"Sightseeingboat"

Adds refreshing soda spenders and some classic game cabinets for amusement to the "Light Shuttle".

"Minigvessel"
Adds something very exclusive to the "Light Shuttle", guess what.

These three ships are exactly equal in cargo space price and performance.
They are together with the "Lnader" the default ships to start "Phoenix" and offer

NOTHING

They are the biggest piece of junk in the galaxy and was made exclusively for you commander jameson.
In my personal opinion they are supercool - to start with.

They are the basic ships and mission time will be planned that it is very very tight to finish a interplanetary mission successful with them.

They are really not very good and suck in fuel consumption because of the low thrust. Every additional ton of cargo is a performance hit so you have to think wisely if you really need this or that equipment because fuel is the most precious "equipment".

You can't fit a hyperdrive or any weapons to them they are only ment for interplanetary service.

Today i finished a scout mission with one and a half hour of reserve and i had to use up the fuel to the very last drop to be in time. This was a not urgent mission and the timespan is randomly between 1 and 1.5 times of what i calculate "one time" is already tight so urgent missions are usually not or only hardly to complete with the shuttle because they can leap down to 0.7 times. you would need a better ship to complete them. perhaps the "Talon" but it's very expensive because of the fitted military drive (most small fighters have by default a military drive and i added half of the price to the ships price while for standard drives i discount this value to get a small price reduction for large ships compared to smaller ones (i let calculate most of the ship specs based on tables or expressions, once i found a suitable table or expression i never have to mind again about because it's calculated from the ships mass or capacity or whatever is already given in the specs).

Recently the "Lander" is still fourth starting ship, i sized it down to reflect better the low capacity but it's still to large compared to the shuttles.
As soon as i have finished the fourth Shuttle the Container Lifter i will remove it from the starting ships add again thepossibility for a hyperdrive so that this will be most probably your first ship after the shuttles to leave the system because it will be lowest in price but therefore unarmed and with a bad performance compared to a any fighter because the lander is designed as taxi and offers the possibility to fit 5 cabins which is a lot for the low cargo capacity. the space for the cabins is reserved for them and can't be used for cargo.

The "Lander" is a vessel which can be combined to a larger ship. I only use three of them to form the "Triple". This can be an interesting ship, it offers quite a lot of cargo space and room for 17 cabins (6 for each minus one for the pilot). It's low in price for its capacity but has the same bad performance as the Lander and will also be unarmed.

Let's move to the classic ships of Pioneer manufactured by Tom Morton.
The Ladybird is still a pretty ship, it was a sort of Cobra, it has getting smaller and smaller over the revisions and also lost a lot of capabilities. It's not the best choice for this class (size) of ships simply due to the fact that i have a couple of ships in this class and they must have differences in handling.

It was designed as police vessel but i replced it with the "Interceptor" recently with a special static version for the cops only. It won't be used as bulk ship because i limited the bulk ships to ships above 200 tons hull mass additionally to the type "static ship" to disable sputnik and other possible static ships like the police vessel for the player or the "Shyrkay" which is ment as a sort of beast to hunt or to protect.

It's also still the "texmapper example" even if i moved the model to "ships_default.lua" where i collected all default ships of Phoenix. in general this won't matter to disable/exchange them for a mod you need only to replace the ship specification scripts, fortunately it's still possible to disable a model simply by replacing it with a empty file here (in general this is still possible in Phoenix.

The "Sirius Interdictor" was the Ship which was "Pioneer" when we got attracted to it. It was the starting ship and had just a to good performance.
It's still a very good ship, it offers quite a lot of cargo space and it's fast as a lightning compared to other ships in this size. It's also somewhat smaller as it was originally designed.

The third of totally four ships ascending in cargo capacity was the "Walrus". It shows also how a wingpart can be moved with the LMR.
It's a bit a lame ship, or i designed it a bit lame. It's a typical transporter in its specs. Rather suitable as easy target then as ship for the player.

The last of the four original Pioneer ships is the unique "Flowerfairy Heavy Trader". OK that's a ship, a large ships and it's not much else as large.
One of the standard ships you need at least to run Phoenix.
At least it needs one freighter above 100 tons cargo capacity so that the Trade Ships module will work (i exchanged the filter criteria hull mass with cargo capacity for the Trade Ships module).

summarized:
- the "ip_shuttle" (recently the "Light Shuttle) is needed to run the game as standard ship.
- "lanner" is still fixed as ship for the ship spinner in the title screen it's replaced with a model exchange script and displays the "Light Shuttle" instead.
- "ladybird starfighter" is still needed as police vessel but replaced with the Interceptor and the original model os renamed to "ladybird".
- the "Flowerfairy Heavy Trader" you need to have at least one ship for the "Trade Ships" module.

with these four basic ships Phoenix will run. recently "ip_shuttle", "ladybird starfighter" have fixed names and replacing ship specs must have this name (how the model is named or how it's named in the game won't matter, Pioneer31 only checks for the ship specs file name). For the ship to display in the title screen Phoenix checks for a model named "lanner" thus it's exchanged in the models folder with "xxx_exchange.lua" it doesn't need no ship specs and could be theoretically any model even a building or the pilot model. The trade ship can be recently any ship above 100 tons cargo capacity.

