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Judges Guild Mercenary Cruiser Reimagined

navanod said:
I dug out the pic of that thing...my first impression was "meh, pretty square and boring." But I got to thinking about it, and that might be a challenge in itself - to take some of those early simple (and moderately ugly) ships and see if you can make them visually appealing and useful.

The listed size is way wrong (8.2 m x 8.5 m x 66 m = 4600 cu m = 328 dtons), and I haven't checked the validity of the design, but I took a SWAG at a prototype over morning coffee, built out of a box and some pieces I had laying around. Scaled up to get the right volume it comes out to 12 m x 12.2 m x 94 m. You can see a rough render of it here -

http://www.travellerrpg.com/CotI/Gallery/index.php?n=1083
Click to expand...

It looks primitive, boxy, pretty uninspired and poor. Kind of like Steve Cole's "star trek" drawings for his SFB Game, which are some of the absolute poorest sci-fi renderings I've ever seen anywhere; worse than fan art kind of bad.

Eliminate that huge sensor dish. Give it some sleekness. This is 57th century tech were talking (allegedly). Get rid of anachronisms.
 
Okay, tweaked a few things. The round thrusters looked...wrong on a ship so square, so I adjusted those.





I swapped out the square turrets, shrunk down the pylons some, and replaced them with round turrets. Still not completely sold on it, tho.

 
The round turrets are winners in my opinion. But I think they'd look better snugged up to the hull, not stuck up on those towers.

Not too sure about the squared drive greebles though. I like the cylinders on the back sides, what about incorporating the drive greebles into them? As in have the drives partly extended out the sides, if you catch my meaning.

Loving the rest of it!
 
Yep, pretty much :)

The drives could maybe be a little bigger around and shorter to my taste, and shifted a little to inboard (more inside than out by 3/4 or so) but I haven't looked at your deckplans to see how you have things laid out. And that is just my taste and an esthetics comment :)
 
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I have to say that I'm impressed that you've been able to take a (pardon my language) butt-ugly box of a ship and turn it into something pretty cool looking.

Nicely done.
 
Getting down to the nitty-gritty now. I finished up a first go at the air/raft (also my first effort involving serious use of NURBS, and that will probably change down the road), tweaked the wings on the pinnace to give them vertical stabilizers and some extra oomph, and upsized the engines on the cruiser by 30% or so.



 
Actually, I have always figured that lower tech (9-10) ships would tend to be blockier, uglier, ungainlier ................... than ships produced at higher Tech levels
(so danged dyslexic today I taht am even getting words backwards)
Maybe it because I have actually been sober for a whole week :mad:
 
Gray Lensman said:
Actually, I have always figured that lower tech (9-10) ships would tend to be blockier, uglier, ungainlier ................... than ships produced at higher Tech levels
Click to expand...

I guess it depends on the requirements. A nuke sub has certain requirements. Once it was known that the underwater speed was better using the teardrop design (TL 5), the looks haven't changed much since...
 
Everything is coming together well.

The flat tail of the ship between the engines is looking a little plain though. I liked the square engine look but the extended ones are great. Maybe a bay door or glass ports would fill in the space. Not sure of the floorplans so it could all be just engine parts back there. A air raft bay might work also.
 
Final modelling renders

Well, I'm just about ready to call it good on the modelling end. I added some more detail stuff, especially on the aft engineering section - some more vents, some sections of small generic greebles to break up the lines a bit, broke up the area between the drives a bunch, etc. So, here's some closer looks at the whole works. Things still need to be tweaked here and there, but overall I'm pretty happy with the way it looks. The last major parts I want to model are pinnace and cruiser bridges/cockpits, then it's on to texturing. Comments, questions, concerns, etc welcome as always.

Progress15_Fore2.png


Progress15_Fore1.png


Progress15_Midships.png


Progress15_Aft1.png


Progress15_Aft2.png


Progress15_Vehicles.png
 
Looking good. Can't wait to see the finished product. You have real skills withy this stuff. The finished product is looking to be as good as anything Hollyweird could come up with.
 
You've made that boxy ship start to look great! I was always disappointed in those plans (I actually had them) but if I had this to by, they would have been much better appreciated!
 
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