>That is a very sleek design. The hull is too alien for my tastes though. I
>prefer ships with recognizeable details (guns, hull panels, airlocks,
>sensors, etc.) Could be a nice ship if the crackle were removed and "real"
>details were added.

The texture was chosen to provide a distinctive look. I do have ships with
a more metallic, panelled surface - if two ships look completely different,
it helps with telling them apart in an animation. You should have seen the
earlier versions of this one - talk about vomit-inducing colours...

>Don't want to sound so negative. The shape of the ship is VERY nice.
> -Shay
>

Thanks! Blobs are great. I like blobs. And sphere_sweeps, too (they make up 
the arcing sections with the blue "energy" texture in the centre). However,
I've found that those objects do make realistic hull damage hard to do in a 
quickly-rendering fashion, on the downside.

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In article <3c6d9f63$1@news.povray.org>, "Hugo" <hua### [at] post3teledk> 
wrote:

> The ship is nice, but I disagree with that statement. The ship I am planning
> on paper, does not have any weapons really.. I definetely think it's
> unnecessary

If you have a ship capable of interstellar travel, the ship itself would 
make a very good weapon...just accelerate towards the target, drop a few 
small objects out the airlock, and change velocity so the ship itself 
misses the target. Or just abandon ship. ;-)

Even a small mass, like a piece of silverware, would have a huge amount 
of kinetic energy if it is travelling at a significant percentage of c. 
An entire ship going that speed...big boom.

And all this assumes the drive that pushes the ship is useless as a 
weapon...a stream of hot, near-lightspeed ions might actually work 
pretty well.

-- 
Christopher James Huff <chr### [at] maccom>
POV-Ray TAG e-mail: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
TAG web site: http://tag.povray.org/

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I like it a lot - looks very alien. The texture and design make it very
organic ...



"Tom York" <tom### [at] compsocmanacuk> wrote in message
news:3c6d7e82$1@news.povray.org...
> I like starships, even if they are second only to glass spheres on
> chessboards in the cliche-stakes. So here is a megapov starship.
> It started life several years ago as a super-ellipsoid experiment
> gone wrong, and is now mainly blobs and sphere_sweeps. The surface
> pigment is, of course, the mighty crackle, with the crackle normal
> problem retained because I like the angular look it provides.
>
> The elliptical green aperture and the blue arcs are supposed to be
> ports for weapons, because if there's one thing you can be sure of
> in space, it's the need for an unreasonable amount of firepower!
>
> The background is just several layers of bozo pigment, and was based
> on Chris Colefax's excellent nebula include file.
>
> http://www.compsoc.man.ac.uk/~tomy/graphics/ship04.jpg
>
> (~92K jpeg)
>
> Tom

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In article <3c6d9f63$1@news.povray.org>, Hugo wrote:
>> if there's one thing you can be sure of  in space,
>> it's the need for an unreasonable amount of firepower!
>
>The ship is nice, but I disagree with that statement. The ship I am planning
>on paper, does not have any weapons really.. I definetely think it's
>unnecessary.
>
>Regards,
>Hugo
>
>

How am I going to do StarWars in POV if there are no weapons? ;-)


Tom

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> How am I going to do StarWars in POV if there are no weapons? ;-)

You didn't say "star wars" but "space" in your first post.  :o)

Hugo

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Shay wrote:

> That is a very sleek design. The hull is too alien for my tastes though. I
> prefer ships with recognizeable details (guns, hull panels, airlocks,
> sensors, etc.) Could be a nice ship if the crackle were removed and "real"
> details were added.

I disagree, in an alien ship I would not expect to see any recognizable
details.
This ship looks organic, i.e. grown not designed. Actually that would make
sense. Growing your ship (and possibly generating a new one) from material
acquired during travel is probably more realistic than having a complete
shipyard and an engineering department on board every ship.

as for the

>  because if there's one thing you can be sure of
> in space, it's the need for an unreasonable amount of firepower!
>
in the original posting, I could not disagree more. You realy have watched
too much star wars/strar trek etc. movies. Space is so huge that interstallar
battle is too unlikely to be a realistic option, simply because you can not
find your opponent within a reasonable life expectance of only a few
thousand years. Besides I do not think a civilization that would combine
aggression and space travel technology has any change of surviving for
more than a few centuries, but that is a political issue.