The "Rapier" was my first "script only" model i've made. It's based on a detailed sketch of the ship which was also the layout for the UV mapping.
the mapping didn't worked out to well and from then on i decided to use a bump of the model to wavefront to create the UV projections, respectively a skin.

It's a very nice fighter in fact the one with the best specs in the game (together with the "XF-MK I") but costs quite a lot due to the fact that it has fitted a military drive by default to save some of the little cargo space.

Because i named it, the "XF - MK I". Of course it's a X-Wing you can't hide this fact Gernot. But it's scripted and based on scratch resp. out of my imagination, it looks similar but has different dimensions thus it's imho still compliant to the licensing because it's my work even if it's not my idea.

However probably i will remove it from "Phoenix" and offer it as standalone ship mod. I like the ship and personally i like to see it in Phoenix.

Let's move to the rest of scripted geometry i've made. The "Toceh" ("Gecko" or "Real Gecko") is the cheapest fighter you can get and most probably your choice after the shuttles. It's quite good in performance but you will get quite soon claustrophobia in it and like to move to the sister ship of the "Toceh" the "Draco".

The "Draco" is one of the best ships in "Phoenix", good performance and enough space for equipment and some cargo. It's only beaten by the "Cyrapi MK I". (mk 1 because a mk 2, a little larger one is already planned).
With this ship you can complete the task to "find home to sol" in Phoenix easy.

Recently the "Cyrapi MK I" is my newest ship for "Phoenix", the name is simply "piracy" because it's losely based on the FE2 "Krait". It's much larger as the Krait and also different in dimensions. The Krait is similar to my "Draco" more wide as long, the "Cyrapi" is longer as wide. It has a slanted bottom which gave me some troubles to design a landing gear respectively to use my standard landing gears which are designed to be used on a flat horizontal bottom. But compared to the "Draco", "Toceh" or "Buteo" it looks much better with the slanted bottom.

The "Buteo" (latin for Eagle) looks on the screenshot larger as it is, a close look will show that it's almost the same as the "Toceh" in ship specs. Yet another Fighter to start with after the shuttles.

Unfortunately i noticed that i missed to update the ship specs of some of my scripted ships and it looks like the "Toceh", "Draco" and "Buteo" have a to small fuel tank.
I will have to fix this and upload the changed version of "Phoenix".

Intentionally i liked to have the "Buteo" as what the Eagle is for FE2 before i decided to use the shuttles to start the game with.

The "Long Range Shuttle" is in my opinion the ugliest ship of "Phoenix", i started it to work on a few ideas i had. The geometry functions instead of sub-models to save framerate and to cheat a sort of cabin / inside with the billboard function.

Ugly or not it offers a lot of cargo space and much space for cabins. It's possible to fit a hyperdrive but it's like any shuttle unarmed.
The ship specs are reasonably low for such a shuttle which is mostly ment for taxi jobs with a lot of space for the voyagers and something totally unreasonable like an "Amusement Deck" (the poop deck) with 1200 years old slot machines in it for those who dare to play a classic b&w "Space Invaders" (on a real tube monitor!) in the year 3200.

The "Manta" also runs as sgm model in "scout" this is the original scripted version.Here i tried to work on a ships shape with bezier shapes mostly. I Iiked to get somethin g cool as the eagle and the result was this which isn't as cool as and much larger in size (the larger size i decided later). Thus it's a large sized fighter with good performance and quite a lot of optional cargo space. Keep in mind that my ships are usually on the "low end", this means lasting the cargo capacity out results in a heavy hit on performance and resulting fuel consumption. If a ship is used only as fighter it can have very good performance but soon as you load it you will lose this. A ship can have empty 20G fwd thrust and fully ladden it's easy half or even a third part of it.

Fighters usually last their capacity already out with the equipment thus the 24G of a "Rapier" shrink to 12 or 14G when it's ladden. This large fighter offers more space and thus you can keep more of the initial thrust when use as a fighter only and equipped minimal. This large fighter comes fitted unlike the small fighters with a standard drive by default.

A large transporter can hold maybe 500 or 1000 tons but will hardly lift from the ground if the capacity is lasted out. To load only 200 tons if you have 1000 tons capacity makes much more sense as to last it out.

