FLFS “Concept Art”
The official playtest window for Full Light, Full Steam ends this weekend (although it looks like one final playtest will take place next week) so I will be returning to the FLFS manuscript with great trepidation to rake through it for one more editorial pass, correcting problems, and adding a couple more segments.
It also means that I’m arranging for art, and I’ve got three awesome folks lined up — I’m really excited to see what they’ll turn out. In order to make sure we’re all on the same page, I’ve put together a little art guidelines package, part of which is some image files of solar steamers and their escorts and fighters. Since I was already doing these up, I thought I’d post them here so the likes of you can see my l33t threedee modeling skizillz using ten-year-old rendering software. This is why I’m getting other folks to do art for me.
The HMS Exemplar, a generic solar steamer
click the image for a compilation of four different views
A generic escort (technically, a Leo classification) — no solar sails because they’re battery-powered. Did I mention “batteries” are giant springs? Heh, that still amuses me.
A wing of fighters and an escort. The fighters are Rollickers, not that it matters in the least.
April 3rd, 2006 at 11:21 am
I like the fighters and the escort, but the engineer in me dislikes the steamer design. Why? Given thrusters which don’t expend reaction mass, you would be at best acceleration most of the time (assuming of course, that slowing down means turning around and accelerating ‘backwards’). Also, having no widespread artificial gravity in FLFS means that having a constant gravity from acceleration would be a great advantage, and allow the crew to operate more effectively, yeah?
But HMS Exemplar seems to have the main axis of acceleration _perpendicular_ to the ‘up’ axis of the ship, which means that everyone will be pushed back to the rear of the ship all the time, and the “gravity effect” of the accleration would be all wrong. Instead, an arrangement like I sketch out below in glorious ASCII art makes more sense to me
NOSE
DECK1
DECK2
DECK3
DECK4
DECK5
DECK6
DECK7
DECK8
DRIVE
^^^^^^
April 3rd, 2006 at 11:37 am
Here’s where I totally cop out: “Warren, that’s a perfectly valid observation and suggestion and in your games you are perfectly capable of playing it in such a way.”
This does fall into that grey area of how I set up the setting as heavy on the evocative broad strokes and light on the canonical details. It doesn’t bother me in my game that sailors would be tugged towards the aft of the ship when they were going forward; we play with everybody having magnetic boots (an in-game elaboration) and I get more mileage out of the ocean-ship analog that the horizontal decks provide.
On the other hand, the faraday drives are set into gigantic gyroscopes that allow them to be pointed in any direction, so the ship is quite capable of pushing its thrust straight “down” and going straight up. The aquadynamic hull is just a carryover from prior designs that assumed water landings of all ships. If that makes it make better or difference sense to you, well then, rock it out.
April 3rd, 2006 at 1:56 pm
While I understand the usefulness of 3D modeling, I had always envisioned FLFS as having ink pen illustrations, much like a Captain’s log or Explorer’s Journal, including the sketches…
Of course, the other fun option you might want to fiddle with might be to take those renders (post mapping) and throw them throught a few filters, such as duotone brown to give it that really old school photographed quality, which could work as well.
The only other suggestion I’d have is to throw about 3 more lights on all the ships, you want them well lit to highlight the contours.
April 3rd, 2006 at 1:59 pm
Oh, these are not going in the book, for exactly the reasons you highlight. The game should be illustrated, not rendered. These are reference models for the illustrators to work from, since it’s a little difficult to explain how a solar steamer looks in such a way that multiple artists come up with anything even marginally similar.
April 4th, 2006 at 1:30 am
Cool, all understood — although I still disagree. My “engineer’s brain” just struggles with that layout
Plus, I did think that the quoted acceleration of the Olympic of “fifteen knots per second” = 7.7ish meters/second = ~0.8g was intentional. So that you could have normal(-ish) gravity all the time during periods of acceleration (which I expect would be 99% of the time).
Oh, and having the Faraday drive at one end of the ship, even if it’s in a big gyroscope, could cause unwanted torque if the direction of thrust did not pass through the center of mass of the ship, leading to the ship spinning around. Which is cool if you want to change direction (although you would really want a proper RCS (reaction control system) in place for that), but less cool if you just want to fly in a straight line
Yes, I did my Masters in Aerospace Systems Engineering, and this thing bothers me with nearly all Sci-Fi (apart from BSG). Sorry
April 4th, 2006 at 10:09 am
You must have loved the fighters on Babylon Five.
I think the Olympic segment talks about their being two sets of dual faraday drives (I don’t have it in front of me). Each of the four would be on its own gyroscope, able to direct reactionless thrust in any direction. The four are spaced around the center of the ship. Which means that, done correctly, most of your thrust is centered. And done incorrectly, it’s perfectly possible to tear the ship apart with its own drives.
April 5th, 2006 at 3:06 pm
“…tear the ship apart with its own drives.”
This is just too fucking awesome. I’m having some sort of crazy awesomeness overload. You WILL be putting this in the book…right?
*sudden pause*
…can I do a picture of this?
April 5th, 2006 at 3:12 pm
Rock it out, Kirk.
April 7th, 2006 at 3:13 am
“You must have loved the fighters on Babylon Five”
Oh yes! In fact, if you redesigned the Rollicker to be a spring-powered Starfury rip-off I would be in geek heaven! Properly designed spacecraft, them
April 7th, 2006 at 8:32 am
Actually, look at the Rollicker — it’s got four faraday drives (the cylinders in the back), all of which can thrust forward or backwards. Starfuries were a definite inspiration.
April 9th, 2006 at 7:52 am
Cool; I thought they were the spring batteries (I imagine them to be spiral-wound springs, like in wristwatch movements). But if they are the drive coils, I would put them further out (you get more torque for your money that way), but neat