Harvester

[Jinx]

haha - funny - no.... but yes... thinking about shipdesigns is some sort of sparetime activity. - you know... before disco - i often made sketches on little yellow papers while working in the university ( students job to archive stuff - rather boring ... ) - with the discovery of modelling sorfware, i was finally able to make my thoughts actually hit the 3d.

so - to make a model - it starts with a box - and 30 min later, it looks like that - can t tell you how... i just add stuff here and there and then they re done. - the real work is texturing them ( hardpointing isn t too much work, especially when its replacement hardpointing )

well - more to the point. - it appears as if its not gonne be a rheinland pirate cruiser replace - so i ll hardpoint two variants and submit them with a suggestion. - one will be using the corsair dreadnaught hardpoints - since its in the game but not used.... the other will use the corsair huntress hardpoints.

both ships could be replaced easily - furthermore, i am working on a replacement of the kushan VHF ( the one sold in kappa/gammu ) - a fighter that should be a replace for the bugged VHF ( due to its strange hitbox ) - once done, both ships are submitted to igiss - and will await his judgement.

one problem i see with such designs is that.... the longevity of playerfactions isn t too great - unless they are heavily based on the vanilla NPC factions ( the =CR= runs well - but thats an exception so far ) ... when the harvesters die out apruptly or slowly - such a design would become useless as no faction ( not even zoners ) couls possibly fly such a thing.

the concept is indeed to be the "ancient" shape of what the zoner juggernaut ( new version ) is supposed to be derived from - however distantly. - but the juggernaut is still the most alien ship the zoners should fly i guess.

but all that are concerns that are not based on anything and are just that - concerns. - only time will tell how the factions will prosper or die.

edit: about the texture... yes it looks clean and cold. - but an organic looking texture needs to be really really good to look convincing - or it looks utterly cheap. - i tried to use nomad .xml but failed doing it, - they wouldn t show up ingame - so i have up on that. - tried to convert them.... still no luck. - so there we are... these are generic FL textures, even if the "metal" texture isn t really used much on FL models. - any other texture wouldn t look good on it - it had to be a clean and smooth one, not something tiled as a liner / generic faction based shiphull skin. - i also tried custom textures, but it wouldn t look very convincing.

about the power of the ship - its really small - comparable to one of the smaller destroyers - it could be made rather agile ( if its armour was reduced to make up for it ) - when its a huntress replace, it would have up to 12 turrets. - i ll make sure that they cannot fire into every direction though.

about the hitbox - both, the nomad BB and the bretonian battleship hitbox fit well over it - the nomad BB would have these three spikes - but would cover the shape pretty well - the bretonian battleship would miss some of the lower parts of the ship - but would cover the whole hull perfectly well.

while testflying, the rheinland pirate cruisers agility felt OK ( that thing is quite agile - imo ) - since its easy to get it through asteroids - it might loose some of the strafing abilities.

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Shipdesigns made for DiscoveryGC