Loroi Ship Design

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manticore7
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Loroi Ship Design

Post by manticore7 »

how important are aesthetics to the Loroi when they build their ships, to me the Loroi seem to craft their ships rather than build them? Will the Loroi keep building aestheticly pleasing ships or will they start building flying bricks inorder to out produce the Umiak?

on a related note I like the human ships that we have seen especailly the Bellarmine, I see the humans don't build flying bricks in this universe either
"Worlds governed by artificial intelligence often learned a hard lesson, Logic doesn't care"
Andromeda season 2 episode 6 All too Human

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Trantor
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Re: Loroi ship desgin

Post by Trantor »

manticore7 wrote:how important are aesthetics to the Loroi when they build their ships, to me the Loroi seem to craft their ships rather than build them?
Form follows function. Then give it a nice shape if it´s not to expensive.
Fight with style - it´s an expression of culture. ;)
manticore7 wrote:Will the Loroi keep building aestheticly pleasing ships or will they start building flying bricks inorder to out produce the Umiak?
Only if they develop sth new that somehow "requires" rawness.
manticore7 wrote:on a related note I like the human ships that we have seen especailly the Bellarmine, I see the humans don't build flying bricks in this universe either
As long as we can afford it...

I´d trade armor, acceleration and sheer firepower for appearance anytime. ;)
sapere aude.

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Arioch
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Re: Loroi ship desgin

Post by Arioch »

The newer ship classes (Scimitar, Rapier, Katana, Vanguard) have a slightly more angular look than the curving lines of the older classes (most notably Tempest) to try to give a slightly more mass-produced feel, but clearly the Loroi can't do anything without giving the aesthetics of the subject serious consideration. But it's certainly true that the Loroi favor a smaller number of larger, more expensive ships than the Umiak do.

Also flying bricks lack cool factor.

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Trantor
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Re: Loroi ship desgin

Post by Trantor »

Arioch wrote:Also flying bricks lack cool factor.
You sure? :mrgreen:
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Re: Loroi ship desgin

Post by NOMAD »

Arioch wrote:
Also flying bricks lack cool factor.
er hum, i agree with Trantor

http://shipyards.relicnews.com/kushan/index.html

I really like these ships :P

although, i will say I like the double prong looks of the Loroi ships, with the space outer engine pods. It just screams "I'll kill you until your dead"
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Arioch
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Re: Loroi ship desgin

Post by Arioch »

I like the Homeworld Kushan designs very much... more so than the Taiidan counterparts. They are angular, but hardly "flying bricks."

Image

Majincarne
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Re: Loroi Ship Design

Post by Majincarne »

Freespace 2 had some beautiful bricks.

Image

Image

Also if fs2 beamweapons == plasmafocus they had some uber armor to go with the brickness too.

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Trantor
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Re: Loroi Ship Design

Post by Trantor »

Moar Flying Bricks:

Image

Image

Image

Image
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Re: Loroi ship desgin

Post by Karst45 »

[/url]
Trantor wrote:
Arioch wrote:Also flying bricks lack cool factor.
You sure? :mrgreen:
I take your brick (that isnt flying btw) and Raise you by a Cube

Tamren
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Re: Loroi Ship Design

Post by Tamren »

I've never been a fan of ships with exposed "superstructure" with so many random doodads hanging my a thread that they look fuzzy.


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Ktrain
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Re: Loroi Ship Design

Post by Ktrain »

OUTSIDER UPDATE => HALF LIFE 3 CONFIRMED?

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manticore7
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Re: Loroi Ship Design

Post by manticore7 »

on page 92 the Destroyer in the fore ground looks it takes some of its design ques from the F-22 Raptor.
"Worlds governed by artificial intelligence often learned a hard lesson, Logic doesn't care"
Andromeda season 2 episode 6 All too Human

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Re: Loroi Ship Design

Post by Paragon »

Flying bricks can be awesome so long as you remember to cover every surface that's not an engine exhaust with weapons. Laser turrets, missle banks, ECM equipment, a fucking ram, doesn't matter. Just so long as it looks like it was designed by someone who said, "I'm going to make a ship that can do two things. 1. Fly and 2. blow lots of shit up." If it doesn't kill the enemy or take you where you can, it doesn't belong on a flying warbrick.

You want open space? Fuck your open spaces, this ain't no yacht. That's room you could be using to hold a bigger reactor, more hull plating, or (my personal favorite) guns. Lot's of guns.
"Optical computers, genetic catalogs, nanorepair modules--forget all of that. It's when you see a megaton of steel suspended over your head by a thread the thickness of a human hair that you really find God in technology."

