designing procedures

[shran]

Having seen so many kitbashes and ships hat would fall apart literally the second they would be completed, I started thinking a bit.
There are several ways of designing a ship, one of many is just drawing something and later adding in the various functions.
Another method, one we prefer over at Daystrom I believe, is looking at what is needed, what is available and how a given amount of resources is used best for fulfilling said needs.

I suppose other methods are to be looked at which I may have left out, but basically it boils down to this: Is it better going for the looks when designing a starship, or should a more realistic approach be used?

Similar argumants can be made for utensils, architecture, and so on.

As I couldn't get to a solid conclusion, I supposed you might have some interesting answers to this.

[stitch626]

When I design a ship, I go with it must work, but it also must look good... to me.

[shran]

Personally I am slightly in favour of the rational aprouch, of looking for what is neccesary to fulfill the demand, to take a look at the available resources and how said resources can be used best for said purpose.
But the idea of drawing a vague contour, or even having the vague notion of what something looks like, visualizing it on a medium and assigning functions only then has its own merits as well.

As an example, take the RP ships we designed. They were going by the same process, and all players wanted the design to work, first and foremost. Looking nice was more of an afterthought.

[Deepcrush]

For building a ship, I think purpose come first. Looks are a minor after thought.

[Mikey]

Agreed with the above - form follows function. I don't believe, for example, that Federation ships are built with the style of primary hull which they have primarily because SF thinks circles/ellipses look nice - rather, they were built that way because the circular/elliptical primary hull serves an IU practical reason. That said, of course if a given component's function allows for more than one design, I'd go with the nicer looking one.

[Sionnach Glic]

I tend to look at what it needs to do, then try and design the form around it.

[Graham Kennedy]

Well, anybody who looks at my Coalition stuff knows where I fall. Design for the function, and whatever it looks like, that's that.

What's interesting is that over time, I often come to love the look of strange / ugly ships designed this way. Functional has a beauty all it's own, I find.

[Reliant121]

Sure you're not a bit German Graham?

[Mikey]

Sure you're not a bit German Graham?

Kennedy, Krupps, what's the diff?

I think GK's Coalition stuff is an excellent example of how functionality (in the big picture) breeds aestheticism. The obverse, of course, is that we as observers are socialized in the same environment as that for which our creations are designed; wet ships look sleek and streamlined to us because we are products of the same world that demands that functional form from the ships.

[Reliant121]

I agree entirely. While the ships are the antethesis of sleek in many ways, they have a true elegence in their utilitarianism.

[stitch626]

And then you have ships that are neither, like the Yeager.

[Reliant121]

That isn't a ship.

That is an abomination.

[Captain Seafort]

Well, anybody who looks at my Coalition stuff knows where I fall. Design for the function, and whatever it looks like, that's that.

Having seen your ships I have one word.

Bollocks.

You may have defined the form around the function, but it's pretty clear that said function was developed with the intention of producing an aesthetic form.

[Lighthawk]

Function before form, if form is even considered. Two of my favorite series for ship design are B5 and Halo. In both the human ships are big, blocky, and ugly as sin. They are designed to do work, and look like they can.

[Graham Kennedy]

Well, anybody who looks at my Coalition stuff knows where I fall. Design for the function, and whatever it looks like, that's that.

Having seen your ships I have one word.

Bollocks.

You may have defined the form around the function, but it's pretty clear that said function was developed with the intention of producing an aesthetic form.

If you mean that I set out to have a specific look to the ships then no, it really wasn't. I had absolutely no clue what the ships would end up looking like when I started. Hell, the defining ship of the whole lot is the Kororra class, and the first draft of that was a rotating cylinder! It evolved through years and years of changes, and every one of them was driven by fleshing out the background technology and realising how it should/would affect the ships. I had absolutely no idea how they would end up looking. And in fact even now I have a thought in mind that would somewhat change the hull form of most if not all the Coalition ships; not radical, but enough to need to redraw most of them.