SpaceSimCentral

a lot of imagination!

for the rear engine you will have to pardon me, it's glowing blue in the original and there is no way to carve this bezier shape out so i tricked the engine glow on the shape. it's still better or closer to the original as to stick out some thruster nozzle.

strange, in the manual the gyr is described as single seater but it needs two crew members in the game.

The crew members have to be very close friends then!

my fault, i shouldn't refere to an aniso mod where the ship specs are hacked, the gyr has definately only one crew member (while ok comparing to the scale there will be easy space enough for a footballteam in this oversized ship).

i'm very sorry for the loss of my screenshots, it happened now for the second time and i have no idea why thus i canceled my picload account and use what i should have used already - my google account.

no space for even only one member of a footballteam:

the Falcon is apart from a few added vertices the exact geometry except that i turned almost everything to a bezier surface. it worked well was quite easy done and the result is amazing if you guess that it's build from a handfull of points.

the success with the falcon and because it was so easy done i started to rebuild the hawk/kestrel in the same manner but it turned out that it needed special effort (many new points and a geomtry split into several parts in ffe) to reach something which isn't as good as the falcon (imho).

the profile of the falcon wing is quasi wrong (it's anyway wrong), when i used the points as in this image the profile of the resulting bezier surfaces showed a larger surface for the underside of the wing. of course this i changed for my conversion and there isn't much difference in the result except that now the top surface is larger.
to reach the needed points for the bezier quad i just added one (per iteration) at the front of the wings profile in exact the height of the next point (those which form the wings profile in the original) due to that this nice wing shape was created.

yes the Falcon is straight green in FFE - but it uses the "cobra" texture in FE2.
there are many differences in skin use between them because of that i started to blend what is FE2 FFE and my own impression of it many of the teytures i used at start i didn't use anymore and almost all ships use now own skins instead of many several textures it's foremost better for my dynamic skin selection.

a substitute

half 'n half



the hawk/kestrel is build from i guess 6 different parts; hawk fuselage, hawk wing, hawk recess, hawk fin, kestrel mid-section, kestrel engines to make it possible in FEE to reu-se the hawk for the kestrel. it gave me a lot of troubles keeping this idea to build two ships from one because due to the slghtly different shape i couldn't use except for the wings itself the same texture twice.

i know i rebuilded it already for FFED3D but this time i redesigned the wings and apart from being thin like a razorblade they look much better as the geometry i used for my first model even if the previous "ffed3d hawk/ketrel" are else more detailed and such but the wings surface is better now and i guess i will re-use it. the difference is mainly that even for the ffed3d version even when it was build with blender i used a quick snapshot of a lua scripted geometry for the wings bezier shape, it's much easier and better made in with the lmr as modelling engine (for pre-modelling) as if i had to create a bezier shape in blender, at least i feel i can't reach the same so well. this first bezier shape was a flat and a triangle to close the surface like the original is designed knowing that due to the divisions it will result in a very smooth and unlike the "flat" command result in a proper shaded surface. but it's not as smooth as the new one which is rebuild using a bezier quad surface, it doesn't needs the triangle to close and smoothly slides into the fuselage. the only thing which worries me now a little is that it is this thin. if i lift it i lose the exact shape (while even if it's not to see i changed the fuselage a little and splitted the top from the bottom section to add an extra bezier not to have a sharp edge between top and bottom, you can't see it but you would if this 4mm wouldn't be there and it would be sharp and not rounded).
on the other hand in FFE (and as well any other similar game) and in pioneer you can't make good use of a Hawk or a Kestrel, i guess they are only men't as agressors because you can hardly fit a 1MW pulse laser and very often they are unequipped due to this lack of space in FE2/FFE (like in FE2 the Falcon which has a little more cargo space, the Hawk and Kestrel didn't exist there i guess).

