SpaceSimCentral

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.

Defender (former "Defender 1")

You might remember that this was one of my earlier designs for Pioneer, a quite quick made model. The template for this ship is the tiny player ship of "Galaxian". Its named "Defender" because the "Galaxians" or later "Galaga" are your enemies but has no relation to the game "Defender".

This is a complete overhauled version, i spent almost one day only for this ship to keep it up to date. The meshes are new and i combined as much as possible into one mesh. The landing gear flaps and the recess is no longer cheated with overlayed geometry , the front flap opens now really instead to be a "null material" circle which simply covers (and cuts) the recess.

All for this lousy ship, but i like this lousy ship just because it reflects the Galaxian player ship.

Once i had the idea to adapt more classic shoot 'em up ships, like the R-Type or even the Defender even if the latter is only a couple of colored bars.

The Caiman

This ship was once designed to carry an additional "Lander" with it. I discarded this idea and it will be used only standalone, mostly because i changed the size of the "Lander" and it will no longer fit to the "Caiman".

Still i like this ship, it seems i put a lot of effort in the details. The performance is avarage for this size of ship, if i remember this right it has the "hidden feature" of a quite high lateral thrust and resulting angular thrust, this is something the ship info screen won't show thus it's "hidden".
Neither i like to show such to the player. It's not that you wont' like to know this capability of a ship, vice versa because i like that a player has to experience this, not everything must be kn own to you as a player, this isn't a simulation it should become a game.

This ship has solar panels on it for what purpose ever, perhaps to recharge your phone or something like that

"Typhoon"

A high detailed model which leaks only of a skin but looks already fine in the state it is. Its performance is outraking (or should be it seems i have to revisit the ship specs).

I guess "Vuzz" added a robot sub-model to it. At least when i changed the use simply to my scripted robot model it appeard on top of the ship.
The idea isn't bad it looks special with that robot on top, i could still use this idea for an alternative version.

"Phoenix" (former "Imperial Interceptor" or simply "Interceptor" the name is now occupied by a different ship thus i needed a new name for it. "Angel" would be a second idea for a name)

This ship also still leaks of a skin but is otherwise a very nice one. The performance should equal to the Caiman. A sort of "Cobra MK III" replacement.

It was my former Police vessel but is now replaced with the recent scripted "interceptor".

I'm very sorry but i missed this scripted model


The "Glalactic Freighter" is the last which i use of the "Galactic" ships. "Cruiser" and "Dinghy" i removed from the Game. The performance hit of this models is quite high but it's ok as Bulk Ship. It's recently the only Bulk Ship in Phoenix.

Sad that i missed to post this with the rest of scripted geometry ships.

"Shift"

My intentional "heavy craft", a heavy armoured sort of flying tank. The "Shift" is what i designed the Badger for. A clumsy but strong ship.
Its performance isn't to well but it can stand many hits.

Instead of a front gun mounting it has a fixed oriented gun turret, just because it looks good, we can have no turrets in "Pioneer" resp. "Phoenix".

"Lancet"

A bit saucerlike for a "Lancet" one of my "retro design" ships. It's not such a bad ship it just looks cheap.

"Moth"
(former ADC-44, Moth, Mosquito)

The retro fighter per se. Everything is 1944 on this ship, from the layout which are the never build airplanes / rocket gliders of the german Luftwaffe to the analogue gauges in the cockpit.

It comes with a military drive class one due to it's very tight space for equipment. Cargo? this ship has no space for such useless things like cargo
it's ment as a pure head hunter. Its hyperspace range is due to its little mass outraking (it's a wooden construction ) , but it leaks of everything else and space is that tight that you will have to decide which equipment you need for a task and probalbly will have to remove or exchange some for a task to fulfill.

Certainly no long range fighter for long ingterplanetary flights because it has also small fuel tanks. But perhaps the ship with the largest hyperspace range thus you are always a little earlier as your target. But well never be in a hurry to get home or to dock to the next station, divide your fuel up wisely.

"Terra" (former "Galactic" or "Terra Class")

The "Terra" was the reason why i removed the "Galactic Cruiser" from the set. It's a similar designed spherical large ship and only good to carry large amounts of cargo. Imho it also looks better as the primitve "Galactic Cruiser". Yet another retro design and somewhat inspired by "Perry Rhodan" while it's far form the look of them, while of course it changed a lot over the decades, this reflects a bit the '40s '50s style which was still to find on the cover artwork for "PR", some of the covers "Johnny Bruck" blatantly covered from U.S. paperbacks, mostly army novels but even from some sci-fi.

Thus it isn't "Perry" it's just a ship in retro design.

