EVN - Delphi

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Merry Christmas to you too and everyone else here on the forums and have a wonderful new year.

I know it's two days late, but I got you guys a present.

I finally have some work done on the pinnacle of NDC engineering: the NCV Chrenari. 72 km long, and built with almost the sole purpose of destroying entire worlds. Its weapons array outmatches almost one quarter of the firepower of the NDC fleet, and it is the only ship in existence capable of carrying a continuous-fire Nichron cannon, designed carefully and purposefully to generate enough energy that the ship is literally capable of melting the surface of a planet singlehandedly.

However, the ship's absolutely behemoth stature prevents even the most necessary of sudden course-corrections, and as a result, the craft's travel must be meticulously planned and rehearsed before execution of a campaign. It sports an impeller with so much graviton-displacing power that the ship must be moved completely by itself with at least a 100,000 km safe distance limit for any nearby vessels. Though mobile in most regards, the ship serves best as a near-stationary command center for fleet operations, unless it is being called upon to make use of its primary weapon. In such a given situation, the ship's massive capabilities require the departure of all support vessels. The Chrenari's forward radiation deflectors are powerful enough to shield the bow of the vessel from most of the fallout from its weapon during firing, but any nearby craft are susceptible to lethal doses of gamma rays, passing through even the strongest of refractor shields.

Now, about the question I'm sure you're going to ask. NO, you cannot fly this ship in-game. Its stellar sprite alone is going to be absolutely massive, and if I were to make a ship of it, Nova would crash, HARD. This ship is more of a plot-device than anything, but I can promise it'll be a fun one just to be around. I'm considering some different options for even a few scenarios in which you see it fighting. If I give it just one heading on a ship sprite table and set its turning, acceleration, and top speed to zero, I could theoretically have it appear in at least one fleet battle complete with huge numbers of turreted weapons firing from its surface. At the conclusion of this said battle, the ship would then be programmed to disappear and then show up as a fixed stellar in the system, as though it parked itself for fleet use. During extended military campaigns, you can expect to also see some Atlas Transports and Alexander Dominants exhibiting similar behavior (acting like a real ship and on a future visit becoming a stellar object the player can dock with). It makes sense, really; in modern war you'd drive your convoy to the battlefield, dismantle it, and set up camp from the equipment you brought. This is the same thing, just bigger.

I don't know what to say except THIS THING IS JUST SO AWESOME!!

:blink:

/swoon

HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLY SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII-

drools

Man, that's impressive.

I'm not thrilled with the prongs on the front end. I'd really prefer to make it a little more like the Monolith, with a wide-set, squared front end. After all, then it can fit more guns. I'll perform revisions some time this week.

Delphi, normally I'd enter a rant where I mention the countless times I must visit a surgeon to get my brain surgically rebuilt because you blew it up.

Well, let me tell you that there's nothing left of it.

That's a compliment, by the way.

!@#$ that is cool. The prongs on the side made me think it was Pariah Design all day cause I didn't read the blurb when I skimmed this page due to lack of time. That is just my opinion though. Not a bad thing, just an observation by the way.

Also may we please see some of the revisions/variants you design along the way even though you will only end up with one?

I want one!
Very nice work, it's extremely impressive. You know how to make visible turrets on a ship, right? The Chrenari is what it needs to be used on. Yes, needs.

-K

This post has been edited by Kasofa1 : 28 December 2010 - 10:44 PM

The current version looks a little too flat, so I've got an idea. Following in the style of the Centaur from a page or two ago, I'm thinking of trimming the prongs on the front end, and then taking the entire forward half of the fuselage and dropping it a significant amount. There's a nice little angle being formed by the struts on the sides of the engineering hull, and I'd like to accentuate those and bring them out a little more. I'll post again once I've got an image update.

Ha. Worked in elements from the existing "prongs" and the chunkier design I had in mind. Now it looks more like the futuristic NDC models - with the illusion of a few curves - while still looking absolutely brutal.

Also, here's a little schematic with elements on the outer hull labelled for convenience.

Primary Artillery - A massive continuous-fire Nichron cannon, unlike anything ever mounted on an existing starship. Devastating to ships, stations, and planets alike.

Forward Thermal Sinks - These giant radiators bleed heat away from the artillery during firing. However, after prolonged use their reactive filament cores begin to burn out and must be replaced.

Ventral Gantry - The causeway running along the underside of the Chrenari serves two important purposes. Power conduits and ducts running away from the artillery weapons channel excess energy and plasma away from the guns and back to the engineering section, but during the possibility of an emergency evacuation of the Chrenari, the majority of the ship's escape craft are attached to the gantry and the underside of the vessel.

Dorsal Weapons Platform - Several unusually large turrets are employed along the spine of the ship, similar to those placed on some cruisers to fend off fighters and corvettes. However, the batteries built onto the Chrenari are capable of firing battleship-crippling artillery rounds. The ship's primary launch bays are housed here as well, a stark difference to conventional NDC carriers which store their bays along the underside of the craft.

