Then I had a problem with the power cap. Even though it rendered perfectly when I made it, as you can see above, it suddenly decided that the whole thing glowed violet rather than just the bottoms of the holes. And absolutely nothing I did would change it's mind! In the end I had to resort to drawing a new cap from scratch and re-importing it.
It's frustrating as hell because, as you say, this has all come together shockingly fast - I expected this would take weeks or months, much as you did Teaos. But fast as it's been at least 1/2 the time I've spent on this has been wrestling with how to make simple stuff work the way it's supposed to. And a big chunk of the rest is spent googling "how do you do X in blender" and then watching tutorials on youtube, reading forums etc. If I really knew what I was doing I probably could have done this in a day or two.
Still, one thing about my ships is that many of them have standardised parts - the same turrets and sensors on different ships. So if I go on to do more, that will make things easier!
As for looking cluttered in bits and not in others, bear in mind there's still a lot of stuff to go on the hull. Also bear in mind the ship is three miles long. Those little Mk 2 turrets? Those are almost 500 feet apart...
Anyway, here's the Mark 21 turrets. Note no rifters on them, as explained above. You get a good idea of the scale of the Mk 2, 6 and 21 turrets compared to one another.
For the next bit, I'm thinking of this. I suspect it will be a tough one to do... or maybe not. Time will tell.