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Trantor
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Re: Loroi ship desgin

Post by Trantor »

Approved.
Tamren wrote:I've never been a fan of ships with exposed "superstructure" with so many random doodads hanging my a thread that they look fuzzy.
Hull is weight. Weight eats up payload. ;)
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Re: Loroi Ship Design

Post by Karst45 »

Paragon wrote:You want open space? Fuck your open spaces, this ain't no yacht. That's room you could be using to hold a bigger reactor, more hull plating, or (my personal favorite) guns. Lot's of guns.
Stargate: the great race: (roughly quoted)

With you auxiliary Ox tank you should be able to hold up until rescue arrive.
Douche: Yeah i removed those so i could put more weapon.

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Re: Loroi Ship Design

Post by Solemn »

Since this thread appears to have flowed into the subject of spacecraft designs in general, there are a few things I'd like to mention.
First, some guy made several block-like scifi spaceship components for Blender and has made them free to download and play with here; if I weren't still wrestling with the UI changes from Blender 2.4 to 2.5, and if I had any artistic talent whatsoever, I'd be making dozens of customized flying brick variants with it right now. I like playing with blocks.

Secondly, there is a top-down shooter/strategy videogame that I used to really like called Ares, which used a number of flying brick style designs, but managed to keep them distinct enough that the ships never really felt samey.
If you haven't heard of Ares, that's because it is an old indie Macintosh shareware game that was made in 1996-ish, its first publisher went under shortly after its release and the rerelease by Ambrosia was never very popular and is incompatible with modern Mac OS. However, the source code was GPL'd by its creator a few years ago, and the projects to port it to modern systems are moving forward about as quickly as you could reasonably expect of open source projects with few contributors for a game nobody played. Antares is actually almost gameplay-complete... for Mac OS X, and only with regard to the standard single player campaign. It's probably going to be several years before it gets ported to systems actual gamers use. Xsera sounds like it might become a bit more ambitious, interesting, and worth following and making mods for once it gets off the ground, but that's going to be a long way off, it's much less developed than Antares right now.

I'm putting the rest of this behind spoiler tags on the off chance that any of you have Macs or want to wait the years it will take to port the game to your systems, since I'm going to go into some (minor) spoilers while talking about the ship designs.
SpoilerShow
Much like Outsider, Ares involved humans and spaceships and big glorious battle scenes. The similarity pretty much ends there, though.
In Ares, you can often tell how dangerous a ship is by its size and by how much it resembles a flying brick.
There are exceptions, for instance Salrillians are always dangerous while Gaitori never are, but it's a useful rule of thumb.

In Ares, the first ship of war built by humanity looks like this:
Image
It has no weapons, no armor, no shields, no FTL drive, no vague resemblance to bricks of any variety, and no chance in hell. It's our first military spaceship by mere technicality, not by commission and certainly not by capability, but despite all that it turned out to be the single most important spacecraft in the history of at least three species. A humble unarmed long-range human scout ship on a fact-finding mission of peaceful contact with diplomatic hopes, in which mankind finds itself horribly low-tech by galactic standards and thrust into a conflict on a scale beyond the crew's wildest dreams, where the scout vessel's crew find that the future of the human race--if not all galactic civilizations--lies in their hands... okay, I guess some aspects of Ares might sound vaguely familiar.

The next example of human military craft that we see (which only happens after the campaign is about 80% complete) look like this:
Image
Image

Curvy and somewhat rocket-like. The slowest FTL drive of any FTL-capable craft, and inferior in every other respect to every other comparable craft, possibly including its counterpart among the Gaitori, who are a race of centipedal space scrubs whose sole purpose in existence is to get de-pantsed by the cool kids.
Image
Pictured: a Gaitori. Note the absence of pants.

Things looked pretty awful for human spacecraft at that point.
But, with a lot of assistance and a hell of a lot of technology from the other races, we learned to build flying bricks in no time flat, harnessing their vast slabby power.
Image

Image

However, Ares' humans still design more curvy and more rocket-like designs for craft that are just supposed to go from one place to another, instead of being expected to fight too hard.
Image
Image

Since we had battle-bricks of our own, you might think things would be looking up for us, but no.
See, by that point in the game, the bad guys had pulled in the Audemedons, who are quite nearly the undisputed masters of astronautical brickology. ALL of their ships are flying bricks of one stripe or another, and most look fairly close to true brick blocks.
Image

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You have no idea how scary orange boxes can be until you have faced a competent Audemedon player in PvP.

