WizArtist II
"How can you have a yellow alert in Spacedock? "
Member # 1425
posted
Looks like the F-22 Raptor is going to have some Competition in the future.
-------------------- There are 10 types of people in the world...those that understand Binary and those that don't.
Registered: Nov 2004
| IP: Logged
Da_bang80
A few sectors short of an Empire
Member # 528
posted
Those pics have been floating around for a couple years now. Although the PAK-FA does look way cooler and sleeker than the F-22.
China's working on their own 5th gen fighter, the Chengdu J-20.
-------------------- Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. The courage to change the things I cannot accept. And the wisdom to hide the bodies of all the people I had to kill today because they pissed me off.
Teh PW
Self Impossed Exile (This Space for rent)
Member # 1203
posted
Da_bang, i'd like to remind you that looks doesnt equal function. Performance matters. (now of course, if those looks actually enhance Performance, then meh).
my concerns is that with our goverment issues with finances, other competive countries will take this as their chance to finally advance militarly against us... and i honestly think thats a probablity, with the type of retards in politics that have harmed us or hope to harm us by benifiting special iterests first before all others (though -they- say or will say otherwise, it's the results that will fuck us over)
Registered: Jan 2004
| IP: Logged
posted
China is sorta the odd man out with regards to military- a nuclear power that does not intervene militarily to achieve it's goals. (not like the US and NATO do anyway) Oh sure, they have the goods to rain hell on some country, but it's almost a moot point with North Korea also having nukes (or at least atomic weapons) right in their back yard.
And India has nukes. Pakistan. The Galapagos Islands.
Well, everyone, really. Except the Iran, Syria, Libya etc. (and those assholes have other WMD weapons just as terifying).
And therein lies the issue- China can sit back, confident the US will spend whatever resources, borrowed or otherwise, are needed to keep nuclear weapons from the nuts most likely to use them.
And the US and China are in this odd position where the US owes so much money to China that neither wants to step on the other's toes- any war would have the US blow off any debt obligations and the US cant have China call in it's loans so it turns a blind eye to human rights abuses and China's formenting civil war in Africa over metals and resources.
Trade deficits wont get addressed for the same reasons- cant piss off our creditors, so they hose us in an area that could (in part) get us out of debt.
Wait, this was about a plane?!?
Huh.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
| IP: Logged
posted
If you compare the ten top main battle tanks in the world, and the ten most advanced fighters of 2015, the only difference is the flag on the wing, or what flavor machine gun for the commander's turret.
Edit: Ok so the F-86 Sabre and MiG-15 Faggot were clones already in the 1950's, but my point still stands!
Registered: Aug 1999
| IP: Logged
WizArtist II
"How can you have a yellow alert in Spacedock? "
Member # 1425
posted
quote:Originally posted by Nim:
Edit: Ok so the F-86 Sabre and MiG-15 Faggot were clones already in the 1950's, but my point still stands!
Not even CLOSE to being alike other than a basic plan form. If you ever get a chance to compare the two at an airshow, the Sabre is significantly larger than the Faggot and the armaments are also fundamentally different as well as the tail structure.
-------------------- There are 10 types of people in the world...those that understand Binary and those that don't.
Registered: Nov 2004
| IP: Logged
posted
That's a very nice photograph! And it just proves my point! To the untrained eye, the size and the tailfin placement is the only difference. Their fuselage, air intakes, wing angle, even their teardrop canopies, are practically identical.
If it wasn't clear in my previous post, I'm only talking of aesthetics and visual impression, not what's under the hood. Of course you should mimic your competitor. If they've come up with trial-and-error findings guaranteeing efficiency, you'd be an idiot not to.
In terms of ship design and sci-fi concepts, however, I like diversity, the Babylon 5 universe coming to mind. Endless variations inspired from animal shapes, renaissance decadence or quaint UFO ideas. Compare that with one of the most tragically wasted design opportunities ever, the total synaptic death that is the Honor Harrington universe. You can talk about efficiency all you want, but fan-art friendly it is not. Unless one is a alternative hobby aid designer?
Registered: Aug 1999
| IP: Logged
WizArtist II
"How can you have a yellow alert in Spacedock? "
Member # 1425
posted
quote:Originally posted by Nim: In terms of ship design and sci-fi concepts, however, I like diversity, the Babylon 5 universe coming to mind. Endless variations inspired from animal shapes, renaissance decadence or quaint UFO ideas. Compare that with one of the most tragically wasted design opportunities ever, the total synaptic death that is the Honor Harrington universe. You can talk about efficiency all you want, but fan-art friendly it is not.
Dear GOD, that Harrington U is HORRID! Somebody hired a newbie off of Moonlighter.com to do their artwork and got what $129.99 will get you in the art world. I too liked the approach of the B5U to ships though I thought the Agamemnon's were a bit clunky. It certainly made recognition easier.
-------------------- There are 10 types of people in the world...those that understand Binary and those that don't.
Registered: Nov 2004
| IP: Logged
posted
After all these years, my favorite B5-design is still the Vorlon Dreadnought (without the lollipop hull pattern and yellow color), and Babylon 4. I also like the fact that they kept the ship designs coming all the way up to the end, with that smaller (underutilized) Whitestar variant. The ships of that Gary Cole-spinoff were nice too, although I thought the Excalibur was a bit much, in every sense.
About Honor Harrington, I managed to plow through the first four books without seeing any "official" schematics, and merrily imagined the ships only by the scant descriptions and my own noggin. For a long time I saw Harrington's battlecruiser as a blue and ivory USS Sulaco. Long, tall and thin, lots of side surface. Then I finally saw an "official" line drawing of a Honorverse ship, and this played in my head. The Honorverse ship is the only design I know that looks better in ASCII.
