Best freeware starship design software

[Evo Plurion]

I've seen some pretty amazing deckplans and starship designs on this board - most recently on the "Type W Barge" thread. Can anyone direct me to the best freeware for doing such plans?

BTW - How do you guys afford those thousand-dollar design suites?

 

[BetterThanLife]

Originally posted by Evo Plurion:
I've seen some pretty amazing deckplans and starship designs on this board - most recently on the "Type W Barge" thread. Can anyone direct me to the best freeware for doing such plans?

BTW - How do you guys afford those thousand-dollar design suites?

It has been my experience that the people with the thousand dollar design suites have other uses for them besides designing starships for a game.

Most of them are purchased for commercial purposes and then also used to create starships and deckplans.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

Also, computer magazines often give away older versions of programs for free (usually with discounted upgrades to the current version).

 

[RandyT0001]

At www.profantasy.com you can buy CC2-Pro and Cosmographer Pro for about $87.00. It is not freeware but is realitively cheap for good drawing software.

 

[vutpakdi]

Yep, I purchased Canvas for professional use (~$300), but Canvas also happens to be extremely well suited for doing deckplans for many reasons including being able to draw in scale and the display of lengths and areas in scale units.

That said, I've seen some outstanding deckplans using whatever the person happened to have handy (or came with their computer) including AppleWorks and MS Paint.

As mentioned, CC-Pro and Cosmographer Pro aren't all that expensive for commercial drawing packages. I've seen good plans done with Fractal Mapper, which is cheaper.

If you want free, you might try OpenOffice.org. You won't get the scaled drawing capability of the commercial packages, but it is free.

Ron

 

[EntilZha]

I think if you really want a program for doing deckplans, you're not going to find a whole heckuva lot for free, at least not anything that'll do much of anything useful. I use TurboCAD 8.0 for my deckplans, which I picked up for $19.95 at Half Price Books, although you can probably find it (or something similar) cheaper on Ebay.

Just my $0.02.

 

[Evo Plurion]

Originally posted by EntilZha:
Just my $0.02.

Sold!

 

[fredofmars]

AutoRealm is also functional and free (which is what I am using at the moment).

http://www.autorealm.org/

 

[kaladorn]

Something that might be of help is if someone were to collect a web page with good sample deckplans from CC2 Pro, Cosmographer Pro, Fractal Terrains, CAD systems, etc. It might be useful to have comparitive results in one place. As well as reviews of the strong and weak points and basic operation of each of the tools. That might be real handy for the deckplan geeks or aspiring new ones.

No, that was not the sound of me volunteering - too much to do for the next month or three.

 

[RandyT0001]

Kaladorn, a web page with samples of deckplans using various software and basic operations, methods, outlines of work procedures could be done on the Deckplan Challenge site. I just have to convince the others to assist with this. Maybe over the next few months we could get this worked up as essays.

 

[kaladorn]

That would be very handy, Randy. One thing that would be nice is to have some in depth reviews of the various tools, particularly from the perspective of a new user, someone familiar with paint programs, page layout software or CAD (since some are oriented more towards each of these featuresets), and just general experiences with the tools when making or attempting deck plans.

Most people wonder what tool to use - what we (as a community) lack is a good sort of head-to-head comparison site we can refer new gearhead shipgeeks to.

 

[Evo Plurion]

Sorry for the tardy response to your offerings. I tried AutoRealm and I'll think I'll play around with that for a while. This takes me back; the margins - and sometimes whole pages - of my high school notebooks were filled with hundreds of starship designs. I used to be fairly good at technical illustration. Anyhow, I'll give AutoRealm a try.

(Hey that was cool! I actually sounded like Khan Noonian Singh there for a moment: "On Earth - two hundred years ago - I was a prince, with power over millions!")

Thanks all