Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Thin and crisp, you say? Are you suggesting that we eat our ships as if they were crackers?

Seriously though, I'm pretty sure that people whose entire job is to design spaceship art are in fact "experts of ship designing". Moreover, team TriLambda is composed of significantly more than just one person.

Those thin and crisp parts tend to have purpose though. Look over the schematic for the hurricane for instance
http://knightly-slumber.com/worldofwarcraft/files/hurricane.png

Those fins on the side are range finders and sensors, heat exchangers, positioning systems, and or shield emitters. There are a few other schematics you can find and for the most part they follow a similar logic.

A lot of hulls still waiting for re-design that's for sure.
But i'm not sure about thinny and crisppy aspects of them. What you mean?

They need someone from NASA to explain the way ships should be designed. Like the shuttle has wings so it can fly in the air as well. The famous UFO is circular so it can go in 180 degrees. Which is wing like. But if they can get lucky and get some insight of how ships are going to actually be on Earth that would be good. It shouldn't be hard to talk to a real person from NASA. Until then jury rigging era or not make the ship as cool as possible. I'm sure I'm not the only one that -doesn't- fly goofy ships.

Cars don't all look the same. Add some 22 in. rims and you got a phat cadillac.

When it's the future your'e gonna want to fly your spaceship in the air to go to the grocery store. So wings like an aircraft. And it'd help to go in multiple directions in the military. So a circular craft. Don't mess with the creators of the famous UFO they intended it to be made fun of so the government won't make a perfect craft.

I had always thought it was since no two races really look all that similar even brand new players can generally tell that a kestrel was not made by the same people as a rifter

The space ship panoptic of New Eden's vast universe is, of and by itself, a master class in living art. It is a thing of beauty, it's designers are children of the gods, or at least they get kissed by little elves in their sleep, and it is a joy to see all the new creations.

My only beef with EVE ships is the tendency these last few years to make Matari ships look good. And now many of them often do. This fills me with deep sadness. I want Matari ships to look like they were made with the last few sheets of hull metal that they found in the shop, bolted a port-a-potty and a warp drive to it and then kicked it out of the dock. If we could have more of that, I would be the happiest pilot in New Eden.

My only other beef is an apparent drive to build symmetric ships, which I don't think is at all necessary. Some symmetry is fine, it doesn't have to be all the way.

Other than that. I like all the space ships.

Except the Brutix. I never could get the hang of the Brutix.

I'm not from NASA, and I don't design spaceships, but I did happen upon an academic paper that theory-crafted the optimal design for a spaceship if said spaceship was going to shoot at things and be shot at back. Maths and engineering included.

Realistic space combat was boring as hell. Because space is big. Too. Damn. Big. Realistic spaceship design reflects that.

All spaceships are spheres. Spheres have the lowest rotational moment of inertia - not in a particular axis, but overall - and that's important when you're in the depths of space away from large masses (planets) that restrict your acceleration. You also have all your engines facing the same way.

Acceleration is important because the most sensible and effective way to not die when shot at is to simply take a jump to the left... or the right... or up... or in any direction by any worthwhile amount. Compared to every human conflict in the past, the range at which space combat could happen is enormous! So enormous that lasers have a time of flight of minutes and hours. Missiles and projectiles have days and weeks. Imagine firing a laser at a ship that's eight light-hours away - it'll take eight hours for your laser to reach it, then another eight hours for you to see if you hit or missed. When you have that long to dodge, it becomes a smart idea to continually, slowly, dodge randomly.

There's no point having engines in all directions, as you can just use a gyro to spin on the spot and then blast off in the direction you want.

They'd also be black. As dark and as cold as possible. This is so they can't be seen. They cloak themselves against the blackness of space. Spheres, for a given volume, also have the smallest profile in every direction compared to other shapes of the same volume.

To get hit by a missile, the missile will need guidance. It'll have to guide itself, as the launcher is light-hours away and up-to-date information won't arrive in time. If it's to guide itself, it'll need to shine a light(or radar) out in front of it to see your cold and black ship. If it does that, you'll see it coming, and blap it out of the sky.

Or, you could be hit by a wall of bullets. Or rather, you could be hit by a few bullets in a wall of bullets. Filling space with bullets, flak, and garbage, is hilariously expensive. The mass of bullets needed would weigh more than the mass of your ship.

Pew-Pew Lasers diffract, even in the almost-hard vacuum of space. At range they wouldn't hit as well as at close range. And good luck getting into close range... you can't see your opponent because they're cold, black, and absolutely minuscule compared to the size of the solar system. Paint your ship in reflective paint, and you'll bounce most of the energy away. This will give you enough time to move and not get shot further (but yes, you'll be easier to see).

The Science-Fiction staple plasma gun is a non-starter. Just like Eve-O, they'd be very short ranged. Plasma is like a hot ball of air. It wants to spread out so it can cool. You can put that plasma in a bottle, but it'll heat the bottle, also, it's now just a regular gun firing a weird bullet. Maybe you can put 'hot air' in a balloon. Maybe that balloon is a magnetic field. You probably could do this, but the field needs to be continually given energy to keep its strength. How are you going to do that after you shoot it away from your ship? Also, the plasma is going to be hot enough to radiate heat rapidly. Which means it'll cool rapidly. And once cool, you literally have a hair dryer.

Explosions are pretty useless too. Balls of fire spread out with a one-on-r-squared relationship. Double the distance from the explosion, a quarter of the fire touches you. Triple the distance, you get a ninth. Even then, most of the damaging effect from an explosion comes from the concussion wave of the air/water/medium the explosion is travelling through.

In space, there is no such medium. So explosions have to be really, really, close... or really, really, big.

Like nuclear bomb big.

That only reduces the problem, not eliminates it. All that energy from the blast will radiate in every direction. And your target is only in one, very specific direciton. It's woefully inefficient. And you still have to find your target first, shoot the bomb at it, and hope to Bob that the target doesn't decide to randomly accelerate.

The only thing left to talk about is the good old fashion bullet. Bullets are moderately good at transfering energy from themselves into whatever they hit. They do suffer from the same aiming and dodging problems of every other weapon. But if you do happen to know where exactly something will be, you've got a very good chance of being able to hit it.


TL;DR. CCP's art team made the smart choice by making interesting spaceships, not realistic spaceships.

I'd take any F jet or mig into space any day. A sphere has no flight in air if the engines die. And that's a number 1 priority in life. Pick a car add some rims you got a good mobile. But look at the migs and F jets, all jets look as bad and badder than the raven. And governments don't skimp on price so really imagine all cars like a ferrari and lamborghini. There's lots of super awesome jets....that'll be spacecraft. Heck soon the ferrari and lamb will be normal cars, there's already a few.

P.S. The distance between us and a star is the diameter of the white light away and we arn't alone and space is an infinite object/element.