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Decided I was a bit bored doing huge ships, so here's on of the fighters. It's the Deathdealer, another contemporary of the Kororra class. The Deathdealer is a point defence fighter - short on range, but fast and agile as hell. Armament is a pair of AMP cannon. They're intended to be cheap, simple, basic machines that defend capital ships from other fighters.

This actually turned out harder to do than a capital ship in many ways, largely because of the curved fuselage shape. Believe it or not, the fuselage is a combination of two very distorted cylinders and a sphere. It's not perfect - the fuselage shapes should be blended into one another, but I don't find a way to do it. But overall I'm happy with how it came out, given my current limited knowledge of how to use blender. Would love to have a proper guy I could put into these scenes, as the machines are actually a reasonable scale with a guy.















And with gear down... one thing I wanted to do for the Coalition universe is give the small ships wheels. So many sci fi shuttles and fighters land on a flat bottom, or skis. But wheels are so much more practical! They make it easier to pull a ship around when it's on the ground, they allow rolling landings, etc.

Huh, I forgot to put a couple of bits on so I've redone the pics and reloaded them.

#1 - If that's a "typical" one-man cockpit, I think that shows scale well enough without a figure.

#2 - the single protrusion on the starboard nose, above the paired cannon - is that another weapon, or an antenna/sensor?

Re: #2, it looks like the receiver for a hose and drogue refueling system to me.

Mikey wrote:#1 - If that's a "typical" one-man cockpit, I think that shows scale well enough without a figure.

Kinda. The cockpit is in the rearward part of that upper hull, the main sensor is in the forward part.

To show scale :

#2 - the single protrusion on the starboard nose, above the paired cannon - is that another weapon, or an antenna/sensor?

Captain Seafort wrote:Re: #2, it looks like the receiver for a hose and drogue refueling system to me.

What he said.

'K, then. So the bit that looks like a canopy is actually a sort of radome?

Mikey wrote:'K, then. So the bit that looks like a canopy is actually a sort of radome?

If it is, it should be clearer IMO

Technically future fighters shouldn't need a transparent canopy.

Mikey wrote:'K, then. So the bit that looks like a canopy is actually a sort of radome?

The front part in white is a radome. The cockpit is under the darker patch on the hull in the photoshop pic. Alas, I'm not able to draw surface features on objects very well so I can't draw that in on the blender version.

Here's a pic of the innards :



The white ball is the power reactor, the long tube in front of it is a zero point energy system that multiplies the output of the reactor, the purple glowing tube in front of that is an energy converter. Big ships power systems have the same basic principles, which is why every big ship also have the purple "caps" sticking out of the hull. Above the reactor is a fuel tank, in front of that is the cockpit, and in front of that is the "radar". Below the radar is the rifter that lets the ship go in and out of midspace.

Cockpit module ejection :



And no, there's no windows.

Yay!