Sensor Array - The Chrenari's navigation systems are some of the most powerful in the NDC fleet. As such, the sensor modules built into the superstructure perform a number of complex tasks: everything from relaying fleet communications, to remote command of neighbouring allied vehicles, to finding safe impeller jump routes for the massive vessel itself.

Aft Thermal Sinks - Similar to the artillery heat sinks, but still fundamentally different, the Chrenari's aft heat absorption systems dissipate thermal build-up from the engines during operation. The only comparable vehicle with this external feature is the Alexander Class Dominant. Though heat isn't such an issue on most smaller NDC warships, The absolutely massive nature of both the Alexander and the Chrenari usually requires "reactor flashes" - shorts blasts of nuclear energy channeled directly through vents in the outer hull - in order to accurately maneuver and stop the vessel in space.

Primary Engines - The drive systems of the Chrenari account for almost 40% of its total mass, in the form of dense nuclear fuel laced throughout the entire aft of the vessel to power its state-of-the-art focused nuclear engines. Though the profile of the engines makes them look somewhat diminutive, the macro-vectored thrust generated by the blast corridors is enough to get the entire 72-km-long ship moving in only a few minutes, and provides more than enough energy to sustain an impeller jump capable of moving the ship great distances in almost no time.

Now that ist a beast! More behemoth- and less fork-like. Anyways, this is again really, really awesome. Nearly as great as the Horizon

This post has been edited by lastsummer : 30 December 2010 - 10:59 AM

I have a question. In the latest build of the Chrenari you can see parts identical to the missile tubes and cannons on the Centaur. Are those pieces still missile tubes and cannons on the Chrenari, or are they something else? I assumed they were weapon ports, but now I wonder since they weren't listed on the schematic.

In my personal opinion, you should make the center very wide, and it gives it a bulkierfeel to it. Make that small enough and it can easily make it a gunboat. Just a thought.

I'm testing out the rotating turrets trick, but I'm encountering several problems. As it stands, the quality of the effect is just not up to the standards of the plug, unless some of you can offer insight into fixing the issues. Here's the breakdown:

First of all, for the turrets to appear but also shoot, there are two methods that can be followed.

First, I can create the visible turret, which is actually an extremely short-range weapon spin animation that looks like the turret pointed in the direction of fire. The second stage is a submunition that is the actual ordnance, which travels away from the source. Here though we find two problems. When the "turret" submunitions, it obviously disappears, so we only get a brief blink of the turret turning and firing. Also, as I'm sure some of you have found, sub-munitioning turrets tend to point in the wrong direction when tracking ships, usually according to your own ship's movement and acceleration. Sometimes this also affects the submunition's accuracy, causing it to fire ahead of the target ship but never dead-on.

The second method would be to keep the actual turret and the visible turret separate and distinct, by treating the actual turret as a regular weapon (buy the outfit, it applies the weapon, and spacebar fires it), and treating the visible turret as a separate turreted weapon that does no damage and simply shows up whenever you press the fire key. Of course the inherent problem here is that you must actually tell the player to purchase two weapons just for a visual effect, which breaks the sense of immersion in gameplay.

Beyond these issues, both methods also cause the turret to jitter unnaturally on top of the ship while firing. So far, the quality is just not high enough for me to move the turrets above the ship (as it is, they fire from underneath).

Any solutions?

Can't you set it so that when you buy the weapon, using control bits, make it automatically grant you the second part of the weapon? Referring to the second method. I don't know if it works like this, but when you go to modify the outfit, can't you have it serve multiple purposes? You could just set it to give you both weapons. I use this when I'm making sensor packages.

This post has been edited by Spartan Jai : 04 January 2011 - 09:42 PM

@spartan-jai, on Jan 4 2011, 09:38 PM, said in EVN - Delphi:

Can't you set it so that when you buy the weapon, using control bits, make it automatically grant you the second part of the weapon? Referring to the second method. I don't know if it works like this, but when you go to modify the outfit, can't you have it serve multiple purposes? You could just set it to give you both weapons. I use this when I'm making sensor packages.

That's not the question, SJ, though I did go through this logic earlier with DarthKev. Delphi's wrestling with the question of making turrets that visibly rotate, an optical effect to make the Chrenari cooler (if that's even possible :D).

I realise that this is still probably not quite what you are looking for but when I was mucking around with this I ended up getting wicked frustrated. So I though I would share what I came up with instead.
Anyways eventually I drew stationary turrets on my ships with the story that all guns/turrets were located with in armoured domes with only "small" exit holes that the barrels of the guns barely poked out of, I then used the animation that would otherwise have been used for the turret animation to represent muzzle flashes and made them slightly off center so they would fire around the stationary turret dome. Seeing as only very large slow ships had turrets it worked much better and produced a cleaner effect.
Maybe that might look cool on the Chrenari...

I considered the idea of muzzle flashes, but then there is still the question of what to do about the fact that most of the ships in the game are scaled but the weapons are not. I think things would just get too confusing.

Either way, I've prepared a small sheet with the completed NDC ships on it, for your viewing pleasure.

There are still many more to come, so stay tuned!