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[WIP] LordChicken's Space Engineer's Star Trek Quest

LordChicken

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And since I got on to the topic of hangar floors, I put some work into trying to finish them yesterday. Here are the results:

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I still need to make the turntable, make the lights light up and some other bits, but coming along nicely.

Due to the size of the blocks in this game I have space for two shuttles, two worker bee drones, and four detachable cargo pods for said drones. I haven't got the worker bees or their equipment quite figured out but where I am going with the designs I've been testing, they all should be able to link up like a train.

I altered the layout of the shuttlebay cargo bay area a tad as well. I simplified it to reduce the poly count and make it more functional in game. But it is still really close to Andrew Probert design.

So far I like flying into the shuttlebay just as the character at full speed and trying to stop on the deck, like a fighter on an aircraft carrier. I usually miss because I'm coming into fast and slam into the rear of the cargo bay. Or I bounce off the deck and slam into the rear of the cargo bay.
 

CABAL

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So far I like flying into the shuttlebay just as the character at full speed and trying to stop on the deck, like a fighter on an aircraft carrier. I usually miss because I'm coming into fast and slam into the rear of the cargo bay. Or I bounce off the deck and slam into the rear of the cargo bay.
Aircraft carriers have a system to sort of 'catch' the aircraft as it lands to prevent that from happening. Still really hard to do, though, I presume. @Hellkite would know more. Would there be a way to create a similar system? Does the game have anything like a tractor beam?
 

kjc733

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Aircraft carriers have arrestor cables - these are cables under tension strung across the deck. The aircraft has a hook on a cable under the tail and the aim is to slam on the deck and catch the cable. If they miss then its full engines and take off again.

In the old days they use to have barriers as well, again a net (well several nets) under tension to prevent the aircraft slamming into aircraft parked forward. Now they have angled decks though.

Anyways, nice work!
 

Hellkite

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@CABAL Remember that I'm Air force not Navy :yuck: by the grace of God man
So no Aircraft carrier experience

But kjc is right

In universe of Star Trek tractor beams and Computer Automated controlled landing { in other words using the crafts own RCS thrusters and anti gravity unites to control the landing and taxi in the hanger } would be the best methods for a starfighter or shuttle to land on a starship.

With this said Star trek V had a emergency barrier net on the Enterprise A shuttle bay

320x240.jpg
 

CABAL

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@CABAL Remember that I'm Air force not Navy :yuck: by the grace of God man
So no Aircraft carrier experience
Well, yeah, but there has to be some cross over between traditional and naval aviation. Did they ever do any teaching or do training about it, just in case you needed to make an emergency landing on a carrier?
 

Hellkite

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Most USAF aircraft don't have a landing gear and tailhook assembly built for carrier landings. Probably the F-4 or the A-7 were the last USAF aircraft even built with the necessary strength. Certainly nothing in the current inventory could do a carrier landing.

If the USAF pilot flew a successful approach and hit the deck, the gear would likely fail, or worse, one main gear fail and the other not.

Excepting of course, some of the lighter aircraft (under 45,000 lbs landing weight) could be successfully flown into a barricade - though it is not something USAF pilots train to accomplish.

In general the USAF design concept is to not spend the extra 300-400 lbs for a possible carrier landing, rather to use that weight on a common aircraft for more fuel, avionics or weapons capability.

So no
 

CABAL

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I see. That's pretty interesting. I'm guessing that the reverse is not true and craft designed to land on a carrier can land just fine on a strip?
 

kjc733

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Carrier aircraft can land on normal runways. Carrier aircraft have a beefier structure which allows them to take the shock of what is essentially a controlled crash. A runway landing includes a "flair", where the aircraft pitch is "rotated" to increase lift, increase drag and thus slow speed, with the aim of touching down at a (close to) zero rate of descent with minimal power and speed. A carrier landing maintains the speed and descent rate because if they miss the hook they need as much power and speed as possible to return to flight in the sort amount of deck space available. But this doesn't prevent them from landing like a "normal" pilot.
If I recall, the early Seafires used to suffer from oleos punching through the wings because they were simply Spitfires converted (improperly) for Navy use.
Aircraft design is all about tradeoffs. If you want to land on a carrier you need beefier structure which adds weight and therefore limits fuel/payload. Conversely a non-carrier aircraft doesn't have that extra weight, but can't land on the carrier. Like it or hate it, the F35 is a fascinating study in these compromises.
 