Needless to say, human casualties were initially relatively high; even our most bricklike ships just aren't as bricky as the Audemedons make 'em. "Par" for level 17 is the loss of 34 human ships for 29 kills, even though more than half of your foes are Cantharan rather than Audemedon and Cantharis doesn't do big bricks very well (their carriers might look somewhat like bricks from the top, but they are actually cylinders with flat wings/heatsinks/whatever).

Fortunately, on the primary anti-Audemedon levels, the Elejeetians were by our side.
Elejeetians are Ares' true and undisputed masters of the flying brick.
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Even more brick-like than the Audemedon equivalents. Needless to say, Elejeetian brick-cruisers are the most powerful military vessels of their class in the game, capable of de-pantsing even Audemedons. You only get to use them for two missions, but those are two missions against large numbers of Audemedon forces, and they are quite essential to the task.

The Cantharans have several bricks of their own, but they are simply not as bricky or as large as the bricks of humanity; using human bricks, the game expects you to end Level 19 with about 35 losses and 50 kills, despite throwing you against the most powerful ships the Order has to offer. Cantharis needs to learn to build more and bigger bricks; perhaps if their Gateship were blockier, or if their Carriers were rectangular instead of cylindrical, they'd have a chance against humanity's doom blocks.

In the final battle, the main weapons and engines from the Elejeetian bricks are incorporated into an Ishiman not-brick, which feels a bit like cheating, putting brick parts in a not-brick. Regardless, with the aid of Elejeetian brick-related technology and several exploding planetesimals, we were able to smash the Cantharan Order's biggest and most important not-brick ship and save Earth from enslavement by a race of paranoid totalitarian oppressive cybernetic space bugs.

...broad similarities. Nothing more.

Though, come to think of it, the Cantharan Gateship looks broadly similar to some aspects of Loroi design schemes:
Image
But, well, neither the Loroi nor Cantharis invented prongs, nor were they the first to use the color green.
It's probably just some general spiky "hey audience, this ship is dangerous and cool" space villain thing.

...okay, villain's probably a strong word there, the Loroi probably aren't the bad guys.
Whoever blew up the Bellarmine are the bad guys.
According to the displays on page 6, that ship looked like this:
Image
Which doesn't look like a Loroi ship, but does look like this:
Image
...damn, it's the Salrillians. We best hope they didn't take any of the Bell's crew alive.

All images originally taken from the Ares Media file, except the one from page 6.

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Re: Loroi Ship Design

Post by NOMAD »

Solemn wrote:Since this thread appears to have flowed into the subject of spacecraft designs in general
well then why don't we stick to the topic at hand :) .

what I find interesting with loroi ships designs: is the double prong look, now I didn't do any research into the alternative designs, but for me the double prong hull always seem to relate to fast and deadly ships (which loroi ship are) Yet, want i find interesting when i view or design ships is the cultural background behind the design of the ship.

Why would the loroi design their ships that way ?

granted most creation follows the design = function role and the double prong with widely spaced engines pods does give ships with good turning and good forward firing arcs for a rapid attack.

yet what lead to the loroi into designing their ship this way ? In the long military history of the Loroi were fast attacks the general feel or a more recent development.

Solemn wrote:Secondly, there is a top-down shooter/strategy videogame that I used to really like called Ares, which used a number of flying brick style designs, but managed to keep them distinct enough that the ships never really felt samey.
intersting, yet another game i haven't heard about ;)
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Arioch
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Re: Loroi Ship Design

Post by Arioch »

The double-prong design is, of course, a purely aesthetic arrangement that I came upon as a signature concept for the Loroi. It looks very aggressive and clearly distinguishes Loroi ships from the bulbous Umiak or linear Terran designs.

The rationalization for the prongs is in the nature of the Loroi defensive screening system. The Loroi house their strongest screen generators in front, in an armored, beveled housing, with a seam down the middle to allow some gap for sensor information to conditionally penetrate the electromagnetic field. The prongs present the strongest defensive screens toward the enemy, in a housing well suited to keeping them intact from enemy fire, while presenting a relatively small cross-section as a target to the enemy.

The aggressive nature of Loroi military doctrine does have some roots in Loroi biology; the Loroi are swift but lightweight, and can deal damage with deadly weapons (and psionic abilities) but are not as adept as absorbing or repelling damage. Hit and run has always been a favored Loroi tactic, going back to ancient times.

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Re: Loroi Ship Design

Post by Tamren »

If humans had equivalent ship tech, what do you think their doctrine and hence, ship design would be?

Looking back, we've done a little of everything. Thought mobility is certainly a favourite.

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