I was wondering why I couldn't see your images having just found this thread. Do you know what's wrong, or are you in the process of moving your images to another image hosting site?
Star Fleet Battles: Federation Police Cutter
- Thread starter Sgt_G
- Start date
Yes. Seems Photo-Bucket's management is suffering from a severe and possible terminal case of H-U-A disease.
(H = Head, U = Up). See here for more information:
Yes, but I haven't decided which site to migrate to. Probably Imgur, but remains to be determined.
Thanks for the interest, by the way. Here's the direct link (until I kill my Photo-Bucket account):
EDIT: Go back to the last post on Page 1 .... I updated the links to IMGUR.
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Thanks for that update, very nice work there, Sir! I just can't do the 2D/3D thing on computers!
As I said on the SFB discussion board, you could put only some in on the 3D views, saying that some are closed, it gives a less cluttered look, but you can still have them on your deck plans!
Mark
As I said on the SFB discussion board, you could put only some in on the 3D views, saying that some are closed, it gives a less cluttered look, but you can still have them on your deck plans!
Mark
This project (3d model of Police Cutter) is still on the back burner. Or rather moved off the burner to the fridge.
I have started another project to make a 2d deck plans for a Gorn Battle Cruise from Star Fleet Battles. You can find the early sketches on ADB's Federation Commander discussion board (not the SFB Discus page).
I have started another project to make a 2d deck plans for a Gorn Battle Cruise from Star Fleet Battles. You can find the early sketches on ADB's Federation Commander discussion board (not the SFB Discus page).
Probably should have added a link, no? http://www.starfleetgames.com/federation/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=5988 == "Federation Commander Forum Index --> Other Starship Art --> Gorn Battle Cruiser deck plans = work-in-progress"
Thanks, but sad to say, I need to change the shuttle bay. Per the game rules, there's only one hatch per side, not three. The Battle Cruiser has three balcony pads on each wing for the shuttles to take off from / land on. The idea being, they can dump a half-dozen shuttles at once, which is very useful for ground assaults. Without the balconies, the shuttle launches would be strung out over a period of time.
I hope it's okay to necro my own topic ....
Yesterday, I e-mailed the final draft of the police cutter deck plans to Steve Cole / Amarillo Design Bureau for review and comment. I expect they'll have several "recommended" changes that I'll have to do before ADB can accept them for publication. Hopefully not too many changes because I'm really happy with what they are now.
I created the deck plans using a program called Floor Plan Plus v2. Included in the package was this image:
I made that in SketchUp, obviously, to the exact measurements from the deck plans. I want to re-visit the project and clean it up, just in case ADB wants to print it (or perhaps a three-quarter view of the same model). If they do, I'll have to discuss with Steve whether or not the windows stay. (They are lined up to crew quarters on the plans.) The main thing it needs, and the one thing I don't have a clue how to do, is fleet markings / logo / ship's name added to the surface of the ship's hull. I would really appreciate if someone could point me in the right direction how to do that. Thanks!!!
Yesterday, I e-mailed the final draft of the police cutter deck plans to Steve Cole / Amarillo Design Bureau for review and comment. I expect they'll have several "recommended" changes that I'll have to do before ADB can accept them for publication. Hopefully not too many changes because I'm really happy with what they are now.
I created the deck plans using a program called Floor Plan Plus v2. Included in the package was this image:
I made that in SketchUp, obviously, to the exact measurements from the deck plans. I want to re-visit the project and clean it up, just in case ADB wants to print it (or perhaps a three-quarter view of the same model). If they do, I'll have to discuss with Steve whether or not the windows stay. (They are lined up to crew quarters on the plans.) The main thing it needs, and the one thing I don't have a clue how to do, is fleet markings / logo / ship's name added to the surface of the ship's hull. I would really appreciate if someone could point me in the right direction how to do that. Thanks!!!
I look forward to the deck plans! Sadly, I have no clue on to how to add the finer details though.
Deck plans for the B-10?? Yeah, that would be cool to see. However, comma, I shall NOT be the guy to draft them.
For that matter, I don't think I could ever do another set of plans with the level of detail that are in the police cutter plans. Not even for the APT (Armed Priority Transport) that I'm working on (still very early stages).
For that matter, I don't think I could ever do another set of plans with the level of detail that are in the police cutter plans. Not even for the APT (Armed Priority Transport) that I'm working on (still very early stages).
