Subject:
|
Re: new Mk4 pics are up on brickshelf
|
Newsgroups:
|
lugnet.space
|
Date:
|
Mon, 22 Jan 2001 15:13:38 GMT
|
Viewed:
|
659 times
|
| |
|
|
"Trevor Pruden" <trevor_pruden@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:G7KCsw.3Dt@lugnet.com...
> Yep. I got serious on the capital streak when I saw the Mithrander. I
> thought: "Gee, that would be cool to build!" Since then I had been
> searching for the fiberoptic parts to do the job. The transblue /brey 4x4
> cylinders in the engineering room is the warp core - one of the pics show
> one of the fiber opics lit up, with a light behind the core and one *inside*
> the core (hard to tell). The core lights up for the warp reaction. The
> grey 1/4 cilinders (big) at the fore of the engineering room are the
> sluch/fuel tanks, and the fiber optics/trans orange SW guns are the plasma
> conduits. In the aft section of the engineering room you can see the
> dylithium crystal containment (the blue container to the side is the spare
> crystal storage), and then you have the two (primary and secondary) fusion
> reactors directly behind on the main floor, with the two main propulsion
> drives directly behind. The secondary propulsion drives are on the second
> level. You also see several removal control modules (yellow) up on the
> second level in the aft section, and on the first level on either side of
> the warp core. In one pic a white dude has removed one for servicing.
> There are also two engineering stations up on the gantry to the fore of the
> warp core.
Interesting that you follow Star Trek technology quite closely - Brandon and I
started out doing that when we began building stuff for Zacktron back in '92,
but over the years have split and used other influences such as modern military
strucutre/units, NASA/future realistic space flight projections, and other
Sci-Fi movies. Its kinda a conglomeration of all - we try to become unique and
not just one technology.
> The decks work as follows:
> Deck 1 (top) = bridge/science stations
> Deck 2 = weapons and torpedo control, crew living wuarters, communial
> showers and toilets (in blue), and over the service bays we have various sub
> system controls surrounding the weapons locker and main storage bay to the
> starboard side, and the isolated security room/brig to the port side. I
> always try to include a brig! :^)
But aren't there three decks pictured? I don't think our ship is big enough to
need a Brig, we have a hatch and an airlock ;-) (just kidding) But think...in
the middle of a war, a traitor would be executed, not merely contained on a
battleship.
> I have been using the technic chair for every ship so far!
:o)
> Well, I have tons of regular brick, and although I do have a lot of
> specialized brick like you describe, those are used a lot in other models.
> I have tons of models right now.
You should LDraw the models you like and disassemble them for capship projects -
if you use more specialty parts you'll get a lot better asthetic effect. Just
my suggestion :-)
> I really wanted to do a good capital that
> followed the lines of a sea-faring miltary ship - from my perspective, space
> ships do not have to be sleek. Boxy designs are very permissable in space
> since earth-bound rules do not apply. I saw a similar design (made out of
> paper) on LEGO 3K that really caught my eye - it has similar lines to my mk4.
They're permissable, but they're still not as visually pleasing as a well
rounded, defined ship. My first ships were either 6 or 8 wide and about 2-3
feet long, usually one deck. That's how Brandon and I started, and they were
esentially long square tubes with stuff on the outside. We then built
Enterprise-shaped ships (I have some pics somewhere) which were separatable with
a neck, hatches, and stairway between, engineering/shuttlebay in the drive
section. As we split away from Trek we started with our own shapes - now we
draw influence from all over.
> > Its impressive on size matters, but I still think its a bit boxy. Ships • don't
> > have to be *enormous* either - devote a little bit more to form and function
> > working in harmony. Pack it a little tighter. Corridors don't have to be 4
> > wide, military ships have narrow halls, figs can squeeze through 3-wide
> > corridors.
>
> Yeah, I would have prefered to go tighter on the tower two decks to get more
> in the rooms. Right now the second, third and fourth decks have 6 wide
> corridors, - this was due to splitting my ship down the middle.
Wow - more decks! I looked at one exterior shot and a few interior shots
(brickshelf was being WAY slow last night) - I noticed the down the middle
split. Good idea! I suppose your ship is too tall or too many decks for what
Brandon and I did with ours - built the structure of the ship into the bottom
deck where Engineering/Life Support/Weapon Control/Showers/Galley were located,
and then build removeable deck chunks to go on top for the bridge, crew
bunks/storage, airlock, and bulk storage in the aft. For you to do that would
require an incredibly strong lower deck and very tight removeable deck designs.
Good idea solving that problem. I've gotta figure out how we'll do that if we
decide to add a third deck on a future project (likely).
