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I was willing to entertain the prospect that you just like the current Raven design, but now I am forced to assume from your arguments that you are, in fact, either trolling or downright uninformed. None of these arguments comprise a convincing argument as to why anyone in their right mind would make an asymmetrical spaceship design.

1. The key word you seem to have missed here (despite the fact that you used it yourself) is "compensate". If there is a problem you have to compensate for written straight into your schematic because of your design choices, then it's gone beyond "you may want to rethink your design" - it goes straight into the territory of "F, rewrite this and see me after class".

2. Because shields, as we well know, are utterly infallible, and there's no reason to make a structurally integral ship underneath - I mean, let's face it, no Caldari ship in EVE has ever gone under 25% shield ever.

Are you kidding me? A ship's primary defensive system being an external energy field is not an excuse for lazy ship design. While you're at it, consider that an asymmetrical ship design makes it harder to shield homogenously.

3. But maintenance proceedures for each wing are symmetrical.

4. And what's the easiest way to homogenise ship design? Make it symmetrical.

5. Show me one notably asymmetrical woman you'd be willing to date.

Space craft have plenty of reasons to be equally asymmetrical. Not to the extent realistically as the raven, but sensor clusters, Weapon platforms. Drone bays and guidance centers. Power centers. Imagine our own craft to venture to mars It would likely look a cross between the ISS (Yeah, the roughly stationary ISS... orbiting 15 times a day at 28k kmph.) and Project Orion. Granted we don't have massive orbital assembly arrays and we build in sections. Yet even given the opportunity to build a extraplanetary craft start to finish in zero g. Form or function? Likely end up similar to the aircraft carrier but inverted due to its environment. Internally or compartmentally symmetrical and externally Asymmetrical.

What is fun about a asymmetrical exterior and uniformed interior modules. Some vitals can be housed in different locations like crew quarters, capacitor charges, shield buffers. While the exteriors are already planed for specific functions like sensors so the shell is easily recreated in mass like sea ships. Leaving the internals to be modified and updated in sections like what we have in t2.

All of which you would have no reason to distribute asymmetrically. Asymmetric weapons distribution in particular will almost inevitably leave your ship with either a blind spot in its SoI to which it cannot deliver ordinance or an inversion of the other problem with asymmetric ships - that of one side inevitably being more vulnerable to ordinance than the other: you'll get one side of the ship that it's less dangerous for ships to be on, because it can't deliver as much ordinance.

Similar problems occur with sensor clusters and guidance centres.



Both of which are roughly symmetrical, even though the ISS is a (relatively speaking) stationary object. Good work there.



No, it wouldn't, because the function and environment of a spaceship and an aircraft carrier are so fundamentally different that the comparison is in serious danger of being entirely invalid.

What you should take away from this is that asymmetric spaceships are stupid, ugly and logically unsound, and that arguing on behalf of them is equally so.

The best reason in my opinion is #5 , not to discredit the other ones listed mind you.

What has realism got to do with the shape of an imaginary vessel in a game about internet spaceships?

If you're pushing that argument then I'm going to argue that all ships should look like this

The trip from Jita to Amarr is going to take significantly longer...

Lets leave the realism where it belongs and keep EVE's iconic asymmetric designs (like the Raven, Blackbird, Omen, Catalyst, etc.) as they are!

Moa... LOL
thats the ugliest ship i ever saw...
i cant even imagine uglier one...

To be fair, the Raven IS looking better. Particularly the small adjustment to the cockpit/bridge/frontal head and its supportive new rear structure. The ship's head looks less like a chicken in a desperate search for a close encounter with an axe. The engines at the rear too, seem quite pleasant.

If anything all of these new subtle changes amplify the out-of-place, lopsided awkwardness of the smaller of the two wings. If the small wing on the left when viewed from the rear, was scaled somewhat larger relative to the other side, by length, width & depth it might actually work.

Ideally just a little smaller than the right side's length and width, keeping in theme with original asymmetric hull design yet finding a bit more balance of scale / weighting.

In many respects this can be due to humans being proportionately asymmetric. We're all a little taller, shorter etc.. on one side vs. the other. For the most part it is subtle, we can casually choose to only wear size 10's on our left and right sides etc. It's familiar and strikes a chord when we view it. Ideally, the aptly balanced asymmetric machine becomes less precise and somehow that much more organic on first viewing.

On the other hand a perfectly symmetrical human enters the territory of creepy. The uncanny valley. Not unlike a robot somehow. Simultaneously extreme asymmetry has its unsettling qualities when viewed generally due to it being particularly inhuman.

The trick is finding balance and more precisely, a comfortable ratio. One side slightly greater than the other in relative size mimicking the asymmetry of nature/biology yet not overwhelmingly so.

It's not so much a matter of being wholly for or against asymmetry or symmetry - yet both if they exist in excess to the point where the over all balance of the subject/ship is acutely skewed.