BTW did I say I liked your design.

    Andrel

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This is going to be somewhat off-topic - apologies to all.

>Growing your ship (and possibly generating a new one) from material
>acquired during travel is probably more realistic than having a complete
>shipyard and an engineering department on board every ship.

I think it's really difficult to say what's realistic in this field. 
Nobody has built a spaceship capable of interstellar travel yet, and 
we have no idea what would work and what wouldn't. Possibly an organic
hull would be more demanding to maintain than an inorganic one - it'd
certainly require more fluids (he said, as if he knows what he's talking
about :-). Possibly growing the hull and then having the cells freeze, or
die to leave a solid hulk would be viable.


>as for the
>
>>  because if there's one thing you can be sure of
>> in space, it's the need for an unreasonable amount of firepower!
>>
>in the original posting, I could not disagree more. You realy have watched
>too much star wars/strar trek etc. movies. 

With my limited aptitude and time, I feel I can make more impressive space 
battles than Chris Foss-style cruising shots. They're easier to make look 
good, because more is going on. I think. I don't share the StarWars or 
Star Trek (or Babylon 5, etc) view of what those battles should look like,
though.

>Space is so huge that interstallar
>battle is too unlikely to be a realistic option, simply because you can not
>find your opponent within a reasonable life expectance of only a few
>thousand years. 

Depends on the assumptions we make. For instance,

A) Depends on the speed of interstellar travel.

B) Depends if life is going to concentrate around planetary systems (increased
   likelihood of an encounter between ships) or spread out evenly.

I make some equally undecideable assumptions:

A) Motivation for battle. If both sides have access to the resources of an
   entire planetary system, including asteroid mining and the energy from a 
   star, why fight over raw materials? What's the motivation for fighting?

B) There are enough encounters between ships to make weapons worthwhile.

I think maybe a ship that can reconfigure itself as the need arises would 
be the most "realistic" option. If it needs weapons, it can rapidly build
them, but otherwise the mass is used elsewhere.

>Besides I do not think a civilization that would combine
>aggression and space travel technology has any change of surviving for
>more than a few centuries, but that is a political issue.
>

It's really difficult to say.

>BTW did I say I liked your design.
>
>    Andrel
>

Thanks! :-)

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> You realy have watched
> too much star wars/strar trek etc. movies

mmm.... sadly to say, even Star Trek has become strongly affected by
"hollywood" with too much of that space fighting week after week.. As if
every case leads to a battle.. I hate that.. But do you know what's the
worst? The mass of people want this!

Hugo

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"Hugo" <hua### [at] post3teledk> wrote in message
news:3c6fdbf7$1@news.povray.org...
> mmm.... sadly to say, even Star Trek has become strongly affected by
> "hollywood" with too much of that space fighting week after week.. As if
> every case leads to a battle.. I hate that.. But do you know what's the
> worst? The mass of people want this!

We want it because ANYTHING different than the same serial/sit-com plots
recycled over and over again is a welcome change.

replies to POT

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Tom York schrieb:

> >Space is so huge that interstallar
> >battle is too unlikely to be a realistic option, simply because you can not
> >find your opponent within a reasonable life expectance of only a few
> >thousand years.
>
> Depends on the assumptions we make. For instance,
>
> A) Depends on the speed of interstellar travel.
>
> B) Depends if life is going to concentrate around planetary systems (increased
>    likelihood of an encounter between ships) or spread out evenly.
>

I think, most of future space warfare beyond the Solar System would
happen
to be internecine fighting within one civilization, as technologically
advanced
civilizations capable of interstellar travel, according to our present
knowledge,

probably are too rare and too widely scattered across the Galaxy to even
know of each other, not to mention physical encounters.

This considerations make me toy with some until now very embryonic
sci-fi scenario: Pashtun tribes colonizing the larger moons of an
extrasolar
gas giant, around 1800 AD, during the settling process centuries-old
fractions among them break up, and finally we have the famous-infamous
feud between the Achakzai and the Nurzai, now taking place on
Ghurghusht,
the largest, almost Earth-sized moon of Qais, itself largest planet of
the Shams
system (also known as DM +19 279)... wouldn't be that a thrilling
concept
for the Internet Movie Project?

See you in Khyberspace!

Yadgar

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