed battle group, it's practically built around its mass driver.

Confederation Cruiser
If the two mass drivers don't make you think twice about attacking it, the Ion Blast Cannon between them will.

Confederation Battlecruiser
This chunky ship carries several wings of strike craft in addition to a pair of mass drivers.

Confederation Dreadnought
Did somebody say Battlestar? Includes massive strike craft capacity, four mass drivers and the ability to carry four massive Plasma Cannons.

_ MORE AT ELEVEN_

@Ianator, I like the general models, but in my personal opinion, they would look better if they were bigger, meaning in this case made out of more Lego blocks. Even the Dreadnought looks like it's only a dozen or so bricks; I think it would look cooler if the fighters were maybe a couple larger (instead of just single oddly-shaped blocks) and the capitals were large enough to require several rows of bricks. Of course that's a very petty nit to pick (is that even a phrase?); overall it looks pretty good!

@kreugeruwsp, totally agree on all counts, but you may want to put spoiler blocks on for the two people that play EVN that have never seen Serenity. Entirely true about the second guy who dies though; I watched Serenity before Firefly and when he died I just thought "OK, didn't really care about that guy anyways."

Good call. I hadn't really thought about that. I was pretty disheartened when I watched Serenity after being a huge fan of the series, because I felt like it just had so little resolution to it, except for the character of River, and maybe Mal and Inara. I do feel like Book totally got shafted, like he was never a figure in the series at all. Listening to the commentary tracks for the movie, however, I guess Joss was pretty pained about how much he had to leave out.

@ Ianator: I'm in agreement with Archon. The low-brick count does make the ships look like the fighter is only a few bricks smaller than the battlesta... dreadnaught. I'm just thinking that if a ship is supposed to have carried fighters, it should look like, at least brick-wise, that it has the capacity.

The smaller ships I can understand - I do have a particularly active imagination, but I can see how they look a little messy to those that haven't been exposed to the style for a long time. I might redo all the designs for the Truescale Graphics Plug later.

I kinda like the simple practicality of it all, and I've received a compliment or two on the Destroyer's "clean lines", but it might just be laziness. What I wish I could do is this.

do you have a way to render your ships into RLEDs?

rleD... that's just the ship, right?

Open model -> isolate ship -> zoom out to desired size -> take screenshots at 15- to 22.5-degree intervals - import screenshots into GIMP and splice into animation grid

That's pretty much how I made the above Shipyard picts.

That'll work, but it'll be lots of effort on your end. Does the program you're using have a way of animating models and rendering movies? If so, you can render it into movie form, and then use m2s (movies to sprites) to make the sprite, which then you'll need another program (MC for Macs, not sure for PCs) to make the sprite into an rlëD. Doing it still-frame-by-still-frame will take you ages.

Anyways, I'll be in my bunk.

The cool people will know what I'm talking about.

(edit)Just finished watching the first 5 episodes of Babylon 5 (yeah, I had nothing important to do today), and all I can say is that whoever wrote the script for Mind Wars has good taste in graphic novels.

This post has been edited by Archon : 14 April 2009 - 10:14 PM

You might just want to use a program like SpinApp to spin the sprite for you, instead of trying to splice it together in GIMP.

After some careful thought on the matter, I have come to the conclusion that maybe you guys are right about how little detail my ships have. I have therefore decided that an overhaul is in order. At this preliminary design stage, I believe it will have much less impact on the development time than if I had simply gone forward with what I already had, and is a step towards getting over my "good enough" attitude.

This decision came to me after a search on Flickr for "microspace," as well as some encouragement from the ever-awesome Soren (who loves the heck out of Override and still tools around in Nova in his NC1170 Frigate every now and then).

Basically, I'm turning this

into this.

This post has been edited by Ianator : 15 April 2009 - 11:08 PM

Sweet! Want me to start making models?

If you can get them into the above scale?

Go for it. I'll put up the Rim ships tomorrow.

This post has been edited by Ianator : 16 April 2009 - 12:05 AM

QUOTE (Ianator @ Apr 15 2009, 06:26 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I like this very very much as a small ship. I agree, though, that the bigger ships should be made of more "parts." This is probably really hard in just a 3D editor, though. If you have some legos, consider making models from them and then copying them. Or maybe look at Hudson's stuff, with his permission of course.

The question of who 'owns' plot elements and ideas is always an interesting one: I remember being told once that my outline for an EV Override plug-in was 'obviously' ripped off from Babylon 5 , which I thought odd given that my knowledge of that series began and ended with the title. Nevertheless, it's easiest if we keep some semblance of on-topicness in the Developer's Corner, so I've hidden those posts with no direct bearing on the subject of the thread. You are, of course, quite welcome to continue the discussion in one of the non-EV-themed boards.

Sorry they're a bit late, but here are the ships of the Outer Rim Alliance, take 1.

Alliance Raider

Alliance Striker

Alliance Gunboat

Alliance Corvette

Alliance Destroyer

Alliance Frigate

Alliance Cruiser

Alliance Battleship

Alliance Juggernaut

One of the interesting things I did with the Outer Rim Alliance was make almost all the ships different from each other, as opposed to the relative uniformity of the Confederation Navy. I'll probably develop some of them into their own ships - no idea if I'll make Core versions or not.

This post has been edited by Ianator : 17 April 2009 - 07:39 PM