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Why the T6 Intelligence Ships look like how they do (from the concept artist!)
somebob
Member Posts: 556 Arc User
http://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/2fh905/sto_concept_artist_here_amaish/
This is only a part of the entire article (and look through the thread itself for more posts from the concept artist).
Hello guys this is Hector Ortiz, concept artist for STO and Im here to talk about process, decision making and to answer some of your design related questions about this IP we love. This post will mainly be focused in T6 ships. BTW this a personal post and doesnt necessarily reflect Cryptics view of things. Lets keep it serious and professional and well all have an informative thread! Ill start with some points to get the ball rolling.
Why are the Intelligence ships designed like that? The intelligence ships were designed after the modern visual language of stealth jet fighters. Intelligence gathering has always been a gray zone in governments. Sometimes their hands get somewhat dirty to acquire it (intelligence) and for that reason Intel ships have that darker tone. Their plating hints of some alien tech exchange. It has always been strange to me that somehow tech doesnt seem to cross over species in ST. Even on Earth what one product brand does influences the others. Im not saying this will be a trend in STO design, but something to think about as an open minded fan.
When it comes to mechanics these ships were designed to have a minimum energy profile. Nacelles are narrow, yet longer proportionally. Bussard collectors are also minimized for the same purpose, stealth. Design wise the blue Tron lines were done to draw the ship against the darkness of space. Stealth jet fighters barely have windows. Theres simply no need for them. The same was decided for Intel ships, which is why we traded them with the tron lines. It was a gameplay related decision. As you can see one thing leads to another. Dark stealthy ships that need player visibility, but couldnt rely on windows for it. Later I might post some other concepts, but its not a promise eh!
This is only a part of the entire article (and look through the thread itself for more posts from the concept artist).
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Edit: everyone should read the comments, hector and jamjamz pretty much confirm that variations of classic designs as customization for the Intel ships are in the works! I'm on a tablet so quoting is not doable, but some retyping:
Hector: I just asked my ship guys and they tell me that yes classic variant ship skins are on the way.
Jamjamz: classic materials will be available but any variant geometry parts will retain the Intel look.
Though I kinda already had that feeling thats where they were going with them.
I like a little Espionage, some stealth and subterfuge in a story, Though I'll be honest and say I don't like the characters such as Sloan and Drake, I want to Disentegrate them ( But that kind of proves the point that they are well written, Good characters get reactions from the audience)
Also stealth fighters/bombers don't glow in the dark. :rolleyes:
If they were really trying to go for a stealth look, the nacelles should have folded down while in warp.
Hell, even the borg cubes look better.
Phantom could be a Defiant, a Guardian could be a Galaxy, a Eclipse could be... Heavy Cruiser?
Not even sure about the Science Intel ship...
I'm sure that SOME elements of "stealth" remain constant, but seriously? There is no way designs from today are still going to be relevant 4-500 years from now.
Given the sophistication of ST sensors that can sense astoundingly vast quantities of information from light years away, there is no way that modern stealth physical design is going to still be effective or relevant.
As stated I appreciate the effort and am looking forward to the new ships. abilities and areas to play in but the design inspiration for these new vessels is completely ludicrous and off base.
"There... are... four... lights!" ~Jean Luc Picard
Agreed a very nice tap dance. But from what i'm hearing the only players that will need this ships are pvpers. So i won't waste money on them.
As far as modern Stealth designs being used is ludicrous, Science Fiction is filled with using modern ideas or common shapes for future starship designs like using fish, spiders, or 1950s spaceship designs. Obviously most of the designs will never happen in real life, but they certainly look interesting.
If they just had one term, Tier 6, most of this brouhaha would have been moot. But separating the tiers as 5U and 6 implies trajectory. Heck, if they'd called it Tier 6 and Tier 6I, you'd see considerably less controversy.
True words
Any sensors that aren't complete handwavium are going to be based on one of three core concepts:
1: Detect particle/wave emissions from the target (e.g. heat signatures)
2: Detect target's interaction with a field in space (e.g. target moves through a planet or star's magnetic or gravitational field)
3: Bounce particles/waves off of the target and analyze the return (radar-like--most active scans)
Now, the basic principles of having as-low-as-possible energy emissions (or directing emissions in specific directions--e.g. dumping nearly all of your heat through the engine exhaust) is not going to change no matter what the technology level--though cloaking graviton emissions is going to take extreme finesse with generating exactly enough anti-gravitons to cancel your own ship's mass.
Also, making your ship as non-reflective as possible to whatever your opponent is scanning you with (electromagnetic waves of whatever part of the spectrum from radio to X-ray, or particle beams, or whatnot) is likewise not going to change--only the methods of rendering it non-reflective will change. Absorbing as much of as many wavelengths and particle types as possible instead of reflecting them will help (i.e. you are "black" all over), and angled rather than rounded surfaces (to make sure that you will only reflect a beam directly back to its source when the beam hits you perfectly "flat-on") will aid in this.
Until they give me the ability to fly a T6 Regent, (Even if it is just a skin), Ill hang on to my money, and my Dilithium.
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Let's be honest here, they only made the ships like that, because they thought it would look "cool".
It's sad to see game developers systematicly deconstructing an IP and being proud of it doing so.
I like 'em. Tron lines and all.
Keep in mind these are just the first ships in the T6 category. Intelligence vessels.... I can only imagine what they will come up with next.
Wow! You should play the stock market. You're able to predict what military technology and concepts will be important and "core" in use 500 years from now, you should be able to clean the hell up on the market where you only need to predict a few weeks/months in advance.