LordChicken

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As far as I know CABAL they can. I'm from San Diego and whenever I went to air shows they would have something Airforce, something Marines, and something Navy fly in and land.

As far as this game goes, by default it does not have force fields or tractor beams. But people have modded them in with some success. With my development background I am fairly sure I can make a pretty good tractor beam system (its on the list), but I have been waiting to start with the mods that require heavy programming until after they finish out the mod API and more of the code base since the game is still in Alpha.

Either way it is still fun to try and land on the deck using nothing but the character.

Carrier aircraft can land on normal runways. Carrier aircraft have a beefier structure which allows them to take the shock of what is essentially a controlled crash. A runway landing includes a "flair", where the aircraft pitch is "rotated" to increase lift, increase drag and thus slow speed, with the aim of touching down at a (close to) zero rate of descent with minimal power and speed. A carrier landing maintains the speed and descent rate because if they miss the hook they need as much power and speed as possible to return to flight in the sort amount of deck space available. But this doesn't prevent them from landing like a "normal" pilot.
If I recall, the early Seafires used to suffer from oleos punching through the wings because they were simply Spitfires converted (improperly) for Navy use.
Aircraft design is all about tradeoffs. If you want to land on a carrier you need beefier structure which adds weight and therefore limits fuel/payload. Conversely a non-carrier aircraft doesn't have that extra weight, but can't land on the carrier. Like it or hate it, the F35 is a fascinating study in these compromises.

True story.
 
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LordChicken

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I don't know if anyone here has been following Space Engineers, but it is finally in Beta! Woot! Now time to finish all of those mods I started.

The campaign editor is also now live and the intro campaign to the game is really good. I highly recommend trying it out. I can't wait to finish these mods and all of my ships so I can start making some campaigns.

I have several ideas already :excited:

http://forums.keenswh.com/threads/update-01-166-stable-space-engineers-beta.7390358/

On the ship front I have started a few ships I need to post some pictures of. Perhaps tomorrow before I go to work.
 

LordChicken

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I'm still here, work has just been crazy and I haven't had time for fun things. BUT soon I should have a better work life balance. :D
 

LordChicken

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I have a new job and I start on Monday! I pretty excited about this job. I will be working as an Associate NetOps Engineer for Charter Communications. One of the things I am excited about is I will be able to have a better work life balance. I will no longer have to cover people's shifts when they don't show up, work late, weird hours, etc.

On this project, I am able to start working on it again. Woot! Now that the art direction for Space Engineers has been finalized I can start the process of adjusting and finishing up my designs so that they look as good and consistent as the standard blocks in the game.

Below is an example of the in game Hydrogen Tank (the red shows the parts that are recolorable):

in-game-hydrogen-tank.png

Below is the new Antimatter Containment Pod that I redesigned following the general aesthetic, again the red show the recolorable bits, also they have switched to a material library so I am also using their materials as well:

new-pod-2.png
And so you know what it looked like before:

old-pod.png

Polygon count is much higher but it looks a lot better.

The last time I posted an updated I stated I started working on some ships and was going to post pictures. Here is a fleet shot! I will get some better pictures of all of the new ships soon I swear :p The ships are spaced out 500m apart.

May I present the USS Ark Royal (that massive ship by itself, 600+ meters), Midway class carrier from the game Starfleet Command.