The saddest part is that Honerverse ships have more plot-critical and narratively-used ship components than almost any sci-fi universe I know: shield generators, lasers, grasers (sic), point-defense clusters, deployment bays and missile tubes, to name the major ones. Every one of these components could've been used visibly and evocatively, as on a Trek ship (visual impact of the chin-placed quantum torp launcher on the Sovereign class). Instead, the Honorverse artist reduced all those components to individual black dots and pressed them together at the middle of the ship. The only unique detail that distinguishes Honorverse ships from rolled-up newspapers was supposed to be the "hammerhead" bow, mentioned again and again in the novels. They messed that up too, putting tapered blocks or cubes in both ends instead. Maybe they'd never seen a Corellian Corvette, or a hammerhead shark.
quote:Recognition is one thing but it's annoying after a while when each species has their own color-coded fleet.
Yeah, I like ship artists with the ability to have fleet variety with the slightest of unifying traits, not with shoehorned gratuitous design elements for identification purposes. While I like the Vorlons, their Planet Killer hamburger ship was the worst "rushed-out-the-door" job I'd seen up until then.
Registered: Aug 1999
| IP: Logged
posted
^To be fair, IIRC the planet killer was done buy Netter Digital, a company made up of mostly FI's least talented people that Netter poached so it's hardly representative of the quality of the rest of the show.
As for the general aesthetics of the alien ships, I thought they made a good job making the ships distinctive from almost anything else in sci-fi. Plus, the colours were hardly the only distinguishing features, that's just stupid. Even if they were painted boring starfleet grey, you can clearly tell the difference between a Vorlon, Minbari, Centauri, Narn, Shadow and Earth ship design. Likewise what little was seen of the League ships were fairly distinct. I don't think anyone would mistake a Drazi Sunhawk for a Vree saucer.
They even seemed to go to the trouble of showing a technological relationship between Centauri, Earth and Narn ships. It rather subtly reflected how certain technologies passed from the Centauri to the Narn through reverse engineering and from both of them to Earth through trade.
As for the Honorverse ships...yeah I have to say I was greatly disappointed when I saw the official designs. I know the descriptions in the books were fairly precise but I think there was still enough room for a *little* artistic imagination in there somewhere. Not that I'm a huge fan of the books or anything. I honestly found most of the early ones a bit of a slog and for me the title character didn't even begin to get interesting until that one with the pistol duelling.
posted
The Honorverse stuff seems very drama-queen from what fans have told me and the shp designs killed any interest. But are those really accurate to the descriptions in the novels?
Nim, I'd love to see a design laid out with annotated notes from the novels explaining why it looks like someting other than an adult novelty. Can you maybe sketch up something? Artistic ability is secondary to accuracy here- just give us your notion of the ship's look.
As to B5, I loved Kosh's ship- like a flower, but with purpose. I loved the Earthforce ships too.... but generally hated the Centauri's "look we're Napoleanic!" gag- their ships, their culture, their silly hair...ug.
The Whitestar was pretty bad and the Rxcalibut was so pointless and silly that the script must have called for an "uber-fanboy" design. Which they still failed at miserably.
The constructions ships on B5 were great (the modified Starfury design with arms) and the giant long-range exploration ship was very nicely done as well (forget it's name- it was huge and disappeared for years).
It's something that's always bothered me about B5: we dont really know who designed what! With Trek, we can say "Andy Probery designed the Warbord" but with B5, we cant credit anyone? That's annoying.
Registered: Aug 2002
| IP: Logged
quote:Nim, I'd love to see a design laid out with annotated notes from the novels explaining why it looks like someting other than an adult novelty. Can you maybe sketch up something? Artistic ability is secondary to accuracy here- just give us your notion of the ship's look.
Unexpected, this was. How nice of you to ask, I haven't thought about these things for a long time. I don't have any 3D software but I'll fire up the ol' GUI and throw out a rough sketch. Not sure how much annotation I can add, but I'll put in as much as possible.
To thread starter: I do have an opinion on 5th gen fighters as well, will add tidbit next.
Registered: Aug 1999
| IP: Logged
quote:The Honorverse stuff seems very drama-queen from what fans have told me and the shp designs killed any interest. But are those really accurate to the descriptions in the novels?
They certainly can be melodramatic and the author tends to hit the proverbial historical allegory/technological anachronism nail a little too squarely on the head...plus the title character is almost a textbook "Mary Sue" type.
As for the descriptions...It's been a while but I don't recall the wording, but the impression I was left with was that the author was more interested in droning on and on about the technical specs than giving the reader a vivid mental picture of the things. One can't help but get the impression the man would rather have been writing pen & paper RPG rule books than a sci-fi adventure novel. Even writers like Clarke, Sagan and Asimov managed to convey very technical concepts in a manner that instilled a sense of wonder. So yeah, those diagrams are "consistent" with the descriptions as I recall them, they're just not terribly imaginative.
quote:It's something that's always bothered me about B5: we dont really know who designed what! With Trek, we can say "Andy Probery designed the Warbord" but with B5, we cant credit anyone? That's annoying.
If you really want to know who did what and what the inspirations were then I highly recommend visiting this site. The guy appears to have spoken to most of the major players and has managed to attribute *most* of the designs. In fairness, it was a long time ago and with the rate at which these guys were putting out content it's no wonder that nobody can remember exactly who did what.
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
Printer-friendly view of this topic
