Ugliest Starship

[middenface]

I came to post my views on the yacht, Jame, and you did do a decent job with it, but it's no good ... it's a horrible blob! I did a bit of tinkering with the safari ship and also the Type T crusier, both are beautiful designs and would certainly grace the hanger of a noble. I tend to think of yachts in the mould of the Nubian cruiser in The Phantom Menace. Shiny!

Urm Paul, thats mine... (the Yacht that is)

Nubian eh? He says like Watoo..
That's an idea.

 

[Reynard]

Now you made me search Nubia and Nubian ancient art. Oh the images of their ship designs decorated in hieroglyphics and symbols.

 

[Condottiere]

Speaking of ancient nature deities, this has to be one of the more disturbing designs:

 

[fusor]

Speaking of ancient nature deities, this has to be one of the more disturbing designs:

I think they rather emphasised the booby attributes of the ship in the artwork. In the film it's not quite that obvious. And actually the movie has a lot of really cool ship designs in it.

And Nell will blow you out of the sky if she heard you talking like that about her.

 

[wbnc]

Yeah, someone enhanced Nells cleavage a little...That must be her Sister..ya know the one who went in for a "Hull Refit"

 

[Mithras]

Ah sorry Ian, didn't see that ... it is a beautiful rendering (as always) - but the Traveller design is just like a rock!

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Realistically, reactionless or not, Maneuver Drives would be much more effective if they were separated into partial units and put at every extreme of the ship away from the center of mass; better leverage there. And just inboard of the Maneuver Drive units would be the sensor units, similarly “leveraging” the improved perspective that having its units mounted at the extremes provides. A ship would be much more likely to be “pulled” from the front and the sides than “pushed” from the back, unless it’s just some massive freighter or “ship-of-the-line”, for which turning performance is less important for one reason or another.

Maybe there's a core piece of the M-Drive that's way more expensive then the rest and so breaking it up into a whole bunch of little pieces would make the drive ridiculously expensive.

Maybe multiple M-Drives interfere with each other, so you actually have to use gas jets for turning.

Maybe the single drive actually generates a field that you can modulate to "push" on specific parts of the ship as you choose, thus allowing the single drive to be just as effective as multiple drives.

Maybe M-Drives do 'pull' and we've just been looking at the ships backwards this whole time!

With no real life analogue for a reactionless drive, and nothing solidly defined in the existing rules (as far as I know), we can pretty much justify it however we want, and thus, at least as far as M-Drives, there's not a solid "function" for form to follow.

You have missed the point entirely. The only important point is, “Do the Maneuver Drives produce force?”; if yes, then leverage is still a thing. Being able to justify something with handwavium doesn’t mean you should. Handwavium is a lazy excuse that denies players actionable realism, which stifles gameplay.

The Maneuver Drive is what turns the ship, so it can... you know... perform “maneuvers”; hence, “Maneuver Drive”, and not “Thrust Drive”. If the ship needs jets to turn, then those jets are part of the Maneuver Drive. Otherwise, a ship with a busted Maneuver Drive could rotate in place as much as it wanted.

Plenty of existing ship designs use multi-part Maneuver Drives for whatever design reason, so, by precedent, multiple Maneuver Drives can’t interfere with one another as destructively as you describe.

 

[FallingPhoenix]

You have missed the point entirely. The only important point is, “Do the Maneuver Drives produce force?”; if yes, then leverage is still a thing. Being able to justify something with handwavium doesn’t mean you should. Handwavium is a lazy excuse that denies players actionable realism, which stifles gameplay.

My only point was that, since reactionless drives are fictitious, there's nothing that says (all of) the force that the drive produces must be produced at the location of the drive.

 

[fusor]

My only point was that, since reactionless drives are fictitious, there's nothing that says (all of) the force that the drive produces must be produced at the location of the drive.

I pointed this out earlier in reply to your own post:

With no real life analogue for a reactionless drive, and nothing solidly defined in the existing rules (as far as I know), we can pretty much justify it however we want, and thus, at least as far as M-Drives, there's not a solid "function" for form to follow.

In TNE at least, the maneuver drives used in previous editions were defined as being Thruster Plates (pg 73, FF&S). Though they were presented as an alternative option there and acknowledged as being very unrealistic because the ship literally pushes against plates mounted on the hull in order to to move.

(emphasis mine). That rather strongly implies that the location of the plates is where the force made by the drive is emanating from.

