the O Miner

[Unseelie]

Thank you Turkish.

Guys, this is my first attempt at a ship. I'm about to post my second model ever, so please keep that in mind.

The concept is a mining craft that has a ring of mining equipment on it, attached to a large engine sphere with cargopods surrounding it.

The vessel busts up larger asteroids and then hauls smaller ones into the ring, where it tears them apart for veins of ore.

These are very rough mockups of shapes that can fit the idea, while I learn the modeling software. Please keep that in mind.

Here's Ominer2

All but the two images in the top left are images from the bottom of the model, which is where most of the details are apparent. Please keep in mind that the ring is the lowest hanging portion of the model.


Some responses: Tenny, I understand where you're going with that. I'm not attempting to build a civilian industrial vessel that matches the military capital craft. The designs for fightercraft and capitals are quite divorced from one another, and the freighter takes a direction rather different than the capitals. My concept is to take the rounded nature of the clyde and compare it to the engine section on the largest ship, and make that engine sphere play a major role in the shape of this design.

To all the other people saying its too smooth for a human design, please go observe the smaller bretonian ships. They are very, very smooth, organic shapes, not like the rougher edged shapes of liberty. Often, where the armour extends out of the hull to form crisp edges is a dramatic design element of the bretonian line, where a large plate is cut with batwing curves.

Turkish: thanks a lot.


My feeling about this iteration is that it needs something on the top, but I don't know quite what. Something to sew the cargoboxes into the major hull...but there isn't really a major hull yet, and I'm not sold on the idea. Largely, I want the model to display that sphere in the middle (which is the engine) as a major design element. I may go out and oversize the engine even more in the next attempt, to the point that most of the ship's mass is in the sphere, as though they've taken a Dunkirk engine and built a few cargopods around it.

The thing chews into asteroids, that's a high energy pursuit, and I'm particularly taken with the idea of making this thing about the engines.

The ring itself I want to eventually carve batwing style, as I mentioned was a major design element above. The curves will face back, toward the hull, and a smooth, reasonably sharp edged ring will face forward. It should be as if someone took eight of the Clydesdale wings and attached them end to end to form a circle.

I'd love more comments on the design, concept, produced models, and progression. Thanks a lot for your comments to date.

---