Hi!

I think you should check out the dev forums. You can find it on the main site, pineerspacesim.net/forum . There are some ships in the works, and you will find quite a few concept sketches too. Help is always welcome. I'm aiming to make a consistent visual style for the game, but it's heavily in progress.

Thrust in the ship lua is given in newtons, like 65e5 which is 6500000 (65 and five zeroes). It's not hex. Be aware that current ship stats are all over the place, they need to be balanced. The newer ships got their based on volumes, but thrust are ridiculously large in every ship.

a hi to you from a veteran 😉

like it at first bite, but i guess i would need to see it in action

nozmajner, yes it's rather displeasing behave of most to give their own ships unreasonable specs, well probably i'm a "low spec" fanatic,

or probably it's my age, i would have certainly acted different when i was young ("i build me a super ship", now it's vice versa "i build my a shitty weak vessel").

thrust can be estimated/calculated (volume? i never tried??? except to estimate the cargo and weight while there are large differences in the purpose a ship has, a tiny fighter with a probably lying pilot is different to look at as a "luxury yacht" with casino and leisure deck), usually i use the fully ladden weight i estimate for a ship as base.

then i determine how "strong" should the ship be, do i like a weak ship or should it have a strong fwd accel and weak retro thrust.

should it lift a lot but be rather clumsy or have good maneuverability but a little less main thrust?

anyway everything good i find boring, each ship should have advantages and drawbacks, it will keep you buying new ships, a player should never be satisfied fully with his vessel, if you played FE2 you certainly know this, at least i never found the perfect ship, even when i have my favorites like any of us.

then i calculate (or estimate im a craftsman a builder and construction worker, we don't calculate, we peep over the thumb)

for each tonne 1e4 newtons (roundabout, the difference is to see on a larger mass)

again roundabout 1e4 Nm for each tonne results in a thrust of 1G

with this as base it's rather easy to determine the proper value, i have i.e. a ship with a overall mass of 50t and like a thrust of 20G

(which i feel is to high usually i use thrusts in a range of 3 to 12G)

it's 50 * 20 * 10000 and equals 1e7

let's make it proof 🙂

a "10 tonne ship" with 1G main thrust, setting is 100000 or 1e5

the example with 50 tons overall weight (laden) and 20G thrust

now how to determine the lateral thrust

mainly it's up to the purpose of the ship, the above "Cargo Unit" is designed weak (1.7G laden) but at least the same weak in any direction.

40t cargo

40t hull

20t fuel

and a thrust of 2e6 in any direction

results in 1.7G laden (the empty ship is not reliable or it depends also a bit on purpose, fighters are usually (and if designed with fair specs)

filled to the rim already with the equipment and you can be happy to have a tonne or two cargo space left, at least that's how i like them.

carriers are different to look at and one can't probably lift when fully laden, why not? there is space for so and so tonnes but you can't lift from a planetside fully laden, it's even reasonable.

reasonable relations are to me (in percents of fwd thrust)

fwd thrust 100%

rev thrust  50%

lateral thrust 25%

or

fwd 100%

rev 30%

lateral 30%

(some argued that all ships are specced nearly the same for this relation, but well it's my experience and i added a little reasonability)

but it's up to you how you use it, but i strongly dislike ships with the same lateral thrust as fwd or rev, with exception for extreme low configuratet like the above one. it's PIONEER and neither Star Wars or Star Trek where the ships have stronger "acceleration dampers" (if such would ever exist at all) as the main engine is, because in such a case i would fly with the "accel. dampers" rather as with the main engine.

the more complicatet "angular thrust"

uh, John Jordan explained the proper equation once to me, but i found it to complicated and i still use a simple one.

my idea is to take the mean radius of all lateral thruster positions and multiply it with the lateral thrust you have, as wider a ship is the more thrust you need to get a good maneuverability.

(but i use often simply 10times lateral thrust it results mostly in a good maneuverability).

or i take this simplified expression: mean radius (radius, not diameter!) multiplied with lateral thrust.

it works and s2odan has set up once a output of ship thrusters relation as a table (i liked that and miss it much)

my simplified expression has resulted always in fair angular thrust (a value around 1 in the table).

who says "thrust" must say also "fuel consumption" 🙂

it's actually a rather complicated thing one has decided to use, really i never understood fully what the idea was behind and apart from that i could have made myself clever(er) but haven't done because i see no reson why we didn't use (we did, but i guess it was to less sophisticated, don't mind) something easier but comprehensible for a layant.

thus we have now this strange thing:

effective_exhaust_velocity =

i don't know who of us modelers will understand this??? OK, no matter if "effective_exhaust_velocity =" or a simple value like 1 or 0.0001.

anyway it's something you have to experience yourself.