The "Badger" i intentionally created to have something similar to my "Shift" or the "Transporter" of FE2. A lower specced ship with a heavy hull to absorb many hits that's why it is a "Badger" it can stand many attacks and can still suddenly rip your belly with its claws even half dead or half alive. Take care if you cross a Badgers path in real life!

There aren't many scripted only ship models left, the "Firefly" is a quite simple model and shows mainly how simple and quick a ship could be designed using the LMR. It leaks of a cockpit and any other details and it's just another ship. The performance use and look is very similar to the "Ladybird".

The "Corsair" is to be honest based on the SW-XWA "Gunboat". It's by far not the same ship but i got the idea for the heavy armed "Gunboat" from SW. It's a large sized fighter which can hold 8 missiles in it's torpedo bays.
It's quite heavy and can stand many hits but also it's a little lame. disrespecting the cargo capacity it can't hold not many cabins for voyagers because it's ment as fighter and not to perform taxi missions.

The "Hullcutter" (the name is in fact an adaption from Space1889, but reflects well how i created this model). Like the name suggest it has a cut hull (and didn't cuts hulls of other ships to well). The intenitional idea i had years ago when i read "the idea for the Millfalc was based on a bitten hamburger" thus i thought myself how that will look and this is the result. It was very hard to respect the ways i had to cut the hullsections for the scripted model and the final changes which removed the last of visual errors i made a couple of weeks ago.

The specs reflect a little the obvious age of the ship, i designed it as a sort of 1930's sci-fi ship with analogue gauges in the cockpit and a steam punk look overall.

A pure fighter with no room for passenger cabins or a cargo bay life support but therefore a co-pilot.

This is a bitten hamburger with two halfes of a cooked egg on it.

The "Interceptor" is what i have planned as police vessel for "Phoenix", it has quite good specs and reasonable cargo space. It didn't looks as good as the "Phoenix" (which was formerly named "Interceptor" and was the former Police vessel) because of the simple disc i feel. Butin general i liked to have something similar to the old "Interceptor" (now "Phoenix") with rotating engine pods like the FE2 Courier has.

The disc and the heavy use of cylinders and tubes made it hard to texture it with projections, of course the best results with this simple method you reach with quads, flats or anything which isn't much curved or bowed.

The Police version of the "Interceptor" is a static ship and has even better specs, it will outrun any ship in the game but can't be bought by the player. I hope it makes the police invincible.

Almost the last of the "scripted geometry only" ships which isn't a ship in fact and gave the name for my former similar but lost project "Sputnik". It's still in the game and i planned to spawn it orbit to inhabited planets likewise the bulk ships to stations. It's obviousely a static ship, the size is very tiny and reflects the original dimensions of the Sputnik. 50cm in diameter and the longest extended antenna is 3m. What i will like to do with it except to spawn it for fun is open. maybe they can be picked up for a service to have what?

The good old mission of "Space Shuttle" for Intellivision, pick up a satellite and bring it home for service.

Mining and scooping the goods didn't makles much profit but with such a mission you could earn a little more money with the cargo scoop device.

If it was about me i would like to have a cargo bay and a rig to load the satellite, nah ok "Phoenix" is no full simulation such is the task of projects like "Space Shuttle Simulator" and not a game about trading and fighting or perform missions of various nature. Thats also why i don't see much sense in such quasi realistic stuff or infos which i don't need to know as a player, even if named "space sim" Pioneer never was a full simulation, it simulates some of the conditions of space flight and the environment in space, how the mechanic works but it is like FE2 itself no simulation like "Space Shuttle Simulator" or similar projects where the task is to be as close as possible to reality, here is the task to be entertained and probably even learn something from it because it's open (and should stay open, i mean not only "open source" open for the player to getinterested in it and start to work on the scripts and therefore they have to be held simple though a player can get a grip on it and not to disable flexibility and use a own limited scripting language to prevent editing by personal choice, pardon me this isn't Pioneer to me, it has lost the title "Pioneer" it has no more pioneering spirit. "Pioneer" in this case "Phoenix" likes to invoke the natural curiosity of a player and not to prevent it. To invoke this "aha moment" - "if i change that then this will happen" and this mustn't be intented by me or anyone else it's maybe the sole abstruse idea of a player and he will do it because he will like it "legal" or not because to me is "legal" what what works. This is entitled "Pioneering" or "Frontier" - later handed out with a hex editor to force players to hack the game and not to prevent from such).

Further to me is the environm ent nothing else as the procedural generated Tower in "Tower of Mystery", the game starts when you put your avatar in this environment, in case for "Tower" a sorcerer, warrior or trader similar in the case for "Phoenix". In original "Tower" the charcter is always the same when you start but it will be formed different by your acting in the game, this will also influence how the enemies will face you. Theoretically it would be possible to master the "Tower" without a single sword stroke. As more agressive you act as more agressive the enemies will act, contrary if you use bargaining and magic clever you probably wouldn't have to fight at all.