Introducing the USS Belknap (top row, third from the left of the ship grid) from the publications Starship Design: Interstellar Forum for Naval Power and Ships of the Starfleet: Volume One. This one is just the Secondary Hull as I still need to build the Warp Support Pylons and attach the Primary Hull.

The USS Okinawa, of the same class, can be pictured on the bottom right of the ship grid. This ship is from the game Starfleet Command.

Also pictured is the USS William Wallace (bottom left of the ship grid), a Claymore Class ship. This is a fan design for the game Bridge Commander, might have also been available as a mod for Starfleet Command but I am unsure on that. As far as I can tell the design was created by Sbloyd and updated by Starforce2.

2017-01-14_fleet.png

I think I will end this post with some pics from inside the Arboretum aboard the USS Venture, a fan design by InPayne, looking up at USS Reliant and from the Arboretum of the USS Enterprise looking out at the USS Venture and USS Ark Royal.

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With all that said, I need to also create that Arboretum Set I've been putting off. These are just large empty rooms with big windows and good views!

EDIT: Ignore any of the red thrusters attached to the ships. They are there for station keeping as I finish up RCS Thrusters and Impulse Engines.
 

LordChicken

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I need to bounce something I've been experimenting with off of someone.

The default grid in this game for large ships is 2.5m³. I have spent the last two days trying to figure out a way to subdivide the grid making it 1.25m³. This would allow for more flexible shapes and a higher resolution to ships.

I started down this path while trying to resolve the torpedo deck with the two airlocks on the refit Enterprise. The blocks are too big to do either one effectively. I am trying to avoid purpose building mods for just one thing, like this area on the Enterprise for example. I am trying to make all of the mods as flexible as possible so they can be used across a wider array of ships. Even non-Star Trek ones, GASP!

Unfortunately there isn't a way to subdivide the grid that I found, BUT I could change the size of the armor blocks to 1.25m (which would be a lot of work) and then double the sizes of all of the non-armor blocks to compensate, thus sort of faking grid subdivision. This works as I did test almost all of this process and am certain that it would work if I changed the size of the armor blocks to match.

There are a few drawbacks to this.
  1. Pre-existing grids won't transfer well into the new grid. As in any ships built using the default original grid won't like having that grid shrunk and things will get weird. I might be able to compensate for this, but I am not sure.
  2. This method could more than double the amount of triangles per ship. Currently the base cube has 48 triangles for a 2.5m³. The new grid would mean for the same space you would get 192 triangles. For clarity the game removes armor faces that touch each other so what was 1 cube now is 8 cubes which would equal 384 triangles. After you remove the touching faces the new total is 192.
They are working on optimizations, but I don't think they are expecting for everyone to have ships with stupid high triangle counts.

So what are your guy's thoughts on this?
 

LordChicken

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Further testing has revealed attempting to save the old grid size armor blocks to be infeasible. :(

So the options now are to either keep the grid at 1.25m³ or use the original size of 2.5m³ and model out a bunch of "half armor" blocks that won't really be armor. The latter option wouldn't be as useful as you would still be stuck to the original grid for placement.
 

LordChicken

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Time for an update!

I have finished the artwork for the passageway set :)!

Pics or it didn't happen right?

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Rectangular Halls

244850_20170925020003_1.png Radial Halls

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Concentric Halls

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All of the bits

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Recolorable

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Fancy floor texture.

All of these use the default textures in the game with the exception of the diamond plate texture. I made that in Substance Painter. Texel density is 10px per cm.

All that I have left for this set to be 100% complete is to make the Level of Detail models, Construction states, and to program the Emissive textures to be programmable so the alert lights can be turned on and off and have the colors change. I also intend to have the regular lights turned on and off.

:plan:
 

CABAL

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So pretty. I may need to add this to my wishlist.
 

Majestic

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Wow awesome work, love the look and feel of them. :)
 

LordChicken

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So pretty. I may need to add this to my wishlist.

Dooeeeett! I am hoping to be at a point where I can start posting the ships as blueprints and these mods on the workshop soon.

