First off a Disclaimer. YES, I know that the liberty carrier has been Yue Fei's pet project. This design is NOT meant to be flown by players. I am working on a system, and I want to put a dockable carrier in it, but I find that the current designs are lacking detail to be proper bases. (Their unique textures also makes them stick out like a sore thumb against other liberty designs)
Yue and I differ somewhat on design philosophy for liberty. His models are slightly blockier and are trying to hint towards liberty going stealth with their ships. I however believe we should dive deeper into the art deco inspired elements of vanilla liberty craft. This is what my current work in progress for the Ulysses class looks like.
Since I have not started the engines yet please look at this piece of developer concept art and envision the engine from that freighter connected to the back.
With the bow I wanted emulate the profile of popular art deco renderings of an ocean liner. I also wanted to pronounce the axe head for artistic effect, and to provide cover for a docking bay that I had originally planed to go on the underside.
The conning tower was supposed to look like the Chrysler Building in New York, but I chopped down the top to reduce the height of the ship, and to give a better impression of a control tower.
The deck is angled to pay homage to modern aircraft carriers. That deck is intended for recovery, not launch. If a carrier must make a retreat, you want to recover as many fighters as possible and they will be traveling at tremendous speed to wards the ships. In such cases I believe a runway is safer than charging an open port and hoping you slow down in time to avoid hitting a wall.
The area directly under the runway on the command tower side has the four launch tubes. The opposite side with the tower that looks a tad Gothic has normal docking bays on either side. In the future I hope to have an open bay directly underneath where a gunship sized vessel can dock with the carrier.
Unfortunately this design has some issues. The angle deck makes it asymmetrical, which is making it tough to visually balance the ship. I have tried moving the comm tower around. Right now I like it where it is because the right side looks very well put together.
Another issue is that the top of the ship is still very squared and pretty plain. The bottom is also still lacking detail. (And I have yet to start the engines)
I have been working on this for the last 4-5 days straight, and I need to take a break on it because I am starting to become frustrated. I'll be putting "on the shelf" for a while and come back too it when my mind is cleared and my eyes are fresh. In the mean time feel free to offer your individual perspectives.
![[Image: 25z2zx4.jpg]](http://i30.tinypic.com/25z2zx4.jpg)