Vector spacefighter : upgrading

[Monkey Boy]

Ok,
Ultimately you want it to look cool, but just a few points:

Firstly, on the gatling gun, remember that you do not need to be able to see all six barrels in the forward view to allow it to fire, gatlings are designed so that as they rotate, the barrel that is firing is always in the same position, and there is no reason why this has to be an inboard or even bottom barrel - it could easily be the barrel furtherest outboard, so you could fairly easily tuck the gatling in a little further, by at least half the gun's width. Remember that F15 and F16 jet fighters all have gatlings, but only have one hole in the fuselage, aligned with the barrel position that fires - so as long as you can see at least one barrel in the forward view, you can still fire the gun.

I don't think you have to imbed the gun in the ship's body, but to balance the ship and make it sleaker, I still feel the gun should be tucked in a bit closer.

Secondly, to make room for the missile launcher on the nose - there is no reason why the forward landing gear *has* to be on the nose. Why not put it on the aft hull, up at the front of the aft hull, instead of that darker grey rectangle that looks like it could be a boarding ramp. If I remember ST:IV correctly, the klingon BoP did not have it's forward gear on the front pod, rather at the rear base of the interconnecting neck - right about where this grey rectangle is in your ship.

cheers,

[nulll]

Good point on the gatling gun, i have to play with its location a bit.

In my original sketch, the front landing gear was actually on the back hull, in the grey box underneath the neck. Basically the box would flip open and a set of wheels would slip out. This had as result that the cockpit would be pointing upwards quite a bit due to the size of the missile launcher underneath it.
Technically it doesn't need to have wheels there, for moving about on carriers or starbases (no atmospheric flight for these models) they might have somekind of small motorized cart that attaches to the front landing gear and moves it around. Carriers might even have some sort of launch system that propels the ship out of the fighterbay and this might again attach to a front landing gear without wheels.

The older version of the ship had a huge missile launcher, i have to wait with the forward landing gear until i remodel it, i might even replace it with a smaller rocket launcher like on the apache helicopters. I think rockets the size of hellfires (about 1.6m long, 20cm diameter) are more suited than the 5.2m long heavy missiles i have there now
Another option is to move the rockets to the wings and embed a smaller gatling underneath the cockpit or put the landing gear there etc.

[nulll]

Last update for a while, probably. The modelling is about 95% done - what's left to be done is some additional detailing and cleaning up the meshes/objects. Right now it's about 385.000 polys. Painting/texturing will have to wait till my arm gets better.

I replaced the huge missile launcher underneath the cockpit from the original design with two smaller rocket launchers and moved those under the wings. Added some more detail to the entire back hull as well.

Images :

[Elowan]

I really like this ship. Nice job.