Own Universe: Sleeper Ship

[Elowan]

Originally Posted by SiS-Shadowman

Sorry, but you lost me. I read through some of his fables, but I couldn't find that particular one. I think you need to give me a hint.

It's summarized here:The Old Man, the Boy, and the Donkey

[SiS-Shadowman]

Hehe, now I've got your point *laugh*
You may be right here.
I'm still trying to find out what kind of design and story I want for my ship. Originally I thought it was enough to say, I'll use an ion-engine, but as we calculated, it's not enough. Maybe I'll just ignore alot of math, but still get the logic right (make the decks of the bridge face towards the acceleration axis and the rotating quarters in a 90° angle towards the axis).

[SiS-Shadowman]

I'm back, along with alot of updates.

First of all, I wondered how the people on my ship could land on their new plant, because obviously the ship can't. Since I've got plenty of time between rendering and working on the model, I read alot of articles bout ground to orbit transport and I stumbled across the idea of the space elevator. I knew those things did exist in the mind of alot of people (Star Trek: TNG for example), however I didn't know that we are so far that we could possibly do it. So I thought it would be great if the ship could just enter orbit and release a several thousand kilometer long cable and attach it to the ground.
The people could then first transfer the crew and the stasis pods to the ground. After that, it could then dismantle everything that is needed and send it to the ground as well. This provides the people with great resources, until they are able to establish the first colonies and infrastructure.

As far as the model is concerned, I added more heat radiators to the engines, as well as maneuvering thrusters to the sides of the ship and to the body of the ship.
I also deleted the old front-shape, I hated it. The newer one is inspired by the babylon 5 destroyer, but just slightly .
I'm currently adding details to the front (a small hangar bay), trying to avoid working on the main body.





I'm having a problem with the advanced light plugin from 3ds max. In the last picture, you can see two little black triangles just under the hangar bay. I've no idea what setting I need to change, in order to get rid of them. Is it the Filter size or the Ray Bias? Because it seems to be unaffected by the Rays per Sample setting, I've tried everything from 50 to 250.

[Yanko]

and when where you gonna tell me you were working on this lol, it looks awesome man!!!

[Dallidas]

looks great! realistic but not uber realistic. Those triangles might just be flipped normals.

[kborak]

Originally Posted by Dallidas

Those triangles might just be flipped normals.

they could be overlapped faces as well.

[SiS-Shadowman]

Well, I just tried flipping the normals and whoot, frackin max crashed, taking my max file with it. The next time I see a dev from autodesk, I will REALLY feel the inevitable urge to inflict massive pain on him
This program drives me crazy. Great I had NO backups of the engine greeble radiators, so they won't make it into the final design anymore, I'm sick of doing this frack twice or more times.

[biotech]

Looks great.

Try to save in incrementally numbered files, you use up more disk space, but at least if your current one gets mangled, you can go back to a previous one.

You can even merge bits of your older model back into the new one if you cock a peice up playing with it.

[SiS-Shadowman]

Yep, that's what I needed to do. I had older backups, but none after I modeled these radiators. Strange thing is, that the max backup does contain everyhting but them.
Anyways, I'm taking a break from modeling this ship or I just go crazy.

[nyrath]

Originally Posted by SiS-Shadowman

First of all, I wondered how the people on my ship could land on their new plant, because obviously the ship can't. Since I've got plenty of time between rendering and working on the model, I read alot of articles bout ground to orbit transport and I stumbled across the idea of the space elevator. I knew those things did exist in the mind of alot of people (Star Trek: TNG for example), however I didn't know that we are so far that we could possibly do it. So I thought it would be great if the ship could just enter orbit and release a several thousand kilometer long cable and attach it to the ground.
The people could then first transfer the crew and the stasis pods to the ground. After that, it could then dismantle everything that is needed and send it to the ground as well. This provides the people with great resources, until they are able to establish the first colonies and infrastructure.

Again, the annoying voice of reason chimes in
A space elevator is a huge construction project, your sleeper ship is far too tiny to carry one.

What you want is something smaller, like a Rotovator.
There is a nifty one here called HASTOL (warning PDF file)
The file contains some nice artist conceptions.
http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/libra...1/391Grant.pdf