Askad-Ariitar render

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

Post by Graham Kennedy »

The Askad-Ariitar is another Turgran design - the backstory has Humanity conquered by another race for a while, and then liberated by the Turgrans. So afterwards the Turgrans were significantly larger, richer, and more advanced than Humanity for a long time, which is why most of the ships from this era are theirs.

The Ariitar is obviously rather similar to the Theramel, and in fact shares many systems with it - the Ariitar is kind of a bridge, sharing some systems from earlier ships and some with later ones. So the Ariitar and Theramel have the same secondary laser cannon, for example. The Ariitar has two different sized box launchers, smaller ones from the earlier generation and bigger ones that would be in use afterwards - though actually the large launchers are a "short" version, which is why the missile you see being launched from it here is much shorter than the one launched from the Theramel version.

The original design for the big laser cannon was very similar to the Theramel's big lasers just scaled down, which I didn't like when I started rendering it - it made it look like I'd just reused the later design. So I've redesigned it somewhat, giving it a cruder, slightly "steampunk" feel with tanks and pipework on the outside of the lasers.

Note also the STL drive system - repellor engines use paired "spikes" to focus energy on a point behind the engine, distorting space and creating a reactionless driving effect on the ship. Better tech = more spikes = more acceleration, so the Ariitar's six spike repellors are way better than the two spike version on the Longbow. And yes, there's an in-between generation to come with four spikes. The engines on the Theramel are still repellors, but a later development - the "spikes" are merged to make a faceted toroid, with further development then continuing the trend that better tech = more facets on the toroid = more acceleration. This isn't obvious in blender because it uses faceted surfaces for things like cylinders and spheres, so you can't distinguish between what's mean to be a curved surface and what's meant to be an actual faceted shape. But if you looked at the repellors on each generation you'd find ones with eight facets through to 24+. I suppose the ultimate repellor would actually be a smooth ring which was effectively an infinite number of facets!

A similar principle is at work with the sails, of course - Longbow's pair, Ariitar's six, Theramel's eight. And yeah, there are intermediaries to come with four sails. :)

Eventually, however, repellors gave way to much superior "propulsors". I generally like to give things quite generic names to avoid technobabble - so it's "repellor" and "propulsor", rather than "Quantum magnatomic bayon field engines" or something.

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