fuel consumption certainly depends also on the mass and in addition we have this funny value

effective_exhaust_velocity =

use quite a lot of fuel with a low setting around 5e7

as higher the value is the less fuel you use,

simplyfied said: a higher exhaust vel. means a better or more modern engine, however you like to look at it.

roughly at least.

really something simple would do the same job, because either you use a lot or little fuel that's it,

it's sci-fi and i don't have to know the equation behind as modeler, i like to set specifications in a way i can reproduce, that's all.

erm, i hope that has helped to clarify thruster setup, or have i confused you?

edit:

i never liked style conventions, neither in real life, if ppl weared short hair i weared mine as long and fuzzy as possible,

these days when conservative politicians start to wear long hair and a pony tail, i shaved my head.

i hate conventions as well as my principal hated them.

i don't go along with fashion, i make them myself, actually i like my "Schwingerhämpli"

(a swiss wrestler shirt named also simply "Edelweiss") best,

even when the ppl comment "are you a wrestler?" or "you dare to wear this, never had any problems?",

certainly not, but it looks cool and it's of very good quality.

baldhead and such a shirt? "are you a hooligan of some sort?..."

ha, ha, yeah "the fourty year old hippie" turned to a hooligan, certainly!

Thanks you for getting back to me. 

This ship was just a test run for me, to see how easy it is to import a new model into the game, so do not dwell too much on the design. It was something I threw together in an afternoon... 😀

I have already had a look on the dev forums and it looks very good. The hardest part for me is coming up with concepts, the modelling and texturing is easy comapred to that. And you have plenty of concepts...

Thank you for explaining the thrust settings for me, I have successfully set the desired acceleration on the ship. Since it looks like a bucket of bolts, it also handles like a bucket of bolts, so its not going to pull many G's. Even empty its quite sluggish.

Most things seem to be working, including the landing gear animation, the only thing that eludes me is the blue navlights. The wiki states that any empty with a name navlight* is going to be blue ( I have the navlight_red and navlight_green working) but I simply cannot bring them to work. At best, there are no blue lights on the model, at worst the whole model does not load and the model viewer spits out error.

Here is the ship, should anyone be interested, but like I said, it was just a test.

I did not bother with the low LOD versions, since the whole model is under 1500 polygons anyways. Also it would probably look just as good with 512x512 textures.

Thanks for taking interest in the game. 🙂

You can find a blender script in the dev forum that can help you calculating the desired thrust and deltaV, but potsmoke's estimation is a good rule of thumb.

It seems to me that you need to put an underscore at the and of navlight_ to make it show up.

@potsomoke: You can calculate volumes with the 3D printing addon that ships with blender.

effective exhaust velocity is the number you use the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, to get the deltaV of the ship. It's much easier to estimate a ships performance with that, then with a fuel consumption value, since it gives you the highest speed you can accelerate your ship before running dry. Halve that and put in a bit of safety margin and you have the speed you should accelerate then decelerate from for rough a brachistochrone maneuver.

You can find a blender script in the dev forum that can help you calculating the desired thrust and deltaV, but potsmoke's estimation is a good rule of thumb.

It seems to me that you need to put an underscore at the and of navlight_ to make it show up.

Thanks, I will look for it. 

If you want to see some more of my work, head over go Star Ruler website, I have made the Mirage Shipset a while back. There were massive restrictions on polygon count ( since you can have 500 ships fighting at the same time on one screen) and texture size ( since our mod was running out of memory) so the ships look kind of crude...

PS: I have also done some icons (nothing fancy)

/

http://torham123.deviantart.com/art/Subsystem-Art-333528284

There are some nice shapes in that line of ships.

Fortunatelly we can have higher poly count in Pioneer, usually you don't get hundred ship battles. As a rule of thumb, 10k triangles are reasonable for a small to medium ship.

phew, i start to feel small...

thorham, you made already once a model for pioneer?

i'm not sure, because many "visited" the game, but i know most left and shook their heads about the LMR (while never ask me, i still love it).

some of the cancelled attempts i still have on my HD.

not only seems it's "navlight_green", as example, you can use also instances of it to have more as one of a type e.g. navlight_green.001 etc.

nozmajner, thanks, i knew i saw (and used) it once but have forgot where... (can u read minds?)

i don't calculate, i do it simply.

watch this manual rocket flight, it's a tailsitter and has no retro thrust (0 won't work, so it's reduced to 1Nm but that equals 0 for 100t,

lateral & angular thrust is minimized only to maneuver the rocket in the right direction and do some course corrections,

also because it's tailsitter all controls are mixed up (up is fwd), which disables autopilot (it's restricted anyway) and changes front view to side,

that's why i used only the outside camera.

it's my very first attempt to land with the tailsitter (i made a more or less successful docking before, i bumped several times in the station) and it worked out well.

