What do you use to create your deckplans?
- Thread starter stofsk
- Start date
MSPaint is an easy tool for quick, simple drawings. They won't win any beauty contests but they are easy to work with.
The Hinterworlds Rambler
SOC-14 5K
I am using Illustrator and soon will be doing a lot in Autocad. I am still working now on a lot of my old designs, polishing them a bit, and thinking of new ones. MY Blogsite has been acting wierd of late, so Ill keep ye posted...
Scott Martin
SOC-13
Waiting to actually have some time to play with deckplan software...
I made the mistake of playing with Sketchup, and realized that if I was going to biuld deckplans with that type of toolset, I was going to have to worry about thicknesses of interior walls.
10 cm (0.1 M) works fairly well for "non-structural" walls, but my engineering and control (bridge) spaces are often "component armoured" so I need to worry about thickness of both "services" (including LHyd lines in the case of engineering, which I don't think you want running in a "thin" wall without insulation) and "armour" (often more than 5 cm of alloy) so I notice that I'm losing a lot of cubeage.
This is even more worrying given that (as noted in the "standard stateroom size" thread) the 3mx3m rooms that are "canon" seem awfully cramped, especially once you lose another 10 cm in each direction (which loses you more than a half square meter of floor area if the room is square, and more if it is not)
On the plus side, once I get done, I'll be able to definitively answer questions like "Could this shot penetrate through two decks and punch a hole in the hull?" (asked by a non-vacc suited PC) since all of the bulkheads including inter-deck bulkheading will be explicitly placed.
Of course the deck plans available to players may not actually match the deckplans: there's a lot of volume taken by "fuel tankage" that may actually be void areas
Scott Martin
P.S. Mickazoid are you still using the "demo" version of Sketchup, or did you need the full version to do the skin blending for your "Conquest" class? I have a variant in mind that will need to blend a PAW into a sloped hull form, and it would be nice to know if I can do that without spending $500 on software to see if it does the job or not...
Scott - I'm using a registered version of the software, but I think the demo can perform the function as well - what you want to do is connect the endpoints with the pencil tool - creating triangular polygons makes the 'Edge Finder' work it's magic.
PM for more details. Thanks!
Scott Martin
SOC-13
Hey mickazoid
You have a PM that's been waiting for you to read, so I'll ask more questions when you respond to that one. I have contacted my provider, so please change the phrase "tens of MB" to "a gig and a half" since they noticed that I was a long term customer they didn't really want walking to another provider...
More on topic, have you considered "wrapping" the inner spaces in an outer hull (since there is a lot of "fuel" space available for use to clean up the "bumps" and your engineering space seems to be contigious with the outer hull in one place.
Rereading that it's a bit incoherent: I'm looking at using Sketchup to put the deckplans together, and then putting it "inside" an outer hull of the appropriate dimensions. This gives me both 3D deckplans as well as the outer appearance of the hull in one juicy file. The "Conquest" seems to have the internal hull, but not the external hull, and I don't know if this is intentional or not (the conquest is not what you would calll a "sleek" design...)
Scott Martin
You have a PM that's been waiting for you to read, so I'll ask more questions when you respond to that one. I have contacted my provider, so please change the phrase "tens of MB" to "a gig and a half" since they noticed that I was a long term customer they didn't really want walking to another provider...
More on topic, have you considered "wrapping" the inner spaces in an outer hull (since there is a lot of "fuel" space available for use to clean up the "bumps" and your engineering space seems to be contigious with the outer hull in one place.
Rereading that it's a bit incoherent: I'm looking at using Sketchup to put the deckplans together, and then putting it "inside" an outer hull of the appropriate dimensions. This gives me both 3D deckplans as well as the outer appearance of the hull in one juicy file. The "Conquest" seems to have the internal hull, but not the external hull, and I don't know if this is intentional or not (the conquest is not what you would calll a "sleek" design...)
Scott Martin
Scott - I've been working on external hull layers as well - wasn't incoherent at all and I'm right there with you. And you're right, the kind of trigger-friendly grunt who does a tour on a Conquest-class vessel would probably not like being called 'sleek'...
I'll go read the PM!
I'll go read the PM!
Scott Martin
SOC-13
Hmmm
If your grunts are trigger happy (is this what "trigger friendly" means?) then you really want some extra space between the inner and outer hull layers: better to have a "gruntsickle" from dumping LHyd on himself after shooting a hole through a wall than risk decompressing the ship.
Of course if the grunt was "cleaning" an FGMP at the time, perhaps blowing a little hole in the side of the ship is preferable to introducing a fusing charge into a pile of fuel.
I wonder if this is this the real reason that marines in the Alien universe were always shipped in coldsleep!
Are you planning on having a "depth" to your outer hull, or are you waving at the non-working spaces (both fuel and hull) and not worrying about what depths each take? I'm having trouble with some missile ports, since they open through more than 18" of armour plate, so the depth of the hull requires a significant offset for the pivot plate.
This is entirely due to my aversion to "Magic Iris Valves" that somehow have the same armour value as the armoured hull, but can be mounted within it...
(I'll keep this kind of discussion public, since the point of the forums is so that people can learn from others mistakes)
Scott Martin
If your grunts are trigger happy (is this what "trigger friendly" means?) then you really want some extra space between the inner and outer hull layers: better to have a "gruntsickle" from dumping LHyd on himself after shooting a hole through a wall than risk decompressing the ship.
Of course if the grunt was "cleaning" an FGMP at the time, perhaps blowing a little hole in the side of the ship is preferable to introducing a fusing charge into a pile of fuel.
I wonder if this is this the real reason that marines in the Alien universe were always shipped in coldsleep!
Are you planning on having a "depth" to your outer hull, or are you waving at the non-working spaces (both fuel and hull) and not worrying about what depths each take? I'm having trouble with some missile ports, since they open through more than 18" of armour plate, so the depth of the hull requires a significant offset for the pivot plate.
This is entirely due to my aversion to "Magic Iris Valves" that somehow have the same armour value as the armoured hull, but can be mounted within it...
(I'll keep this kind of discussion public, since the point of the forums is so that people can learn from others mistakes)
Scott Martin
