Defiance's Eyecandy Thread

Dang, she is really gorgeous, @DefianceIndustries, definitely scary-looking, and I just hope I'll be able to carry that feeling in the port. Could be interesting to have a carrier with that level of armament and stealth indeed, I'll get new gunnery done just for her. :)

@Quarto: Here is Typhon, it is an appropriate name indeed. As for the storage room, it feels likely that there is a hangar deck under the runway, with the upper deck above it being for crew, command and control, etc. It's not a fleet carrier, so it wouldn't have the endurance and fleet resupplying requirements of the latter, and part of the massive cost could be explained through additional efforts to reduce the crew size. While the Prowler-class corvette would be the Wing Commander equivalent of a FREMM-class real world stealth frigate, the Typhon would be more like the Zumwalt: much larger, much more expensive and not necessarly cost-effective but a unique tool for specific missions. Plus, would there actually be a need for more than a dozen Dragon/Lance heavy fighters? We're looking at a ship that arrives without being seen, deploy a couple flights of highly advanced crafts that are without equivalent in the Wing Commander universe and strikes surgically before vanishing again. It's not a ship designed for longer combat like a fleet carrier would do.

Actually, that makes me wonder whether the Black Lance faction would not actually start with a Concordia-class carrier like the Lexington or the Princeton, only to have the Typhon as a unique cloak-capable carrier, which would be the capable of actually building Dragon/Lance, unlike the initial carrier. The Vesuvius would cost a bit more, but would exchange speed and stealth for lasting capability and a lot more hangar space.
 
That is cetainly not unpretty! :) But... I find it hard to envision how on earth this carrier fits any reasonable number of fighters onboard. Sure, you could stuff a lot of Ferrets in there, but Dragons? I wonder if you would consider adding a very rough wireframe cutaway of the interior of the ship's flight deck. Where are the fighters stored? I assume that behind those big doors might be some hangar bays - about six-eight of them, each with room for just one fighter. I guess there might also be an elevator on the flight deck, leading down into an additional hangar area beneath the deck, where probably a bunch of additional fighters could be stored, along with the repair areas and spare parts. I'd really love to see you whitebox-prototype the fighter storage areas, to give us some idea of what this carrier could actually store.

Also - any reason why it's Typhon, rather than Typhoon? Does Typhon have some meaning I am unaware of?

Also also - any chance of you doing a Copernicus-class science vessel any time soon? It would be a cool addition, particularly since from the looks of it, it's probably a multi-purpose hull, with cargo-carrying and other configurations.

Didn't you know? Tolwyn also perfected pocket dimensions while developing it, he can store hundreds of fighters ready to appear at a moment's notice! Actually, what you mention is not an uncommon failing with all of the WC3/4 carrier designs. There are eight doors, if I were designing it, I'd have a vertical elevator behind each bay door that leads to fighter storage above the launch deck or a second deck below. but yeah I could do something like that. might be a fun exercise to do a MSD for it.

Typhon (Typhaon) is the serpentine giant of Greek mythology, he defeated Zeus (though he was ultimately defeated by trickery) - I felt it kinda fit with the whole Dragon/Serpent vibe the Black Lance is so fond of.

Hmmm Copernicus. Well I owe HWRM a BL freighter and a cruiser or two, and all the MUP stuff. So...I'll put it on the docket but it won't be too soon.
 
Uiui the Black Lance Carrier - can I have one for Saga :D :D :D

I think we read already before WC4 about the Carrier - I think and this was the Story of my Operation Serpent Campaign- The Black Lance Carrier are Project Omega. Why? Only Banbrige and Tolwyn know of the Project.

They told of a carrier with stealth technics and be not a Super Carrier like the Kilrathi Build - more a armored Battlewagon.

After Banbridge and a lot of High Command who know of the Project died with that suicide Kilrathi ambassador Tolwyn was the only Person left who know of - so he use the Carrier for his secret Black Lance Force.
 
Didn't you know? Tolwyn also perfected pocket dimensions while developing it, he can store hundreds of fighters ready to appear at a moment's notice! Actually, what you mention is not an uncommon failing with all of the WC3/4 carrier designs. There are eight doors, if I were designing it, I'd have a vertical elevator behind each bay door that leads to fighter storage above the launch deck or a second deck below. but yeah I could do something like that. might be a fun exercise to do a MSD for it.
I think it would be more efficient to have just a couple of elevators that are placed out on the flight deck. If you have an elevator behind each bay door, then you don't get to store fighters in those slots. Two elevators in the middle of the flight deck would be enough.

They told of a carrier with stealth technics and be not a Super Carrier like the Kilrathi Build - more a armored Battlewagon.

After Banbridge and a lot of High Command who know of the Project died with that suicide Kilrathi ambassador Tolwyn was the only Person left who know of - so he use the Carrier for his secret Black Lance Force.
That's a topic that's been discussed many times before - people have certainly wondered whether Project Omega was the Behemoth, the Vesuvius, this Black Lance carrier, or even the Cerberus. The answer, technically, is none of the above, because none of these had been invented when Forstchen was writing Fleet Action :). But which one could Project Omega actually be? To answer that question, you have to go back to Action Stations to get some idea of what Forstchen has in mind when talking about "battlewagons". For him, the term means a battleship, a large capital ship designed to fight ship-to-ship against other capital ships.