> > I like how you use more colors like red and blue which are common but seldom
> > used in space. If you have a lot of plates, use them. Star Wars wings of • all
> > shapes along with the space shuttle wings work for sculpting surfaces. On
> > Brandon's and my destroyer, I used a few of those prefab space shuttle wings
> > stepped at different stud intervals to create a very subtle difference in the
> > bottom hull relief. Combine that with the 6x6 corner cutout wings for a cool
> > effect. I like sculpted bottoms on ships versus flat - gives it more • character.
>
> I use flat baseplates on the bottom. That's why you don't see anything, and
> it lends to the boxyness. I have an extreme lack of plates for the size of
> the ship. What comes across as boxyness is really a lot of compromise in
> using a limited range of pieces. I found that I did not have everything I
> wanted, but I did not let that stop me. After all, this is for fun, right?
:^D
Well good that you're expanding your possibilities for your somewhat limited
resouces (can't believe I just said limited referring to your collection size!
;-) ) You're right, it is for fun. The funny/cool thing is down the road, when
you do have all the parts to make an enormous sculpted non-boxy ship, your
building techniques to achieve that will be much different than mine - because
of different building histories. I'd venture to say your walls would still be
2-4 studs thick versus my 1-2 studs thick walls, and so on.
Still, my advice is to strive to break the boxyness thing and go for something
more sculpted - function and form working hand in hand, versus mostly function.
> Yes, as a matter of fact. In Scott Sanburn's timeline, humanity has been
> reduced to a few colonies. There isn't a lot of frills - it's a functional
> ship with all the sub systems in place. It does the job, gets in, gets out,
> and packs quite a wallop while it's at it. I know that it's hard to make
> big look good, but big was necessary based on having bays that would
> accomodate my ships, having an enigneering room that was fully equipped for
> the size of the ship, and having enough bunks for 41 crew, hot bunked. (36
> crew hot bunked, 4 officers in the officer's quarters next to the med lab,
> and 1 captian's quarters with en suite bath next to the galley/mess hall.)
Do you follow Scott's timeline? You guys live pretty close to each other,
right?
You mention accomodating your ships - and I saw a hangar bay with a plane in it.
Is that what you meant? Brandon and I have been including 'shuttlebays' in
every ship to date but this one. This one is just too compact and small to hold
something practically. The crew compliment on ours is 15, and I think we'd have
to wait till a 30-strong ship to hold one larger aux unit/fighter, and still on
the Destroyer scale 50 strong to add 2-3 of them in a bay. The larger Cruisers
would be designed to carry between 5-20, depending on their mission, of course.
Carriers, well, that's their primary job, and like modern naval ships, they
dwarf large 'big gun' ships.
With our ship classes - we intend to provide more loose guidelines and then
every ship built for the fleet will have a specific mission. So, some
Destroyers (this is odd - Destroyer is both a category and a class in Zacktron,
because we haven't come up with a naming convention for our ships yet - still in
development, but we believe our Destroyers will be named after famous military
personnel and space battles) follow the typical 'put a few guns there and a few
guns there and kick the snot out of em' pattern, and others have special
functions and therefore different internal/external configs. We even have a
top-secret ship function in the works for a Destroyer-size ship that's been
severely modified, its one of those ideas that I'm not going to discuss until we
have a destroyer (category, not class) built for it and a stat page posted - I
don't want people ripping off the idea until we've become the de facto first to
do it.
--
Tim Courtney - tim@zacktron.com
http://www.ldraw.org - Centralized LDraw Resources
http://www.zacktron.com - Zacktron Alliance
|
|
Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: new Mk4 pics are up on brickshelf
|
| (...) I did before, but I found that some people use fold technology, some use warp conduits, some use hyper space - but when it comes to fictional FTL technology, I found that the most documented material comes from Star Trek. So, in the interest (...) (24 years ago, 22-Jan-01, to lugnet.space)
|
Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: new Mk4 pics are up on brickshelf
|
| (...) Yep. I got serious on the capital streak when I saw the Mithrander. I thought: "Gee, that would be cool to build!" Since then I had been searching for the fiberoptic parts to do the job. The transblue /brey 4x4 cylinders in the engineering (...) (24 years ago, 22-Jan-01, to lugnet.space)
|
16 Messages in This Thread:
  
 
- Entire Thread on One Page:
- Nested:
All | Brief | Compact | Dots
Linear:
All | Brief | Compact
This Message and its Replies on One Page:
- Nested:
All | Brief | Compact | Dots
Linear:
All | Brief | Compact
|
|
|
|
