What did you do in Empyrion today?

I was playing on the Arid starter and found something very convenient.

The nightclub within jetpack distance from the distillery.

 

I stubled across an old Star Trek RPG Book i had laying around for decades and was immediately hooked.

I just love the simple shapes and clean surfaces. Matt Jeffries designs are just amazing.
Anyways i'm inspired to create some classic Star Trek ships from the timeline of these RPG/Strategy games (i hate current day Trek and i struggle to like Star Trek without being reminded of this crap you see everywhere these days ).

Anyways:



I guess it got a little bit out hand, because the ship is almost 1:1 (it's 194 meters long ).

I know it's completely against current trend of how to create a starship, but i don't care. These are the ships i love to build and i find them the most visually pleasing tbh.

 

Against the trend... pff, with the exception of 90% nobody cares, to quote the esteemed Cmdr William T Spock "the desires of the few outweigh the needs of the many"
So yeah, make it so... the few can enjoy it and go where no MAN has gone before.

 

Look at how different we, puny little humans, envision the "future" and "starships", and what most witnesses of genuine UFOs described. We tend to put zillion details, antennas, bumps and crevices and platings and whatnot, to make the ships look "complex". And the real life extra-terrestrials" (or our close neighbours we never noticed until now) on the contrary seem to favor simple shapes (saucers, triangles, tubes) with very few visible features, no flight control surfaces, no protuding antennas, no bolts and pipes : just an exterior "shell", and even the interior seems to be quite bland and devoid of superfluous details.

When we compare an actual smartphone to an old classical home phone with the numbers dial, or even the more recent "push button" phones, we can see the real trend : the sophistication is not about the looks, but about the capabilities. Smartphones are just a basic rectangle, but sleek and shiny, with very few and discrete buttons.

 

I humbly disagree. A lot of good-looking things in the past had very simple designs -- the dial phone you mentioned is literally a box with a dial, and a tube sitting on it. Yet, depending on the design, those phones looked sleek, minimalist, detailed, pompous, cheap, luxurious, modern, futuristic, robust, or simple.

So I think there really is the "functionality" part, and the "decoration" part. The display, dial, wire jack, volume controls, thrusters, propellers, cannons, muzzle breaks, antennas, or covering all of that for better aerodynamics -- that is for functionality to decide. On the contrary, colors, fonts, checkering, rgb lights, glass inserts, casing curves, the placement of some parts -- these are the deco parts.

Me -- I favor the looks of things that are so functional, that their capability and design ingenuity is obvious to even a uninformed person. Like rockets, or jet fighters, or battleships, or even huge industrial complexes, or supercomputers. There, the most beautiful aspect is that everything is for something. Nothing extra, nothing missing. Everything that has a place, has a purpose, and for every envisaged purpose, there is a part.

I guess that makes me a minimalist, like @Neal. I fail to understand the mainstream design trend to overdetail the ships with blocks or design features that bear no purpose in context of the game.

 

100% agreed.

Each to his own, but sometimes i think it's a shame that so many Workshop designs are buried under tons of Turrets and greebles that make it difficult to reckognize even a general shape. But on the other hand everyones taste is different of course.
Don't get me wrong, i'm not completely against greebles, they 100% have their purpose when used in a strategical manner.
What i'm trying to say is, that i guess that a lot of people forget when to stop adding details on their ships, or forget to zoom out now and then and look at their designs from various distances and angles.

To me a few simple shapes arranged in the right way (it's not easy, don't get me wrong, i was struggeling with that for months*) can create 100 times superior designs (In my personaly opinion), than just building a box and slapping some antennas on it.
Again, please don't get me wrong i'm not trying to degrade anyones creations or anyones personal taste, i'm just trying to explain where i'm coming from and what i try to archieve.
In the end, everyone needs to find the kind of design to their own liking, of course.

* I seriously look up to people who are able to come up with various differnt types of designs like Gun shaped battleships or modular Freighters for example.
In the last three months i was trying to come up with a new design for a explorer type of Fraction, basically an in-game Starfleet (Diplomats and Explorers) faction, just for my own headcannon.
I made literary HUNDREDS of different designs, avoiding the classic Saucer/Engineering/Nacelle formula, but it never really felt right, or it was too close to Star Trek or it looked really shitty. Eventually i came to the conclusion that it is completely pointless to reinvent the wheel, since the best designs (to me) have already been invented.

Btw sorry for the ramble, i couldn't find the spoiler function.

 

@Neal
Spoiler is to be found here ->

 

Thanks!

 

That was not my point to say old stuff looked bad.

My point was : to match the functionality of a smartphone, an old dial or button phone would need to have a calculator, a camera, a tape recorder, a file cabinet and whatnot attached to it, and it would still not be "portable". Because we know what we know today and not the future, we extrapolate our present to a time where technology may have evolved so much that design ways of our present time are just irrelevant to that future.

The tendency to put lots of greebles/ antennas/ turrets is like what was done with the Batmobile compared to regular cars of that time. Or like the cars in the Fallout series, that try to look like spacecrafts with obviously useless deco - well, "deco" is used for "deco" but that's not a "functionality" like brakes and engine...

And honestly, even in Star Trek there were extrapolations from that time that didn't fully render into the future of the series : if the teleporter existed, why not simply "deconstruct" enemy ships in place with the teleporter, or just use the same precision and remote manipulation tech to just fry some parts of the opponent's computer? At that point, the whole idea of weapons is ridiculous.

 

After a significant hiatus from EGS, I decided to hop into Creative and update some of my older ships. Starting with one of my personal favorites, the X-11 Cargo Ship. Being substantially modified when compared to the original, this will be the Mk2 of the X-11 and uploaded as a new ship rather than updating the existing one on the workshop.

Available Here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2807698790

 

Very pretty, but you may consider to remove those Deco Blocks over the Trusters one day if the 5 Block Rule ever goes live.

 

Actually...

 

AFAIK only ONE cover is accepted and thats not a Deco Block

 

That block surprised me as well when I noticed the text on it.
Previously I thought it was just the two shutter window blocks.

But, those two vents and the two non-airtight shutter window blocks all say that they will not obstruct thrusters in their description.

I just wish the devs would add the Walkway Slope block the the list as it looks like a thruster could pass through it.

 

It is at this point that I would use glass:




but for this build I am not allowed.

Still, it is fun.

 

Oh yeah... Repulser engines...




*sigh*

 

ZAGLORE - Small Warp Runabout (SWR)

Also an update of an older ship, one I built back in 2017 when there were less block options. Side-by-side comparison of the original and the updated version in the last pic.

Basically an early-game low-resource warp-capable CV. Barebones. Sleek. A good place to start.

This one is steel,... thinking of making a mostly carbon version...


On the workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2808222527

 

Been working on a new line of Zirax POIs in a different, more modern style.
This is the new Xenu Drone Port (T1), with in-roads in later versions to produce a T2 and T3 version using modular construction.



The current ones in use are ancient, from a time pre-color palette (A8). The new ones are full custom colors, worn and old.

 

Set myself to a project of sorts. I want to try and turn the updated Attarack prime I made here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1758079409&searchtext=attarack+prime into a enclosed cabin craft yet keep it from bulking up to much.

This is as far as I have gotten:





Now, how the heck do I get a warp drive in there?

A little paint job and some textures go a long way to answering the question asked by your average galactic passerby: "So why do you have a door on the rear of your super sleek fighter craft?" but a warp drive is another matter entirely.

Tricky tricky.