 

[FallingPhoenix]

My only point was that, since reactionless drives are fictitious, there's nothing that says (all of) the force that the drive produces must be produced at the location of the drive.

I pointed this out earlier in reply to your own post:

With no real life analogue for a reactionless drive, and nothing solidly defined in the existing rules (as far as I know), we can pretty much justify it however we want, and thus, at least as far as M-Drives, there's not a solid "function" for form to follow.

In TNE at least, the maneuver drives used in previous editions were defined as being Thruster Plates (pg 73, FF&S). Though they were presented as an alternative option there and acknowledged as being very unrealistic because the ship literally pushes against plates mounted on the hull in order to to move.

(emphasis mine). That rather strongly implies that the location of the plates is where the force made by the drive is emanating from.

Woops, sorry I missed that one. As you say, in TNE, if you switch from HEPlaR to Thruster Plates, this idea wouldn't work. You could probably still use the main drive in the back with smaller "maneuver plates" installed in other places around the hull but not drawn on the deckplan, if you wanted.

 

[fusor]

Woops, sorry I missed that one. As you say, in TNE, if you switch from HEPlaR to Thruster Plates, this idea wouldn't work. You could probably still use the main drive in the back with smaller "maneuver plates" installed in other places around the hull but not drawn on the deckplan, if you wanted.

I think the idea was that the official TNE setting only used HEPlaR for manoeuvering (along with more realistic things like attitude jets and chemical rockets and stuff like that), which changed things a lot from older Traveller (CT and MT) that only used Thruster Plates. It was one of those retroactive revamps where they waved their hands over your eyes and said "We've always used HEPlaR! What are these 'Thruster Plates' of which you speak?" (at least until they introduced them as an alternate technology in FF&S). Obviously that was just more ammunition for the old guard who were already on the warpath due to all the other changes wrought in TNE.

I liked the idea of HEPlaR, but it was a bit of a book-keeping nightmare and it provided unrealistic levels of thrust apparently. I think the TNE ship design system is the best of the lot by far though - very crunchy, and the ship's mass is actually important too.

 

[Epicenter]

Practically every sphere shaped ship in Traveller is ugly, the classic destroyer being one of the worst:

And here I thought the classic destroyer was one of the better-looking ships in Traveller.

Okay, it's not that great, but I think it's reasonable.

It's better than the classic Tigress aka "the happy fun ball."

Actually my favorite for the ugliest ship design I hope they never change in Traveller is the Far Trader.

Man, that glazed nose is wonderful - that nod to the Millenium Falcon and all. I love the design of that ship so much. It's ugly but it feels like the kind of ship someone would have actually designed over time. You know, the first model only had the more normal cockpit. But users kept adding in a secondary cockpit because the Far Trader was used on frontier worlds that didn't have global navigation instrumentation and in particular, frontier starports don't have landing instrumentation, so they needed a second cockpit by law on many worlds where a navigator could eyeball the landing site. End-users kept doing this so much the manufacturer modified their design to put in the glazed cockpit on the second run of the design.

 

[fusor]

Ugh.

It's a slab with a bulbous nose. The Proboscis Monkey of Space.

I don't even know what the Fleet Carrier from the CT Book 9 (Fighting Ships) is supposed to look like - it's like something from Escher's nightmares:

http://imgur.com/AfdP3fk


A lot of the ship art (and designs) in the MT Fighting Ships of the Shattered Imperium book are horrific too. They look like a computer artist got drunk and went crazy sticking polygons everywhere. No design logic to them at all. e.g. the "Battle Experimental":

http://imgur.com/AJcMmuM


God knows what they were thinking with this one. It's like an unholy cross between a few USB hubs (had they existed at the time it was drawn), a washing machine, and the Interstellar Queen from TTA. Supposedly it's also a "Fleet Carrier":

http://imgur.com/Xf2nGpb


It's funny because the smaller ships look pretty decent - it's just the big ones that look like monstrosities.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

The AHL was fun to model and do animations with.

Here is an ugly Xerox version. Meant to match the '70s style at the time.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

And here is an AHL done in Mongoose's old art style.

 

[Condottiere]

The beauty of the Azhanti has always been on the inside, it's deckplans.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

The beauty of the Azhanti has always been on the inside, it's deckplans.

Yep. It's like a skyscraper on its side.

 

[middenface]

Boom...

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

Here's one of Andrew's AHLs.

 

[Condottiere]

The front codpiece was due to the spinal mount and the testicularly placed launch tubes.