So, could the Black Lance carrier be a battleship? Well, it could, I mean, since it's not a canon ship (it never shows up officially), we don't know what its capabilities would have been had it showed up in the game. But it sure seems rather light for that. If anything, I'm inclined to believe that Project Omega would have been something like the Cerberus. But if that had been the case, that would mean the project was cancelled long before it could reach fruition, and then revived much later, probably in revised form.

Speaking of which - let's not be silly and imagine Project Omega was something only Tolwyn and Banbridge knew about :). There's a heck of a lot of people involved in any secret military project. It's not like Tolwyn and Banbridge were quietly tinkering away at a battleship in their spare time - there was an army of engineers working on it, going all the way up to admirals and generals dedicated specifically to research & development in the Navy. Additionally, it would be totally anachronistic to assume Tolwyn would steal such a ship away for the Black Lance, because Project Omega was supposed to be about a year way from completion, back in 2668 - this was a time when Tolwyn was probably not yet involved at all in the Black Lance, and in fact we don't even know if the Black Lance existed at this time at all. I would actually hazard a guess that Project Omega was ultimately cancelled after the Battle of Terra. At that point, Confed would have been desperate, and probably all capship development resources were immediately allocated to the Behemoth.
 
Agreed for the timeline of the carrier development. It would make a lot more sense to have it developped after the Battle of Earth, though it could be amusingly ironic if the Behemoth ended up incomplete and thus destroyed because Tolwyn was already shifting resources away for his Black Lance project right after Battle of Earth.

For the carrier, though, I would imagine that Tolwyn enlisted secretly Kilrathi specialists of stealth to help design and build the ship, possibly eliminating them once the project was complete. This would help achieve high speeds without making the Confederation too suspicious of the entire thing.
 
Agreed for the timeline of the carrier development. It would make a lot more sense to have it developped after the Battle of Earth, though it could be amusingly ironic if the Behemoth ended up incomplete and thus destroyed because Tolwyn was already shifting resources away for his Black Lance project right after Battle of Earth.

For the carrier, though, I would imagine that Tolwyn enlisted secretly Kilrathi specialists of stealth to help design and build the ship, possibly eliminating them once the project was complete. This would help achieve high speeds without making the Confederation too suspicious of the entire thing.

well the Excalibur had clocking abilities without the aid of the Kilrathi. We could assume that the Typhon's cloak is an off-shoot of that. Pliers built a one shot cloak - granted he needed Melek's help to finish it, but clearly the basis for the tech had been known to Confed for some time.

That was my thinking behind the fiction above anyway, the system only works at slower speeds because it's not as refined as their Kilrathi counterparts.
 
Agreed for the timeline of the carrier development. It would make a lot more sense to have it developped after the Battle of Earth, though it could be amusingly ironic if the Behemoth ended up incomplete and thus destroyed because Tolwyn was already shifting resources away for his Black Lance project right after Battle of Earth.

For the carrier, though, I would imagine that Tolwyn enlisted secretly Kilrathi specialists of stealth to help design and build the ship, possibly eliminating them once the project was complete. This would help achieve high speeds without making the Confederation too suspicious of the entire thing.

Or Tolwyn build the carrier with the tech of Project Omega (Stealth and very shield tech)
 
TO: Space Marshal G. Tolwyn
FROM: Capt. H. Paulsen

Tolwyn's promotion came during the ending sequence of WC4, so technically he was still an admiral when Paulsen was alive. :)

What's the origin of the model? I see it's a bit different from the actual Evansville in WC4 ( https://www.wcnews.com/ships/wc4projecttransport.shtml ), but it's the same as the "Evansville" featured in various mods: http://www.moddb.com/mods/wing-commander-alliance/images/black-lance-carrier-evansville2
 
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Tolwyn's promotion came during the ending sequence of WC4, so technically he was still an admiral when Paulsen was alive. :)

What's the origin of the model? I see it's a bit different from the actual Evansville in WC4 ( https://www.wcnews.com/ships/wc4projecttransport.shtml ), but it's the same as the "Evansville" featured in various mods: http://www.moddb.com/mods/wing-commander-alliance/images/black-lance-carrier-evansville2

D'oh! See? this is what I get for writing fiction when I should've been working... :)

It's listed in the game .IFFs as "Black Lance Carrier", clearly it was meant to play a larger role, maybe replacing the Princeton? It's interesting because the MFD image for the Evansville transport is a silhouette of the carrier - Even on the CIC pages, but the quasi-canonical "Evansville" is a transport, a Black Lance successor to the Clarkson. So clearly the assets were all made and then a decision was made to remove them from the final product.

To avoid all the confusion I decided to assign "Evansville" to the transport and make up a new name for the carrier. It's totally fanon. :)
 
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Cybot078 does back in the days for me the Black Lance Carriers.
My Vision was for Operation Serpent that the BL stays later as a Special force unit.