Today they draw them completely differen, maybe i link some fanmade CGI clips, they aren't bad even if i dislike some like the horizontal approaching "stardust" which is obviousely a classic "atomic rocket" and has to approach vertically with it's rear pointing forward to decelerate, it has no reverse thrusters. Also they turn the spherical ships around and use the rim as a sort of thruster ring. I never imagined this way, the ring contains the antigravity and hyperspace engines and works in all directions the same the ship doesn't have to be turned because it has in all directions the same thrust, the thermo blaster deflectors are positioned on the poles and can also point in any direction likewise the lasers of the enterprise with the difference that they are mounted on both poles. They drawed the flight or disappearing of the large ships like in Star Trek while clearly "PR" uses Hyperspace technology and not warp or FTL of some sort, means a ship transiting to Hyperspace would simply vanish and leave only mark, probably such a cloud or a remnant of the vast amount of energy needed for this as we have in Pioneer. Also the latter "Linear Drives" use the Hyperspace in theory and only glide between Universe and Hyperspace. At least that's how i understood the technic in "PR".

Nonetheles the clip of the 50 years of Perry Rhodan is quite good.
From the landing of Perry's "Stardust" on the moon to the latest to me a bit strange occurances in the storyline.
The humans are animated very stiff that's sad and shows a strong leak of the designers.

It was best up to Mechanica and Posbis, later it became more and more unreasonable to me. But well you have to find new environments to write new stories even if they are basically very repetive. Also times changed and massive battles in space with vast amounts of large battle ships have become obsolate once while i guess they will work these days again well.

Also many stories point back in time, it's obviousely more exciting if you can't demand all like a god and spaceships still moan and groan when they are in heavy use.

The first story of the inventor of PR (i forgot his name) was "Stardust" (the ship was named exactly like the later Stardust of PR) and it was accompained by the unique "wreck orchestra" the moaning and groaning when the engines had to move the heavy ship in a different direction. It was his first serie over a couple of novels but hasn't been published before his dead if i remember that right.
I don't remeber his name but i remember that he died young.
I've read it back then and even liked it better as PR, the story is more unique. But it was the initial idea to first create an environment and then to write stories fitting to this environment and timepath to create something which should never fail in story breaks. It did nonetheless i guess over the decades.

"Sepia"

Recently i cant tell much about this ship. I overhauled the model a little it's not a very good ahip as i remember. Like most of the retro ships it hasn't a good relation between hull mass and cargo capacity, they are usually heavy which would mean on the other hand that they can stand many hits. But formost it results in a low hyperspace range, a low acceleration and high fuel consumption.

Implementing such a large amount of ships will bring problems i knew it.

My last ship in the set of retro ships still contains a an ugly bug even if i completely overhauled the model i have overseen something, dammit!

Before i zipped the game i really thought i checked all installed ships if they won't fail if you add a certain equipment.

The problem is the team removed most of the sliders for equipment fro m the modelviewer (whysoever), i re-implemented and added the rest when i started "Sputnik" unfortunately the project is lost and what i have from it on my machine are only broken remnants.

However if i can't check something like "radar mapper" it still can fail in the game because i can't check in the modelviewer if it works proper.

Neither i understand what Vuzz had against it back then because if he would have implemented my version it would still exist.
Nah he didn't liked it for what reason ever even if the checking of the animations is one of the the main tasks if you develop scripted models.

Recently i have to help myself with using the basic sub-model for checking so i can see it on the ship without to be called up but this can still lead to an error mostly if i forgot to change to the final sub-model.

The fail of "Radar Mapper" is exactly what prevents the "Bloodrunner" from working proper. I've overseen the old call for "antenna" instead of the new call "mapper".

This means i have to fix this upload the project again and cross fingers that this was the last ugly bug ("smart bugs" which won't halt the game i don't mind much about).

Everytime, i'm very sorry, i stumble over such i start to feel again that this wasn't made occasionally, it was made intentionally to make me sick.
Or what would be the good reason to disavle some sliders from the modelviewer? or other changes which only was a plague to me like a change from "dock_one_at_a_time_please" to "dock_one_at_:a_time" it's still a long command and does exactly the same it's a totally useless change and the only reason could be to keep me busy with such useless changes from spelling "a" as "a" or "a" which is in the end simply "a" and "b" will be "b" however it is spelled.

I know that they liked to get rid of the LMR and little me but i guess it would have worked better in the straight way a construction worker is used to understand.

Simply say: "piss off" and don't plan sleek things beyond my back this only made me upraged back then because i'm not stupid and even if i act often naive i can smell it from far.

Of course i remember that i never understood this decision back then, but to enerve me with such useless changes was the least.

But that's past in "Phoenix" no one says "piss off" (direct or indirect).