Wow awesome work, love the look and feel of them. :)
Thank you! I have spent more time then I'd like to admit trying to blend the game's art style with Star Trek.
 

LordChicken

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I have been working on the Warp Core pieces while it has been slow at work. It has often bothered me that in TWOK and TMP that where the Warp Core meets there isn't like a "collision chamber." Based off how it is supposed to work it makes sense to me that it would have one.

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Warp_core

Here is my take on a TMP version.

Tee1.PNG Tee2.PNG Tee3.PNG Tee4.PNG
I still have some detail to add, and they are untextured for now. But what do you guys think?
 

LordChicken

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It has been a while since I have updated this thread. Short story, I got burned out on this and various other projects going on in life so I haven't worked on this a whole lot. I have been working on it again off and on recently, trying to finish all the mods I started and what not. Now that Space Engineers is officially released they are promising to not modify the modding API anymore so... we shall see what happens.
 

LordChicken

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Wow... I can not believe my last update has been over a year ago now. So much has happened. I had twins, lost my job to layoffs because of COVID. I have been spending my free time between looking for work, feeding babies, and trying to reconnect with modding to complete this project. I have been having a hard time getting back into modeling. No motivation. Probably just depressed due to everything that has been going on this year.

Here are some current screenshots of my interpretation of the Enterprise within the limits of the game Space Engineers. As you can tell from previous photos that I shared I have refined the shape of the hull. Smoother is better.

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I have also started to reassess the various mods I started and if I really want to finish them or not. I have cut a few out that I think would be cool but are more complicated to pursue and I honestly just want to build spaceships. I am heavily leaning towards cutting out the concentric corridor bits (the "D" shaped corridors on the refit Enterprise seen here) I modeled and just stick to the radial or rectangular as the intersections and number of pieces involved are not nearly as high for those two sets as including the asymmetric concentric bits. The set for Star Trek The Next Generation was modified to just the radial and rectangular bits so I think its good enough here.

Corridors.jpg

I decided since I am kind of in a rut modeling wise that I could at least spend time trying to get the "standard" layout of the Consitution type primary hull sorted so that it is functional in this game since that its also one of the objectives that I have set for myself. I want to provide Star Trek type ships in Space Engineers that are playable, survival ready, and not just an empty shell that I see so many people do for Star Wars and other fandoms on the Steam Workshop for this game. It is depressing to load up the Galactica and she's empty on the inside.

Here are some cutaways of the layout I am working out. I think I just about have it. I decided while doing some solo combat testing and watching the various server battles on the LastStandGamers YouTube channel that spreading things out is a good idea. Also since the modding community has created a pretty good replacement (WeaponsCore) for the vanilla turret behavior that I am going to make my weapons using this system. I am also using the Defense Shields mod created by some of the same modders that created WeaponsCore. This shield mod feels more balanced to me than the other popular one on the workshop, Energy Shields. I skipped the bridge in these screenshots since its currently empty as I need to finish reworking the models for that.

lounge.jpg

staterooms.jpg

I know the following image has a bunch of text on it, but since I just wanted to do a quick update of progress on this project I just slapped some labels on stuff. I do intend to do blueprints of these once they are finalized. And if you cannot make out all that text here is a quick rundown on what is on the "main" deck here:
  • Auxiliary Control
  • Sickbay
  • Armory
  • Damage Control
  • Discotech, because why not? I know it is a fluff bit.
  • Cinema, also because why not?
  • Impulse Deck
  • The ventral airlocks, cargo hold, and hangar complex. Various floorplan sources I am using have all of these in this region so I decided for simplicity to merge them together since trying to make them as shown is difficult with the resolution provided by the 2.5m³ grid this ship is built on.
  • Recreation Deck, I forgot to label it but I am confident everyone on this forum knows where that is.
  • 2 Radio Rooms, it is just an Antenna and a Beacon and some fluff to make it look kewl.
  • 4 Shield Rooms that contain only one of the various bits required for the shield to work
  • 4 Gyroscope Rooms with six gyroscopes in each. There will be more in the secondary hull.
  • 8 RCS Fuel Storage Rooms with three small hydrogen tanks each.
  • Various spaces I have not figured out what to do with
There will be warheads embedded in key locations so she can self destruct to avoid the Klingons from capturing her in the future once I have all the things sorted.

