4/21

Tried out the Diablo 3 open beta. After an hour, I figured I had enough cause it really sucks.

I really suck at drawing spaceships. The current ISS picture looks horrible. A redesign was in order. I had a few theories as to what's going on here. Space Stations look stupid. Name your favorite space craft. It's not going to be a station. It's going to be an X-Wing, a Viper, or maybe the Enterprise might win based on sentimental value, but these ships look cool because they're aerodynamic. The Death Star, while ominous, looks cheesy. While researching the interwebs, there's a bunch of top 100 lists for spacecrafts, and most of the stations don't fare very well.

Maybe it's the shape. Spheres and circular stations don't beat the dagger like spaceship. Maybe it's a phallus reference. Help me out, H.R.Giger.

I had another theory that all spaceships look stupid simplified. The problem was that I was calling my space station stupid, but it was on a piece of paper, in black and white, and crudely drawn. When you think of a spaceship, you see it against a space backdrop, and it's got all these panels and wiring and visual technobabble.

Ah visual technobabble. In Star Trek, you've got your phaser, tricorder, communicator, and other possible devices. Other science fiction characters are wearing a lot of funky technobabble because they need to be prepared for every function. The problem with technobabble in the future is the iphone. Everything you have should be reduced to one gadget. We invent things slower than we can compact them. So while I'm personally in the camp that you should make characters look as visually complex as possible, because that's cool, there's few examples of it in real life- The astronaut, and the tool man are pretty cool.

As an experiment, I tried drawing popular spaceships in really simple designs, like the Millenium Falcon or other ships I knew from my head. I did this without looking at google images, and removed all presence of technobabble from the drawing. It turns out a lot of these spaceships look pretty stupid if you take away their function.

So. I need to draw a cool Space Station. The space station is a really important "character", and should be prominently displayed with promotional media. Hell, it's the first thing you'll see when you start the game. But I can't spend FOREVER creating this space station.

How do I draw spaceships?

Let's define the starship's parameters.

The Iacchus Space Station. It is a human funded expedition, but it makes sense that the space station would have been somewhat old, seeing as Humans are relatively new to the Galactic System. It's funded by the Tierel corporation.

The station uses centrifugal force as its means of gravity. This means that you can travel to the lower end of the station and...appear on the top end.

Statistics (make em up!)
Officers (ship duty)- 100
Passengers- 400
Size- 1,200 meters, 500 meters habitable
Fuel- Enough for 2.2 trips (not round trips). No extra fuel is provided because Tierel hates us.
Reactor- Nuclear?
Solar Panels- Yes. Two moveable.
Escape Pods- 50. All jettisoned by the start of AD3.
Docking Ring (external)- 1, with a capacity of 4 vehicles. 3 spots are taken by June 7th.
Support Vehicle- 2, with a capacity of 10 each and no FTL.
Pressure Door bay- 3
Weapons- 0, but possible to repurpose external 3 remote manipulator arms.
Communications- ICS (inter-orbit communications system)
Orbit- Low-Iacchus Orbit, with geosynchronous orbit. Us stupid humans call it LEO, go figure. Defining the orbit is a tough challenge. I want to say that the Station goes into low orbit so that escape by drifting off into space would serve harmful for the ship somehow, because you don't have the atmosphere protecting you.
Propulsion- Tonaga (made that word up) Fuel Boosters power the main engines, followed by orbital thrusters for maintaining orbit/whatever the fuck you need to do
Tractor Beam- I really want a tractor beam for story purposes, but a tractor beam might have to technically come after artificial gravity.

So as you can see by the stats, I have no idea what I'm doing. I can't spend forever on it, and I can't hire a technical advisor. So I kinda just have to BS it. I think it'll be fun when the player realizes he can go across the other side of the map because of the station's centrifugal force, and it'll be fun to explain that to him, but there's a lot of concepts I'm having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around.

Gonna take a week "off" to learn stuff. I am taking a crash course on Science Fiction Hentai Games. I've already pirated or accessed my local library for a variety of materials.

So here's my objectives for the week:
Learn how to write sex- "The Joy of Writing Sex" by Elizabeth Benedict
Learn how to write stories- "On Writing" Stephen King
Learn English- Elements of Style
Learn how to Digitally Paint
Make a damn space station
and a whole day dedicated to learning female anatomy if I have time.


2PM- I did a little more research on spaceships, and then I read half of "On Writing". Stephen King says I should read Elements of Style. I added it to my to do list for this week.

So I'm reading this book. I get giddy with these ideas for my own story, so I hop out of my seat and pace around the room. It's like studying in school, but there's that girl across the room you can't stop thinking about.

I'll write about Zoe tomorrow. Till then, it's nappynoo for this cutiecoo.