On a serious note, your predictions are probably true, based on our CURRENT understanding of physics and science. Who's to say that by the time we actually attain warp drive, meet the vulcans and start exploring the galaxy, our understanding of fundamental principles won't be totally changed.
Scientific theories, principles and methods are being changed, discovered, proven/disproven all the time. I expect a lot to change in the next 500 years.
"There... are... four... lights!" ~Jean Luc Picard
The fact that these Intel T6s have a Trait to grind to collect and fit on those Trait Slots for your character might well be the process some people may feel they have to do and then discard the ship, rinse, repeat for another trait as they go through these ships for the trait level alone. So they could design a flying brick for all they care and still get sales from folks after the Trait ignoring the ship. It is cynical.
I guess this was the point of why 5U can be still viable after grinding out Traits from T6 ships you dont like but are necessary to grind if you want to acquire the Trait for your character.
So design wise it maybe a moot thing for people with large wallets who plan on upgrading their favourite T5 ship with the knowledge somewhere along the way they will end up buying unappealing designs just to pump up their pay to win desires.
Science doesn't make leaps that suddenly turn stuff totally around. And even if there is some fantastic uber-tech that doesn't rely on passive detection, reflection or interaction with fields, there still is non-uber tech that relies on it, and it would suck to be invisible just to the fancy-pants sensor technology but get detected by a radar signal.
But it's also fact that they never really showed some of these fancy-pants sensor technology that doesn't rely on the basic principles outlined above.
Subspace emissions could be tracked. Plasma could be detected. Distortions in magnetic fields.
And Cloak was often shown to be imperfect in some way. In TOS, Romulan cloaked vessels could still be detected enough to know they were there, even if they couldn'T target them. In Undiscovered Country, the ship left behind plasma. In TNG, Warbirds were detectable at Warp and with Tachyon Detection (an active sensor technology). In DS9, the Dominon managed to scan for the cloaked Defiant, and the station could detect something weird going on when a cloaked Warbird was sitting on it.
The only one that was called perfect was the Scimitar cloak - but that might no longer hold true due to more advanced technology. (A player's Scimitar cloak definitely is not perfect, it can be detected with Science Captain Sensor Scan and high Auxiliary Power).
You don't know what the enemy uses to detect you, so you try to cover your bases.
Most people are here for Star Trek. So get back to selling Star Trek to us.
Unofficial lore, unofficial ships? Do you see the problem?
If you want official lore and official ships, TNG and TOS ares out on Blu Ray and digitally remastered now. I am really hoping DS9 gets the same treatment.
Cryptic has no choice but create new lore and new ships if they want to continue the show You don't have to like them all.
It's not like all of the official lore and ships were all well liked by every Trek fan.
Also, the ships have cloaks. Doesn't that mean that to be stealthy they would be cloaked, so their look 'outside' cloak doesn't matter.
Another thing I take from thi thread was a comment that really hits the nail on the head...
Rename T5-U as T6
Rename T6 as T6-I
Job done everyone satisfied no problem move along now...
Actually I wouldn't stop there - my feedback would be that the only difference between T5-U and T6 (or T6 and T6-I) should be the ability to have Intel BOFFs. They should have matching consoles (ie T6 have one extra console to 11) and matching # of BOFF slots (ie T6 has one less BOFF power). T6 Intel ships can keep the Ship Traits that they get, but other T5-U should be given their own traits at lvl5 mastery (lock box ships could all have one for each type - Cardy, Ferengi, Jemmy, Temporal, Tal shiar, Elachi, Hirogen, Voth, Undine, Xindi), faction fed, kdf and rom would all have the same trait.
That way the whole T6 debate would boil down to this:
Want to use Intel Boffs/powers? Fine buy an Intel ship.
Don't? Then you can get your current ship upgraded to T6 at a cost and don't lose out.
Have a lockbox/event/vet ship? Upgraded to T6 for free
...#LLAP...
Oh and thats different to any fictional ship how? Very few sci fi ships actually make any engineering sense, since they were designed by artists and not engineers thats hardly surprising
A grown man wrote that?
Sounds like a little kid grasping at straws, offering 3 completely unrelated explanations for their behavior and all of them totally contrived.
Flimsy rationalizations don't cut it. Especially ones that make you look ignorant of the IP you're trying to sound supposedly knowledgeable about.
How many Klingon and Romulan ships cloak? How many of them have windows? How many rely on dark-colored hulls? How many require a low radar cross-section?
If you're invisible while cloaked, what flippin' difference does it make what you look like otherwise?!
I sympathize with their situation but way I see it before you were renting official star trek license and now you are not.
The cost of renting a few pixels on your screen could be rationalized with it being official design.
It cost money because it was a copyrighted product.
Just like the whole game could be aswell - everyone hates the story missions and forced to cope but at least flying a star trek ship, you could live with it.
With everything that was terrible at the end of the day you had your picard ship or whatever you personally liked.
Now you are not even flying a star trek ship anymore so what's left? A handful of sound effects from the shows?
"They can't do anything about it now", well no one can do anything about cancer or the obesity epidemic now, does that make it awesome not really
That being said, when they release a t6 carrier with 5 forward weapons and 3 hangar bays I will probably accept flying a fake ship
This, pretty much. Especially when you're making something in fiction that already has established background and basic rules.
But their design is far from the only thing that is ludicrous. Another example is the lack of windows. There are living, breathing, sentient beings aboard those, right? So they're telling me the these living beings don't like gazing at the wonders of space and are perfectly content to stay locked in a submarine environment for months, even years in deep space, just because? Are these ships manned by droids?
And black hull....lol
Seriosuly, I apreciate the attempt for an explanation, but....lol