Insteat of using Yorktown and Concordia Carriers they have this two versions with a large bay and a Shorter one. Still have the files

operation_serpent7.jpg

the other ship become my Northamton class heavy destroyer complete by Scooby
wc_llod33.jpg

So maybe a Option for the Black Lance to get a light and heavy carrier for 40 or 80 Dragon.
@Definance - can you send me pls the model? PM?
 
It's mine ;) I could share but warning - 7 texture files like the Confederation Saga Class. I could give you also the old model but without any textures and you find someone who did them.

It's basicly a Southampton with a extra AMG turret.
2018-02-13 (1).png 2018-02-13.png
so it is a Confed Heavy Destroyer.
 
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It's mine ;) I could share but warning - 7 texture files like the Confederation Saga Class. I could give you also the old model but without any textures and you find someone who did them.

It's basicly a Southampton with a extra AMG turret.
View attachment 9677 View attachment 9678
so it is a Confed Heavy Destroyer.
I have been authorized by the Saga team to use their assets. You know, around half of the released ships in the Homeworld Remastered mod come from Saga. I guess it shouldn't cause any issue with the new model plus Saga textures. :)

If I misunderstood you and you were just warning about the size and number of textures, don't worry either, I've tinkered with 500 k poly ships and 250 MB textures for the mod already.
 
**********
ENCRYPED - ULTRA SECRET - Eyes Only - Enter Security Code:
...A7BTNC89PK1 - Accepted...Decoding.......
TO: Adm. G. Tolwyn
FROM: Capt. H. Paulsen
Subject: Additional Assets for GE Project
Transmission begins as follows:
**********
Admiral,
I believe I have identified an excellent candidate for the next phase of the GE project. You were looking for a number of older vessels, which would not attract too much attention, with a good fighter carrying capacity, and can be reclassified either as "training" ships or simply stricken from the naval register entirely. The Tolmacs-class fast cruiser will fit all those criteria nicely.
Firstly, they are nearing the end of their refit schedule - so we should be able to appropriate them without drawing too much attention, especially if we convince the assembly that this is a cost-saving measure. Secondly, their fighter compliment is excellent for its size with ample bay storage and workspaces; I realize that late-war bombers such as the Longbow or Avenger won't be able to use the launch tube system due to their size, however Seether believes we could reasonably spot them for launch on the recovery deck should we need to do that. I mentioned that the recovery deck is not sealed and is exposed to vacuum, but Seether said the pilots are ok with a little space walk, his words sir, not mine. Third, they have exceptional firepower and speed allowing our captains to position the hired help where they are needed most.
I realize many in the admiralty view the Tolmacs as something of a "glass cannon", its true that its shields and armor are not to the same standard as a Tallahassee, but it should be able to use its speed to outrun or outmaneuver anything it can't outgun. But overall I think this is a perfectly suitable platform to base a cruiser force around. At least until Project Guillotine is complete.
If you approve I'll begin making the necessary preparations with the appropriate sector personnel offices and naval yards.
Respectfully,

Cpt. H. Paulsen

WC4_TolmacsFin5.jpg WC4_TolmacsFin4.jpg WC4_TolmacsFin1.jpg WC4_TolmacsFin3.jpg WC4_TolmacsFin6.jpg WC4_TolmacsFin7.jpg

The next entry in the Black Lance faction is a WC4-ized re-do of @NinjaLA 's TCS Falcon. @L.I.F. felt that the BL forces needed a light/fast cruiser and well, we all liked the design. @Howard Day did the original model version as far as I know, and @Deathsnake made a version for Saga/Freespace all were things of beauty in their own right. So I decided to add my own take on it as a "late war" version incorporating more of a WC3/4 paint scheme while retaining some elements of the previous versions and sneaking in a few WC2 details for the fun of it.

TolmacsPoster2.jpg
 
and just like that I gots me a new wallpaper. thanks for this. made my day.
This might very well be one of the loading screens of the mod once the update gets posted, because it indeed is gorgeous. Awesome work, @DefianceIndustries, and this beauty will fit well within the fast strike capabilities of the Special Ops. The ship definitely feels like a proper ancestor to the Hades-class, don’t you think?

Makes me wish we had a Special Ops add-on for WC3 or 4, this could have made a great base ship for it. Crap, that gives me other campaign ideas... ah, I really need to design campaign-making tools.
 
Are you tired of pirates flying off with your shiny coins? In these hard economic times, who isn't? Allow me to present to you the Evansville fast transport, the solution to all your cargo-carrying woes! What's that you say? Clarkson got ya covered? Not along the Borderworlds bucko! Pirate and Union attacks are up 30% over this time last year, and that means shipping & insurance costs have gone through the roof! The solution? You guessed it, a freighter that's a fast as a frigate and almost as heavily armed! Haul your goods the <Redacted> way with an Evansville!

Excerpt from unused marketing material discovered on an old hard drive hidden in an unused lavatory with a sign on the door reading, "Beware of the leopard".

Evansville3.jpg


Evansville1.jpg Evansville2.jpg
 
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