Project XR4 Nyx (WIP)

[Epsilon]

Did you consider extending the bay down instead of up?

It seems to me that you could thicken the fuselage by a meter or so and give it a X-33/Venture Star-esque profile without ruining the overall "Altea Aesthetic".

The problem with extending the bay downward is the wheelwells for the landing gear - I've got something like 20cm clearance until I hit, and that isn't enough to make the cargo fit.

Bumping up the fuselage is theoretically an idea, but at that point, I might as well be making an XR5.

I've been chatting at Doug, and an option may be to make a ship that's specifically designed for STS-style cargos. That would come after this one, of course, so it wouldn't be coming out anytime soon. But maybe Tuesday.

You're correct in saying that I could probably tweak the profile to make it taller, but at that point, it wouldn't look the way I want it to look. I've spent part of today twiddling with a model, and it just looks ugly as hell. It's not what I wanted for this vessel.

Ultimately, I'd rather forge ahead with this model as I've designed it (and for the role I designed it,) and then do something afterwards that specifically fills the role of "Futuristic STS Replacement." That way, you end up with something that's actually designed for the role instead of me trying to shoehorn STS cargos into something that really wasn't initially designed for it.

 

[C3PO]

I was thinking and had an idea about the cargo bay doors. I made a very rough sketch in windows paint of my idea

I can't think of a reason you'd need a pressurized cargo bay. The whole point of a cargo bay is to get cargo into the vacum of space. If you want to carry pressurized cargo, you put it in a pressurized container.

 

[RacerX]

I can't think of a reason you'd need a pressurized cargo bay. The whole point of a cargo bay is to get cargo into the vacum of space. If you want to carry pressurized cargo, you put it in a pressurized container.

A pressurized cargo bay could also be used for extra passengers and their cargo for example. Why would we need extra passengers? I leave that to your imagination. Mining colony perhaps? Why not a dual-role ship? Why limit it to "Just cargo"? Is my point. Why not make that area of the ship "survivable"? It doesn't mean it has to be survivable 100% of the time but would be nice to have that option if need be.

 

[Hlynkacg]

Epsilon, I don't want to tell a fellow artist how to do his job but this is roughly what I had in mind...



The Red squares represent standard TEU format containers. The blue blobs are the propellant tanks and the green slots would be the landing gear wells.

@ RacerX why wouldn't you just put a pressurized module in the unpressurized cargo bay?

 

[RacerX]

@ RacerX why wouldn't you just put a pressurized module in the unpressurized cargo bay?

You can do that to

 

[icedown]

A pressurized cargo bay could also be used for extra passengers and their cargo for example. Why would we need extra passengers? I leave that to your imagination. Mining colony perhaps? Why not a dual-role ship? Why limit it to "Just cargo"? Is my point. Why not make that area of the ship "survivable"? It doesn't mean it has to be survivable 100% of the time but would be nice to have that option if need be.

I think what they have in mind is a CHM like the XR2. That way you don't have the added weight of reinforcements of the cargo bay and door to hold the pressure and better locking and sealing mechanisms. If you want to carry more passengers, then drop in a pressurized module that either takes up the whole bay, or maybe smaller ones that stack can attach together.

 

[Epsilon]

Epsilon, I don't want to tell a fellow artist how to do his job but this is roughly what I had in mind...



The Red squares represent standard TEU format containers. The blue blobs are the propellant tanks and the green slots would be the landing gear wells.

There's not nearly as much space available in there as you think there is.

If it's too hard to see, that's two lines that are 1.57m wide, for a total of 3.14 meters. If I don't have a slot or combination of slots that are at least 4.6m wide and 4.6m tall, you're not fitting a payload in there by default in any case. As for the space over the wheelwells themselves, I've got about 25cm clearance. That's probably far too little to be realistic, but meh. The pipes down the bottom are the tubes for the SCRAM engines. Unnecessary perhaps, but because of the travel on the landing gear, I wouldn't gain that much room from it in any case.

That said, there is a solution to the problem that uses certain overrides in config files (pointed out to me by Doug, of course.) I'll probably play with them a little bit at some point - using said overrides, you could fit 4 SSBB modules into the XR5's bay, like I said. No change request needed.