Perhaps i will design more such satellites which will reflect the real ones so a real search for Voyager could make sense and not being only a boasting in the GNN.

While i guess this could be very hard, evaluate the curse of voyager, calculate the possible position relative to Sol in 1200 years. or something similar at least, something a player can do with a little practice and a few hints where to look for it. I imagine it will be still the search for the needle in the haystack. On the other hand it will have a reg number as a ship model thus it will be easy to locate once you are in the proper system, it's maybe just very very far away from you.

I will see what i can do with it in future but it's a tiny little something which can be used for various tasks.

Recently it's named "Shyrkay" and was once ment as a space ship (it had a counsel on it), it had various names from "Ghoul" (unfortunately) to "Gelios" (which is in fact the title of an amiga soundtracker module). Later i had the idea to spawn it as a static ship, this was already when we haven't had water as fuel. My idea was that they will live in oribit to gas giants and are feed by hydrogene which they also use to travel from system to system, a strange space beast of some sort. Still this can be "possible" this is a static ship something which will counteract with you in the game or which i can use for missions likewise the "Sputnik" it can be hunted legally in low policed systems or it could be protected in better policed systems. probably dropped goods could bring some profit even if it's illegal to hunt them or you could script a special mission where someone likes to kill them or to prevent them from being killed.

These are so far all "scripted only geometry" ships in Phoenix, what follows is the list of old ships i made in blender for Pioneer and a couple of ships designed by Dan and very few other conversions mainly one; Solcommands "Ghoul" which is even when he offers a lot of fine models the only one i found suits to Pioneer because of it's small size.

Even if i decided once to have only scripted geometry in "Phoenix" i changed my mind a little and added these ships as well as the buildings in wavefront format because of their better performance in the game. I can add even some animations to them and keep a better framerate as with the scripted originals. Mainly this is caused by the few sub-models i used and the not so good idea to use a second main model to save some spacing between the buildings in "Phoenix". Probably if i change the sub-models to functions which become due to that a part of the actual model because i experienced that every sub-model i use in a model lowers the performance a little, best is if all is in one mesh and a called, positioned and scaled function is a part of the mesh like it would be written in this model. Thes are experiences which certainly was somewhat obvious nonetheless "Phoenix" and my task to have only scripted geometry in it helped me a lot to understand this better respectively to experience it. It won't affect a single ship much but buildings are placed many in a city and a small hit summarizes easy to a big hit. I assume if i change this use of the sub-models to geometry functions i reach a similar good performance as with the wavefront objects. Further i guess the clear sectioning of the LOD in the scripts helped to to keep the performance hit low, each LOD uses a seperate mesh and is called standalone, no "if cascades". This is something i will have to redesign the ships to as far as possible, but step by step that's a lot of work. Like i said for ships you won't notice the performance hit so easy as for buildings.

The only one i had to remove totally because of a mysterious heavy performance hit is the "Orion" i would have liked to keep it but it has only less as 50% of performance compared to the rest and even less compared to those which run very well. I have recently no idea what exactly causes it.

The Venom

One of my oldest ships, it was made after i made the courier with "CarCAD" two decades ago, intentionally it was like the "Courier" designed to be used for a NFS4 total mod called "Need for Space" which changes the whole game to a sort of "race in space". The ships he used was mainly conversions of existing Star Trek models which was apart from the Shuttle far to large for the game, hard to get around an invisible corner with an enterprise.

It was my first model i made back then using "3DS Max" a hacked illegal one though it was also the last one i made with this illegal owned software.

To be honest i started it with "z-modeler" which was free up to v1.x but has it's drawbacks and was like CarCAD specialised for Car models.
Likewise the Courier the first revision to use it them in FFED3D i made with 3DSMax. Very soon after i spent some time on "elite-games.ru" i changed to blender and the two models got many further revisions over the years, if i would have known blender before i never would have touched 3DS-Max it's not only free it's imho even better as, it's designed to develop games while imho 3DS-Max is only expensive and blown up and that's already all like everything from Adobe which is known to me.

My "Courier" i'm very sorry i can't place in "Phoenix" but it will be published as ship mod along with the old conversions from FFED3D and some new ships i made for this game. While the former "Viper-X" has no real relation to the Viper of FE2 and is named now "Venom". (perhaps i really have to get rid of the "XF-MK I" because it's to close to the X-Wing even if i still like the ship as a simple example ship for scripted geometry and not only for this reason it simply looks fantastic, the X-Wing is the space fighter per se.