of course if i would give it more realistic relation between mass and fuel, it would get impossible without to calculate the thrust

and probably you would even have to precalculate the proper course.

but in this way i had enough reserves (i nearly runned out of fuel) to allow me some extra breaking and course corrections.

the cuts you see are because i saved the game, but fortunately i haven't to load one saved state (phew...).

of course if you would disable rotation damping (which wasn't possible back then) it would get ten times harder.

thinking about rotational damping, instead of the switch i would find it more senseful as specification,

because then you can't switch it on or off by choice, you would have to mess with it as it is.

certainly if that would have been possible i would have give the "atomic x1" no rotational damping (argh).

also fuel consumption was back then a internal value and the same for all ships,

which i feel personally is as good as to set them up for each, it's a extra feature from my pov and not really needed.

you can control the clumsyness or fuel consumption with the hull mass and thruster power as well.

just make a ship with a heavy hull and weak thrusters and the fuel consumption will be high.

but ok, a nice extra to tell "this is a oldtimer", but on the other hand with style conventions no "oldtimers" will

find a way into a official release, which i don't mind even when i like my retro style ships much.

and to round things off (that's the style i like, graphically and musically, take care Flash Gordon is approaching...)

not only a ship of some sort, 1930's laboratory with "jacobs ladder", colored flashing "jelly beans", working clocks

(game time and os time), a small planetarium for "dr. zarkov" and a screen on which the credits to the movie and the original modeller

(from which i took finally only the idea of the ships design, the original is a sketchup model and has far to many polys for a game) are displayed.

well all this is past (for a while at least...).

i never understood "why not", i didn't used up many FPS for all this, not a part of what is needed to make a dense air or a corona

with postprocessing.

"useless" just like doors, a hood, or steering wheels are useless on a diecast model...

personally i feel it's the wrong direction to go with movie like postprocessing, well that's nice to look at

(and i know since computer games exist there is this difference between "intelligent design" which is sold less

and "movie like", sometimes poor animated stuff but as long as ppl can identify themself with a celebrity it's sold best)

but if it leads finally to a sort of spacebattles like shown in the e4 promos, with spaceships acting like windjammers,

then it's to me certainly the wrong direction to go for pioneer.

i like things modelled and working, i only wait for cutscenes in pioneer, because i.e. you can't solve the station animations proper anymore,

but you can make a "nice movie" and use it as cutscene, it will look quite good and "professional" of course,

but it's to me the wrong philosophy.

i had (he's not the first and certainly not the last FE2 player who will say such) a comment on youtube of a dude who

commented that he tries to download the game from time to time, but stated clearly that he rather likes to play FE2,

even when the graphics are low. well i had to answer that i fully understand his point, i rather like to play FE2 to.

it's basic in graphics, well, but everything works (no cutscenes or other "cheats") and you have something to do.

that's what i felt Pioneer was before, i guess i'm not wrong if i say it was also Tomms idea behind.

i don't need postprocessing to make things shiny, but i like functional models which can interact with the game.

and if that looks simple like tomms "sirius interceptor", well it's still better to me as where we heading now, imo.

you don't have to feel the same, it's just my pov and has nothing to do with the effort you guys put in your models.

gameplay is to me the target,

where realism supports gameplay realism is needed,

where fantasy supports gameplay fantasy is needed.

if you follow this, i know it won't become a bestseller, but prob. a long time runner.

i remeber as example, a boxing game on the old intellivision, i really liked it,

poor graphics hard to tell at all that it's a human which you see, but interacting was cool

and hitting combinations unique, but what had been sold best?

coleco's stupid "rocky", no combinations only right and left upper cut, that's all, stupid 2 frames animations

but the boys loved it "i like to be rocky", no i don't like "rocky" where "rocky" has always a vantage,

i like a fair sports game.

the ppl say "graphics", but what they mean by this is only "eye candy".

but candys melt in the mouth... the taste is of short durance.

which is of course in interest of the industry, you shouldn't have fun for years with a game,

best is for the profit if you have fun only for a weekend (think of "rayman" as example).

http://spacesimcentral.com/ssc/topic/3702-ship-editor-stats-calculator/

phew, i start to feel small...

thorham, you made already once a model for pioneer?

i'm not sure, because many "visited" the game, but i know most left and shook their heads about the LMR (while never ask me, i still love it).

some of the cancelled attempts i still have on my HD.

Not that I know of. I did try a ship or two for the free orion, but their required ship quality was well beyond my skills at that time. I have since improved massively though. It is possible that someone tried to import my designs form the SR Mirage shipset. 

Great, I'm looking forward to see it!

Do you need any more detailed, larger drawings of it? I think you should start a thread for it in the dev forums, devs are frequenting that place more than the community forums.

