Askad-Theramel render

Graham's Coalition Universe stuff
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Graham Kennedy
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Askad-Theramel render

Post by Graham Kennedy »

Decided to go back to the sail ships. This is the Theramel, another Turgran design and the biggest and most powerful sail ship ever built. Armament is missiles and laser cannon. They mounted just about the largest sail set ever built, giving them a speed of about 350 c. If you hung a much smaller hull on to that you'd get maybe twice the speed - 700-800 c is as fast as you can get with a sail drive of any size. For comparison, the Swiftsure could was designed for 4,600 c, though it only ever reached 3,800 maximum and averaged 1,950.

The sails are armoured with a grid over them. I actually hit blender's limits with my first attempt at drawing this - the mesh was so big and complicated that the program simply couldn't handle it! I damn near crashed it and lost several hours work, fortunately after about fifteen minutes hung up it came free again and let me save. I redrew the grid in a much simpler form, which it could handle. Amusingly, after I was done it turned out that you can barely even see the grid in anything but a pretty extreme closeup.

The red things on the hull are heat dumps. No forcefields at this point, defences consisted of a mesh of material that was a near-superconductor of heat, built into the hull. The mesh would feed into laser cooling units that convert the heat into laser light and shoot it out of the ship. Hence incoming energy hitting the hull is absorbed and beamed back out again. Not a perfect technology, but maybe ten times better than a bare hull for resisting laser fire. And yes, laser cooling is a real technology.

The big white units in the hull are fuel tanks. They're designed to be easily removed and replaced - mostly a hangover from earlier ships like the Longbow where tanks were detachable units, and also retained because it made it easy to swap out battle-damaged tanks.

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Notice that I caught a light panel in one of the pics... bit of a whups moment. :)
Give a man a fire, and you keep him warm for a day. SET a man on fire, and you will keep him warm for the rest of his life...
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Re: Askad-Theramel render

Post by Captain Seafort »

Graham Kennedy wrote:They mounted just about the largest sail set ever built, giving them a speed of about 350 c. If you hung a much smaller hull on to that you'd get maybe twice the speed - 700-800 c is as fast as you can get with a sail drive of any size.
Did they ever do this - combine a lightweight, poorly armed and protected hull with the most powerful drive possible as a high-speed scout or courier?[/quote]
Yep.
And for this thread's installment of "real warship component recognition", those radomes have been nicked off a Sheffield class.
Yep. :) I got to walk around a Type 42 once, always thought those radar domes looked cool :

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Actually there's some pointy sensor things on the nose of the Kororra's Silex torpedoes that are inspired by the nose of the Type 42's Sea Dart missiles, too.

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I'm not sure what I prefer most from these ships. The amount of work and thought that's gone into the designs themselves, or spotting the elements of or similarities to modern or historical warships. :)
Thanks! It's amazing for me to see these in 3D... I've been imagining them in my head for so long now. Back in the day I even contemplated paying somebody to model them for me. Seeing them come to life like this is awesome, and it's great to know others are enjoying seeing them too. :)
Only two things are infinite - the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe: Albert Einstein.
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Re: Askad-Theramel render

Post by Graham Kennedy »

Oh crud, I hit the "edit post" button by accident instead of the "quote" button. Sorry about that Seafort. :oops:
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Re: Askad-Theramel render

Post by Graham Kennedy »

So I've been playing with this one, making the curved bits more curved and whatnot, and I decided to have a big "rec deck" on board. I got this from the Star Trek novels, in which the TOS Enterprise had a huge open recreation area that featured in many of the books. It even had a pool in it! We finally got to see it in TMP, although sans pool.

So since I was replacing the flat white glowing windows with proper ones, I made a big area that has huge windows, almost floor to ceiling in height, and I stuck some tables and stuff in there along with a swimming pool! At first I wanted one of those types that stick up above ground, but the deck height isn't enough to allow that. So the pool sticks through to the deck below. There are stairs on each side, a rail, and I even made a version of my standard little guy in swimming shorts! Looks kind of cool, IMO.

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Give a man a fire, and you keep him warm for a day. SET a man on fire, and you will keep him warm for the rest of his life...
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