Playing with sail patterns

[Graham Kennedy]

So brief background - many of the aspects of the Coalition were designed to address things that bother me about other sci-fi franchises. For instance, it bothers me that pretty much everyone uses warp drive to get around, and has done for like three hundred years without significant apparent advancement. Even when there is advancement, it never seems to be reflected in the design of the ships - a transwarp drive looks externally identical to a warp drive, for instance.

Meanwhile in the real world sails and sailing ships are very different to paddlewheels, are different to propellors.

So I wanted to have a few different types of FTL drive, which look very different from one another. One of the common ones is the lanshati drive. Lanshati is a Turgran word, though it was adopted into human languages and is the standard word for this type of drive. Lanshati means "twister", because it twists space. Twist = warp, as this is the equivalent of warp drive in the Coalition universe!

Anyway, lanshati drives involve literal sail structures. More sails and larger sails = more speed. Top speeds for a practical vessel (i.e. something like a cargo ship or warship, as opposed to something built just to break records) generally range up to about 1,500 xc.

Now I've always had a mental image of what the sail surface looked like. But the thing is, I've never been able to create it. I had in mind some kind of energy pattern playing within the flat of the sail. I tried to animate a glowing static panel, but it never worked. So what I wound up creating in blender was this (click for somewhat bigger versions) :



Just a random noise pattern with some glow to it.

So lately I decided to have a play and see if I could come up with something better. I googled around to find images of electricity or plasm-type patterns. Here's a few tests.



Same pattern, but in green...



And this one, which I really like...



What I'd really love is to be able to create an animated pattern of my own. I don't know if that's even possible, though.

[Mikey]

I'm partial to the last one, myself. Before you go for an animated pattern, though, you should probably delineate what the energy pattern within the sails comprises, and how it actually effects "twisting."

[Graham Kennedy]

It's meant to indicate a lot of energy at work in the sail. The sail uses energy to twist space (in much the same way that warp drives use energy to warp space), and I wanted some visual indication of 'here is a big advanced thingie with a LOT of energy running through it!'

Something reminiscent of this would be along the lines of what I was thinking of...



Or this. Imagine that last pattern doing something like this.

[Graham Kennedy]

Render of the Theramel with the nicer sail texture. Click for bigass version. I'm still liking it myself!



The Theramel represents the "final generation" of the Lanshati sail tech, at least in Turgran/Human history. Which is why it's so huge and has so many sails. A ship like this could do 1,000 x c, which is about Warp 8 on the TNG scale. Something like a destroyer might make closer to 1,500.