In FE2 the Falcon is the typical enerving unarmed ship which follows you everywhere, but sometimes it's equipped with a 5MW pulse laser and then you have to take some care your shields can vanish quite fast.

to the Hawk and Kestrel i can't tell so much i played FFE but by far not as much as FE2 except that 9 tons cargo space are far to less drive, gun, and well choose autopilot or scanner or radar mapper or atmospheric shielding or ecm but you can only have three of them.

however, how it turned out i fell a little in love with the Falcon, mostly because it was surprising how well it worked out by using the few points the original ship has. the tip could be less pointed but else it's a cool somekind of retro supersonic jet looking space ship (missile shaped vessel )

i don't like the tail of the Hawk to be honest, somehow it destroys the else nicely shaped aircraft.
i have an impression everytime i work with the FFE geometry that some of the ships aren't designed by the same hand. from my POV a FE2 Falcon looks different to a FFE Hawk, not because they are two different type of aircrafts, it's how they are designed. How a Gyr is designed i.e. with all it's sloppyness, sticked together like the Hawk or Kestrel while the old ships was made like from one cast.

somehow the Falcon underscores this because it was like it would have planned to be made from bezier shapes while for the Hawk i had to redisgn many parts and still...

i digged out the script for the merlin and after noticing why i stopped the progress i layed it on ice, i must find a solution for the flapping wings so that they look still close to the original (i won't move the vertices and simply stretch the geometry).

i noticed i lost the script for the "Turner Class" that's sad.

pardon me

the special thing about the hawk/kestrel are the many parts it's made from and that i had to respect flipping over x axis, different position and due to that different texture coordinates for the same geometry. the wing is build over x axis and flipped for the use, either it follows the points clockwise or counter clockwise i kept this idea and thus my parts are all functions to respect the varying use. in general all parts are mirrored in this way for the Hawk except for the fuselage which is obviousely only used once (ok one could design a third ship from the parts using two fuselages why not?) one geometry multiple use and flipping by simply changing the winding order that's quite clever. but well if one snoops int the objects and won't know the exact use of certain parts he will wonder about the Kestrel mid-section, a part made of 6 points? what the heck should that be good for?

just some pictures












merry what?

looks like i have a good reason to re-post my screenshots
(or probably to start a new thread? this new kind of blog style, all in one page is somewhat annyoing as more as i post as longer you have to wait until all is loaded from on a certain limit it get's uncomfortable, also i was guessing about a own section for "phoenix" but it's still to early for this, not before i compiled my own).

here's a slight update to the cobby, this is the first time i tried to wash out the texture i never used this idea because usually the variable material in pioneer is far to saturated for such but since the FE2 palette i use is mostly metallic grey with a scent of a color i gave it a try and it ended out well.
if it uses a dark green blue or red it won't look that good this is what i labelled as "tan" the skin is already orange (or what is left of the orange brown texture).

ahh.. finally but unfortunately the pictures vanished in a mysterious way in the meantime, lol and no critics to the admins here it's not your fault.

i stumbled over this here:


it didn't looks exactly like a lockheed sr-71 it looks exactly like the Kestrel (or vice versa).

That's by Roger Dean. He actually glued a bird's skull onto a plastic model of an SR-71, then drew it. I had that model kit as a child, but I didn't put a bird's head on it.
I think those tiny ships only make sense as police ships. They wouldn't need a hyperdrive.
I'd love to see the pictures sometime!

Oooh I recognise that album cover! Budgie was a great group back in the day!

more like fruit flies which follow you everywhere.

i was listening the album on yt, couldn't remember it well but i guess someone posted this already long ago?

it's agreat rock album.

---

yes, i would like to SEE them to

so here's something to see
(ok i will pack the wip of ffe ships to a mod them are already 18 ships do far for an exclusive use with Pioneer alpha31 or Phoenix)

[url]https://photos.app.goo.gl/ReS6SnCsd4Vw5Qw99[/url]

a lot more to see,

link to the album on google photos:
[url]https://photos.app.goo.gl/ReS6SnCsd4Vw5Qw99[/url]



a city skyline from far