main.jpg

And finally what is more or less finalized in the secondary hull. I gutted Engineering and moved some stuff around to make it work better for the game. It is currently empty so I decided to skip a screenshot of that deck. Same with the botanical garden. At the moment main engineering is two and a half meters lower than where it should be, but I doubt anyone is going to complain since it simplifies the layout.

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The keen-eyed among you will have noticed the various shades of pink in these screenshots. These are placeholder colors that I can easily find and replace with the save editor or a mod that does the same thing in-game. I decided to use these placeholder colors so that I can generate a few different versions of the same ship and easily change them. I am working on picking out three interior color palettes specifically for this and am using these colors in the "living" areas of the ship along with areas that need some color.

I already have a cool color palette selected and am working on a warm palette and a neutral palette. The brown in the cool palette is for wood. The colors in the palette are for the following things in order from left to right in the coolors.co link provided above:
  • Accent Color (that green color)
  • Primary Color
  • Furniture Color
  • Metal
  • Wood
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk!

PS: I added the Centar into my line up of ships due to @Majestic's Centaur reimagining. I really like the direction he took it. I decided it was a destroyer in my fleet. I have not built it yet. But soonish™
 

kjc733

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I've recently stumbled on some youtube series on SE and I am seriously considering getting it (as yet another game I won't play :rolleyes:). It seems to me that the modding community is more imaginative than the developers. Recent developments seem to be a water mod to "flood" planets with (still in work) physics.
Anyway, is that your take? The more interesting things come from modding rather than the vanilla game? How do you find it stability wise?
 

LordChicken

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I've recently stumbled on some youtube series on SE and I am seriously considering getting it (as yet another game I won't play :rolleyes:). It seems to me that the modding community is more imaginative than the developers. Recent developments seem to be a water mod to "flood" planets with (still in work) physics.
Anyway, is that your take? The more interesting things come from modding rather than the vanilla game? How do you find it stability wise?

The game is pretty stable as long as you don't try anything too crazy. I do agree that the modding community is part of what makes this game enjoyable as the vanilla game is pretty basic. It needs more polish on early, mid, and late gameplay on a server in survival. With that said it has a few other faults but I believe those are the result of poor planning on the developers part. They don't seem to have a roadmap on what they are trying to do with it.

The most recent water mod is pretty sweet and I have been using it on a survival world that I am currently playing with a friend of mine along with a custom planet. The default planet generator is good enough, but I think the hight values are too extreme so it is flat and then super tall mountains.

I would recommend getting this game if you are interested in building spaceships because I feel it is one of the better spaceship building games in the genre. And with the modding community, you can more or less create the kind of game you want with it. Also, space combat in this game can be pretty good.

And as an added bonus you will eventually be able to play these bad boy federation ships I have been working on coming Soon™
 

Majestic

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PS: I added the Centar into my line up of ships due to @Majestic's Centaur reimagining. I really like the direction he took it. I decided it was a destroyer in my fleet. I have not built it yet. But soonish™

Thanks mate glad you like it. I felt is was a design change that just made more sense over the kitbash official design.
 

LordChicken

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I don't have a problem. You have a problem.

20201006110247_1.jpg 20201006110255_1.jpg
This is the primary hull for @Majestic's Centaur. After taking measurements from the screenshots he's posted this is bigger then I thought. It is now a light cruiser.
 

LordChicken

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I meant to write "I don't have a problem, you have a problem. I can quit at any time!" But I wrote that in a hurry and posted without proofing.
 
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