Clean hull material

capnmanx

Compare the pictures on the following wiki pages.

The USS Rhode Island on Memory Alpha

STO's Rhode Island variant

Now, I'm not here to complain about model accuracy of the Rhode Island or anything; it's just an example. I chose it because it does a good job of illustrating a key difference between ships in STO, and the ships from the shows. That difference is how busy and cluttered the hulls are.

What I'd like is for there to be a hull material that simply smoothed the hull out, and kept things nice and clean (as much as possible anyway). Ideally, it should have a matte finish, as Trek hulls tended to not be reflective like they often seem to be in STO. As Kirk era ships tended to have the plainest hulls, it would seem appropriately pale off-white colours were used.

I appreciate that many people might find large expanses of mostly featureless hull to be quite boring; but for some of us it wouldn't matter, because that is just what they are supposed to look like.

I have no idea how much work a new hull material would be, so I can't honestly say I really understand what I'm asking for here; but I really do think it would be a good addition.

futurepastnow

There's a clear difference between the newest Federation ships and the older ones.

Look at the Ambassador or the Vesta up close. Both have a lot of attention to little details like markings and phaser strips. both have correct lifeboat and window placements. And both have a material and hull pattern that are correct to canon (or to the artist's design in the case of the Vesta). The Ambassador with the correct material, pattern, and windows just looks perfect.

The older Starfleet models like the Galaxy, Sovereign, Nova, and so on need to be updated to give them canon-correct hull details like this.

I just don't think Cryptic will ever divert its ship artists from making new ships to fix up the old ships to the degree that they require

maxvitor

I won't go into the accuracy of the models, however there is no comparing images from television broadcasts of questionable resolution and details actually existing in the models themselves. The picture you posted as a reference to a "smooth" hull is not smooth at all, with close examination of the picture, details of the hull can be vaguely seen but for the most part are lost due to the limitations of broadcast television and the fuzziness of the picture. For the television broadcasts of the 60s putting in high detail would have been a wasted effort since television viewers of the era would never be able to see it, but most of the models made from the 70s for the movies and the 80s on for television used a paint process called aztecing to give the impression of a large ship hull assembled from smaller prefinished pieces that for whatever reasons may have subtle differences. A smooth featureless hull is impossible for vehicles this big since the hulls are not made in one piece then sent off to some impossibly huge paint booth, but rather thousands of much smaller pieces fitted together, factor in maintenance hatches, cargo access ways, replaceable ablative hull segments, energy transparent sensor coverings, communications arrays, heat exchangers, etc., and you end up with a very busy looking hull surface.
The busy hull textures seen in the game, although falling far short of how detailed they should look at least look far more realistic than they would if the hulls were shown perfectly smooth.

centersolace

futurepastnow wrote: »

There's a clear difference between the newest Federation ships and the older ones.

Look at the Ambassador or the Vesta up close. Both have a lot of attention to little details like markings and phaser strips. both have correct lifeboat and window placements. And both have a material and hull pattern that are correct to canon (or to the artist's design in the case of the Vesta). The Ambassador with the correct material, pattern, and windows just looks perfect.

The older Starfleet models like the Galaxy, Sovereign, Nova, and so on need to be updated to give them canon-correct hull details like this.

I just don't think Cryptic will ever divert its ship artists from making new ships to fix up the old ships to the degree that they require

Please....... the Ambassador is beautiful. I want my Galaxy to be that pretty. TTwTT

capnmanx

maxvitor wrote: »

I won't go into the accuracy of the models, however there is no comparing images from television broadcasts of questionable resolution and details actually existing in the models themselves. The picture you posted as a reference to a "smooth" hull is not smooth at all, with close examination of the picture, details of the hull can be vaguely seen but for the most part are lost due to the limitations of broadcast television and the fuzziness of the picture. For the television broadcasts of the 60s putting in high detail would have been a wasted effort since television viewers of the era would never be able to see it, but most of the models made from the 70s for the movies and the 80s on for television used a paint process called aztecing to give the impression of a large ship hull assembled from smaller prefinished pieces that for whatever reasons may have subtle differences. A smooth featureless hull is impossible for vehicles this big since the hulls are not made in one piece then sent off to some impossibly huge paint booth, but rather thousands of much smaller pieces fitted together, factor in maintenance hatches, cargo access ways, replaceable ablative hull segments, energy transparent sensor coverings, communications arrays, heat exchangers, etc., and you end up with a very busy looking hull surface.
The busy hull textures seen in the game, although falling far short of how detailed they should look at least look far more realistic than they would if the hulls were shown perfectly smooth.

I don't much care that there was a real world technical reason for ship hulls looking as uncluttered as they did; the fact remains that that is what they typically looked like. Consequently that is how I tend to picture Starfleet ships.

To my eyes, the ships in STO often look like somebody has been doodling technical diagrams on them with some kind of cutting tool. It all looks very high tech and all, but it just doesn't look very Starfleety to me.