Pretty much all the ships in CTs Fighting Ships book look very inelegant.
I have to agree. I generally found the illustrations of the large ships in
CT:Fighting Ships to be fairly uninspiring. Notable exceptions are the
Ghalalk and the
Midu Agashaam, both of which I really like.
I think sometimes that some of the artists ran with the "you don't need streamlining in vacuum" argument too far to the opposite extreme, and actually rendered ships in such a way as to showcase the concept while actually making the ship functionally inferior for other reasons. The Arakoine for example. Why have the spinal mount exposed on a forward "boom", rendering the main weapon of the ship highly vulnerable? Make the ship completely ovoid (still uncool, of course) and enclose the mount, at least, so that it becomes a hardened target. Or the Skimkish (which is difficult to visualize from the
Supplement 9 illustration in any event). It looks very much from the illustration like a dispersed structure, which not only is a vulnerability for a combat vessel, but also makes internal movement of personnel and equipment needlessly cumbersome.
Many times, its the artist that changes my mind. I've seen some silly pics of an X-Boat, and I've seen some damn cool ones.
Again agreed. I can think of plenty of times that a ship that I thought was ugly got re-drawn/re-rendered by another artist (sometimes by someone on CotI), and suddenly became really cool-looking. Some of magmagmag's illustrations come to mind (his version of the
Fer-de-lance does wonders for its coolness . . .
)