Und es kommt auch keiner auf einem Sessel dahergeflogen und erzählt mir was das sei nun eine Meriokratie und er hätte nun das sagen ohne das er auch nur ein bisschen geleistet hat, an diesem krankt unsere ganze Gesellschaft, Patrizier und Emporkömmlinge schlicht das was man Dekadenz nennt und woran das Römische Reich gescheitert ist. Menschen welche glauben sie hätten Kompetenz allein durch ihren Namen oder ihr Vermögen. Erbsenzählen oder einen bestimmten Namen tragen ist aber keine Kompetenz das kann der Vogel Strauss auch.

Es bleibt so wie es ist und Scotty würde 100% hinter mir stehen wenn ich sage "Fachkopetenz hat man erst wenn man Blasen an den Fingern hatte von der Facharbeit". Das wird aber nicht mehr geschätz,t heute hat jener Fachkompetenz welcher die saubersten Fingernägel hat und das kann kein gutes Ende nehmen.

Kein Freimaurer aber ich liebäugle sicher mit "nimm dir eine Schürze und eine Kelle und dann wollen wir mal sehen was du kannst auch ohne Geld,Namen und Ansehen. Wenn du das kannst dann können wir auf gleicher Augenhöhe miteinander reden.
Alles andere ist nicht Meriokratie /Leistungsgesellschaft, dazu muss man wohl erst mal was leisten) oder was immer sondern es läuft auf Plutakratie heraus, auf vererbare Macht ohne das man irgendetwas dazu leisten muss. Ob es nun mit Titel oder Geld vererbt wird läuft auf das selbe hinaus, inkompentente Leute an wichtigen Positionen.

WOW!!!!
Gernot, it's fantastic to see all these wonderful ships again! I am going to download the lot for Phoenix and have an "Ultimate" version of the Alpha 31!
Amiga music too! Pure heaven!

I like "Spatula City" it's the project webpage of huge "Joe Zbiciak" who is responsilble most for the Intellivision revival. Huge in all aspects, huge in dimensions but also a huge character and huge in his capabilities from machine coding to electronics, he can not only program he can also build it, that's what i respect most and he's in no way proud or lofty he's a natural dude and likes to show off his knowledge to anyone who asks for it and even if you don't ask for it he will explain it. He doesn't cares for your education level neither if you are wealthy, if you show interest you certainly will understand it.
Who ever asks him for a problem with his Inty will receive an answer no matter if he answered the same a hundred times. The Name seems to be program . "Spatula City" where you first have to show off what you can before you can demand anything and even if you can you won't demand or command. You only give advices and the gearwheels will run by itself without force and with a better result. But this is certainly misunderstood by those which have no natural competence and experience they can rely to. I can criticize him even as a nobody and he takes this serious if i hit the point. Even if i don't understand 10% of him of electronics (i would say) he still takes my questions serious.

This is anything else as stupid meriocracy which is no. Or anything which just underscores "i'm better because i'm of better blood".

"I'm not better then you even if i have 40 years of experience in it i still can learn something even from a untrained".

That's the right stuff!
We even don't need to underscore that we are humble, we just are ourselfes.

What was the biggest problem when i overhauled the Bloodrunner?

The change we made years ago in UV projection which was wrong wrong.
It was first wrong from the aspect "never change a running system".
it was wrong twice becuase it was the wrong idea, a lefthanded models UV is mirrored to a righthanded UV. the UV projection we use now in since this cahnge in Pioneer is wrong for lefthanded models, a misunderstanding which i can tolerate if you don't actively work with three dimensions. mistake which even happened tp our banks whith their new current showing a wrong drawed right handed cartesian coordinate system, well counting lentilles WORTHES NOT A SHIT. a shame because they liked to show how important they are for science and fail in the primitive stuff like this or archimedes' buoyancy. they can count but that's already all they can. they might be studied (in counting lentilles?) but haven't a part of the knowledge of a simple craftsman.
Just because they have simply no imagination of what they been talking about because they never had to made it. The bouyancy is my beloved example, ppl who should know it and studied statics have no imagination of the upwards trend concrete has, just because they leak of experience and imagination. A very bad constellation to win a price or to build a builöding which will last a couple of years but this don't matters to them as long as the salary is high enough.

I know this doesn't belongs to "Phoenix" and it does belong to "Phoenix" because it belongs to me and everyone of us where we go to in future.

With the recent ppl leading our globe we go straight to the next war becuase this is planned to save their capital because the implosion of our monetary system is clear as the blue sky.

any else would mean they will lose their capital and power and this they can't accept so the only solution they can see is war and again a war, they won't be the losers, the losers are the idiots who will walk in the field to die.

If we live tommorow under conditions like in medieval neither is a problem for them they will stay rich and powerful. vice versa this is even better for them if it's again like in medieval times. ppl will keep themself down they don't even have to care for this and they will have a better profit as right now.

Hey yeah Geraldine just a second, it had still an error, dammit little bug hided from me. While i fixed the mismatching spelling i did another mismatch (facepalm).

Happens when i feel i'm under pressure, i feel, in fact i wouldn't be under pressure.