My bamboo behaves strange a lot too, usually after i put the computer in hibernation, but that can be solved with a simple reboot, so I don't think thats your problem :). Does it have enough power? Sometimes USB ports don't give out enough voltage (usually I get this with HDDs), which can be solved with an usb hub with external power.

Great, I'm looking forward to see it!

Do you need any more detailed, larger drawings of it? I think you should start a thread for it in the dev forums, devs are frequenting that place more than the community forums.

My bamboo behaves strange a lot too, usually after i put the computer in hibernation, but that can be solved with a simple reboot, so I don't think thats your problem :). Does it have enough power? Sometimes USB ports don't give out enough voltage (usually I get this with HDDs), which can be solved with an usb hub with external power.

Wow, you do reply fast! I haven't yet registered on the dev forums, since I am not quite sure I am good enough to contribute to pioneer in earnest. We will see after this test. 

It would be lovely if you could elaborate a little on the design. My biggest problem is coming up with cool design. It would be much easier to change something before I start on the texture, If I made a mistake. Like I said the mesh modelling is simple. At the moment the back face seems rather flat (where the main engines are housed). It would also be good to have  some detail of the front cargo doors. 

I have solved the tablet just before I went to bed yesterday. For some reason the config file was corrupted, and no manner of reinstall/uninstall drivers/delete folders was solving it. So I Installed the tablet on my laptop, exported the config file, manually edited the screen resolution and imported the settings. Bam! - everything works. 

I'm sitting at the computer working on university assignment, and I'm checking the forums constantly as a procrastination. 😀

I'll draw some more then, but it has to wait until the afternoon. Check the Natrix too for ideas, they are the same line of ships.

Don't be to anxious, based on your Mirage line I think you can handle yourself fine (and this is a learning experience for us too, so...). Texturing should be a bit different and brighter than those though, but I don't think that's a problem.

Bamboos screw up the config files all the time. They treat the table a new device with blank settings even when you connect them to a different USB port. Man I hate that.

This is how it looks at the moment. I haven't done the cockpit area yet, since I have to do that after I apply the mirror.

Loogs good so far.

This might give you some tips how I was thinking about it until I work out the back, the front door and underside of it.

The proportions might be a bit off on the nose area. I've left in some construction lines which might help.

I like the idea of that hole area on the nose, but it might be better to have it smaller.

I've modified your top area to have a cargo door and a crane that hides in the hull.

I kept the side flat for now but that might change. I'm not sure.

The heat sinks on the back doesn't need to be extruded, they are just surrounded with some intruded areas.

The RCS blocks should match the other two ships'.

Hope my handwriting is illegible. 😀

This is a very good start.

I was distracted by trying to figure out how to bake low poly model from high poly mesh in blender. I have finally figured it out so I have started modelling again. Here is progress report.

Looks fine.

It took me a while, but here's a quick and dirty sketch about the engines and belly of the craft.

I was aiming for three engines, for a bit of variety.

Never mind the screwed perspective. 😀

Again, I like the proportions of what you posted. It already feels heavy even when it's in ortho view.

How much is heavy this one ? like deneb or venturestar or is relly an heavy with 1000+ Tons ?

I'd say it's heavier. As an estimatin I'd say at least two or three times more payload volume then the Venturestar. We can measure it when the model is ready.

Thank you for the sketches. The model is basically finished (I have just adjusted the under side over my morning coffee) and I am working on the texture.  I would say based on the mesh and the cockpit opening that it would have around 160 - 200 tons of cargo space, depending how much of the internal space is used up by the engines and fuel tank.

EDIT: should I scale the ship in any particular way? At the moment its 95 cm long... 😀

You are working fast.

Yes, you should use meters ase your base of measurements, and when scaled up, apply the scale transformation to avoid any issue when importing. I' say import the Amphiesma or Natrix and use their cockpit as a base for scaling.

After that you can measure the volume with the 3D printing addon. I think you will be suprised about the possible capacity. It's quite easy to underestimate volume. If this ship's cargo hold is only 10m*10m*5m, then it has 500m3 volume which means 500 tonnes of water.

You are working fast.

heh, actually I am really dragging my feet here, since I was trying a lot of new stuff and also I am quite busy at work as well.

Here is the LOW poly model textured. No ship markings yet, still working on that.

Looks very fine.

You usually do the lower LOD first? I find it much easier to do it in reverse with the new bmesh tools. They usually don't touch the UV's if you don't delete anything with a seam.

Looks very fine.

You usually do the lower LOD first? I find it much easier to do it in reverse with the new bmesh tools. They usually don't touch the UV's if you don't delete anything with a seam.

I have a feeling you could teach me a lot about blender.  My biggest problem at the moment is UV mapping the hi poly mesh...