 

[RacerX]

I was just throwing ideas out there I hope nobody took offense. Ship is looking good in either case. Nice work!

 

[Epsilon]

I was just throwing ideas out there I hope nobody took offense. Ship is looking good in either case. Nice work!

Don't get me wrong - it's a good idea - it just won't work right with the design of this craft. Like I said, I might play with something after this one that'll carry shuttle style cargos, but this one just won't do it without major reworking and screwing up the design I've got.

 

[RacerX]

Don't get me wrong - it's a good idea - it just won't work right with the design of this craft. Like I said, I might play with something after this one that'll carry shuttle style cargos, but this one just won't do it without major reworking and screwing up the design I've got.

No worries I look forward to flying it with great anticipation as I am sure alot of people are. Please don't mind my "thinking out-loud" way of posting. You have the whole orbiter community supporting you guys.

 

[Rybec]

So.....many....polygons......

I'm just going to keep my mouth shut and assume you'll clean it up once the shape is set in stone.

 

[Hlynkacg]

There's not nearly as much space available in there as you think there is.

No problem, I was looking at the proportions rather than actual dimmensions.

 

[Epsilon]

So.....many....polygons......

I'm just going to keep my mouth shut and assume you'll clean it up once the shape is set in stone.

Not nearly as many polys as you think.

I do a decent amount of hand-cleanup anyway, but it's still 1/3 of the polys that the XR5 has even now.

Note: I count vertices since that figure doesn't change when you change the model from quads to triangles.

XR4: 18628 vertices

XR5: 111644 vertices (although probably 1/4 of these come from the little dudes in the cockpit)

 

[Pipcard]

XR5: 111644 vertices (although probably 1/4 of these come from the little dudes in the cockpit)

Actually those pilots are pretty low poly:

 

[Epsilon]

Actually those pilots are pretty low poly:

Yet somehow, they're something like 6k vertices each by Blender's count. I'm not sure WHY they're that vertex-heavy, but they're definitely dense.

... oh dear god THAT's why.

Edit: The picture was taken after selecting all the vertices in the object and running Blender's "remove doubles" function.

Makes me wonder how much the XR5 could be helped by a good hand-optimization, unless there were a ton of different models overlaying the same spots to let it be changed on the fly? I've never noticed that behavior in the vessel, though. Anyway. The More You Know. :rainbow:

 

[Rybec]

NOTE: Was writing this as Epsilon made his post. The actual mesh isn't full of doubles, that's an import issue. Importing and immediately exporting the vanguard almost doubles it's filesize, screws up meshgroup order and breaks texture links. I'll be having a word with those folks.....

Not as low poly as you think.
The entire cockpit area including wall console and pilots is 32398 verts
Each pilot is 6498.
The console alone is 2040.

The THROTTLE HANDLES are 7128! What the hell! It's like the groundwork was laid for a virtual cockpit, but even then the throttle handles shouldn't be visible in the exterior view mesh.
The virtual cockpit no one can ever see is just shy of 1/3 the total geometry of the craft. Might be a big issue on most computers, but most of my orbiting is done on my wimpy 2-gHz laptop with integrated video.


Also worth noting those vertcounts are as the vehicle stands on blender import, where none of the polygons are welded (each face gets it's own verts instead of sharing them like it should). For that reason, poly count is a bit more accurate in this instance, but I'm comparing apples to apples here. Also part of why this new model seems so much "smaller", it doesn't have several thousand duplicate vertices.
I still think it;s lower poly though, I retract all criticism after looking at the wireframe of the Vangaurd cargo bay...

It's a shame the import/export plugin doesn't preserve mesh group order, or there's a lot of things in that mesh that I'd fix... (like the lower edge on the taper to the engines, the triangles were generated in the wrong order so it goes concave where it should be a smooth curve... Been bugging me for years, but enough enough to try to fix it in notepad.)


EDIT: Take THAT, Python! The exporter sorts all selected objects alphabetically, and the importer reads them in order, so I made it write the group number into the object name, and have successfully imported/exported the XR5 with preserved animations! I am so going to town on this thing. I need to do a little cleaning up before I can post the changes in it's thread (make it detect if an object had an ID added to it and remove the ID before writing the new mesh. If that's even a concern.), but that will have to wait for another day.