Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I say keep the v3 graphics, since they allow more detail, but use its ability to have more detail to make the minnie ships more gritty. give them a rough-hewn, but shiny, surface so we can gaze upon the minmatar's flying scrapheaps and get lost in their details

+1 Trust in the Rust

I honestly love the look/feel of the Tempest/Rifter type vessels. While the Hurricane and Maelstrom look nice they don't feel like Minmatar to me.

if the art team manages to carry that sense of evolution into the v3 versions, they'd be full of awesome and i'd be very happy.

if the drones and the reaper are any indication, the new minmatar base color has more blue in it than the old one, that does make it look more metallic, and with the insectoid base shapes (that come -on the reaper at least- with rounded aft sections that i dont quite like) it looks less "scrapheap" than i'm used to.

personally, i would love for the older designs to have less "metallic blue" shining through under the "trusted rust", so the old, boxy and less insectoid looking ships are not as shiny as the new "assault bugs".

incidentially, this would give everyone something to be happy about (aside from the overworked art team, i guess), the "trust in rust" crowd would have their awesome rustbucket 'phoons and ruppies, and the more "ooh shiny" oriented people would have the sleek looking maels and 'canes. and those into roleplaying or lore in general would love it for being an testament to the evolution of our fledging republic.

I like a lot of the symmetrical designs, and I rather dislike the burst because it's SO assymetrical that it doesn't really bear any resemblance to an actual spaceship, save for the engine in the back. One of my favorite minmatar designs is the Slasher. Now there is a beautiful ship. It is streamlined and it looks fast as all hell. The fins look like the wings of a wasp as it homes in on you, ready to sting your arm and then fly off to drink more of the rotting fruit that has driven it mad. And it's got all these metal things sticking out of it that I'm sure serve some purpose, but it looks like if it ran out of ammo, it could start ramming stuff. The slasher is one of the most beautiful ships I have ever seen.

Another great example of beauty is the scorpion. There is a ship whose designers maintained the Caldari style of building, but didn't let it hold them back. It's not just that it looks like a scorpion, but even more than that, it looks like it would scurry up to you and grab hold of you with its massive front claws. And if it failed to crush you with its brazen might, it would stab you with its tail and let you die slowly. I think that's what spaceship beauty is about. It's not something that can be seen by your typical poodle trainer, that guy who likes My Little Pony a bit too much, or the friend you have who mysteriously acquires rare paintings that have been reported missing. Not that these people can't see it, but it requires a different mindset entirely. One of.....you know, I lost track of what I was saying. Anyway...

...the slasher is beautiful, and symmetrical or not isn't any more a measure of beauty than rust vs. sheen. It all depends on the situation. Most minmatar ships look best with rust.

I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to say that CCP showed the CSM examples of the Minmatar V3 progress during our recent summit. If not, it was nice knowing you all

That being said, what I saw was pretty awesome. I was quite impressed, and I think you guys will be too. I'm pretty picky about this sort of thing, I'm a Minnie pilot who flies Minnie ships for the Minnie militia, my lust for rust is strong indeed!

There was some lore in an EON issue in the form of a short story about a Minmatar ship designer defecting from Ammatar. The take away from this story was that Minmatar ships are anything but 'haphazard piles of scrap welded together by monkeys' They are infact designed, with form and function in mind, and the aestetic of design is the beauty of function. This doesn't mean that they have to look like flimsy ships that would not survive re-entry into an atmosphere. They should be edgy, angular, sharp, and sturdy.
When I think of Minmatar, I think of Millenium Falcon, Battlestar Galactica, Earth Alliance ships, Serenity.

I always thought that the only haphazard, slapped together part of a minmatar T1 ship should be the armor plates. Structurally, they should look atleast semi-spacefaring, with purpose of design as opposed to 'lets bolt this here 'cause it looks good, and tape that over there'. Meanwhile, the Armor Plating is old, deteriorating, and rusty - with negative space between the Plates and the Structure - likely to fall off but who cares, theres an older, rustier, thicker Plate underneath it. Multiple Layers of Armor Plating. Structurally Symeric, but with a Lopsided plate on one side, and multiple smaller plates on the other side. An extraordinarily thick Armor Plate on one side i balanced out by a Layering of thinner ones on the other, with negatives space between each layer.

T2 ships would Maintain the Negative Space between the Armor plates, but the plates themselves would be much neater - jagged edges from T1 hulls giving way to hard lines, cut with a purpose and symetric, but with reduced spacing between them - more of the design is covered up by the plates.

^ This.

Little question, how can ships rust in space? THERE IS NO AIR OR WATER!!!

CCP keep up with the new V3 hulls!!!

I always flew Tempest, even when it got heavily nerved. Just because I like the look of it.
Scrap welded together, detailed textures with alpha mapping and a lot of rust. Like the underdog should be.

Now they raped the look of my tempest with clusmsy texturing, clean windows happy WOW colours.
Doesn't fit the storyline at all. If I wanted to fly Ammar, I would have chosen so.

Rust in piece my Tempest.