That is what happens to quite a few of us we start off with the best intentions not knowing how much work it really takes to create a good set of deck plans for our favorite ship. Since all we ever had to look at were the final results of someone else's hard work. My hat is off to you for your hard work and dedication to this project I'm looking forward to purchasing a set of plans
when they come out.
when they come out.
You know, at the beginning, I never set out to create anything remotely close to the end result. Back in 1989, I needed to draft something for work, so I bought Floor Plan Plus for DOS. After finishing that project, I used the program to create new SSDs for the game. A couple years later, I put Windows 3.1 on my computer and upgraded to Floor Plan Plus for Windows. That was about the time I started writing fiction stories (never seemed to finish any 
). I wanted to be able to keep track of where each character was and how long it takes to get from the Bridge to Engineering, so I tried sketch out a rough deck plan. Floor Plan Plus v2 came out in 1995. I'm still using it today. It will run on Windows 7/32-bit but not on Windows 7/64-bit, nor on Win-8, nor Windows 10 even under compatibility mode. 
I sent on story to Steve Petrick for comment. Oh boy, did he have comments.
He thought I was boxing myself in by naming all the officers and several enlisted on the ship. That led to a discussion about the crew roster, the ship's TO&E if you will, which led later to ADB changing the crew size from 60 to 100, including doubling the number of Boarding Parties, in the Y2K rulebook.
{sigh} By then I had the ship more than half done. I based the plans off clipart found in Scenarios Book 2 which was 82-mm long, so using a scale of 1:1000, my boat was 82 meters long. There was no way to cram 40 more bodies in that tiny thing.
After several misfires, I settled on making it 90 meters long. Tight but doable.
Going back to the earlier discussions, Steve didn't like my asymmetrical design of running the turbolift corridors along the starboard side (not allowing for airlocks / docking ports on the right side of the ship). That resulted in the center-line turbolift design, which led to my obsession of making the entire ship symmetrical. I could have, for example, put a set of batteries to the left and a transporter to the right. No, I couldn't do that. I *had to* make everything a mirror-image. And so it is.
Another thing Petrick took me to task for was I had the Police boat run down a two-man "space truck". He said I couldn't use a ship in the story that wasn't in the game. As the Free Trader was a 30-man ship, it was far too big to work in my story. And Hey! I'm burying the lead here: that same Space Truck was PUBLISHED in Captain's Log #53 that was just released a few weeks back.
Maybe I should dust that story off.
Except, the biggest problem Petrick had with the story is it didn't have any real combat. As the game is called Star Fleet BATTLES, they want/need combat stories with an accompanying playable scenario. This didn't have that.
At any rate, I continued to play with the 90-meter deck plans off and on for years. More off than on, to be honest. I would go for months without touching the files.
I nearly ditched the project more than once. I'd say I did half the work on it in 2001 while stationed in Korea.
In trying to figure out just how big a set of crew quarters should be, I dropped in furniture symbols until it all fit. Well, now that I had one, I just copy/paste about 87 more times. Ta-da, done. But then I started looking at other things. "This needs more detail, and that needs more stuff." It just snowballed on me. Before I knew it, I had something looking pretty good. Good enough that when I showed it to Steve Cole and Nick Blank at Origins, Steve was interested in printing it "someday".
Nick was the guy who did the Free Trader plans and the wonderful Burke-class Frigate plans. 
In 2010/2011, ADB and Mongoose started the join venture for A Call To Arms: Star Fleet. Part of that project included creating all new 1:3125 miniatures. In 2012, they got around to making the police cutter mini. The first draft was enormous.
After a lot of discussions and calculations and more talks, we finally convinced ADB/Mongoose to bring it down to something manageable.
It was still larger than my deck plans, which were probably 85% done at that point, but I was okay with it. I kept finding things I wanted to add to the plans and had run out of room. The new design was 20% larger, 108 meters long, and allowed me to add another deck. It also had the swept-back warp pylons and much larger warp nacelles. I had to rework the mounts and bracing but otherwise that was minor to my work.
So, for the second time, I scrapped a mostly-done set of plans and started over. This time, however, I wasn't really starting from scratch. I made the outline and then did a lot of copy/paste from the second version into the third. It went together fairly quick. In the Spring of 2013, Mother's Day weekend, my wife and I drove down to Amarillo to hook up with the ADB crew to convoy over to the Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary in New Mexico.
I had enough of a "first draft" done to present to Steve Cole. I laid the printout on the table and I still remember how he sat there going through it. All of a sudden, he started laughing so hard I thought he'd fall out of his chair. "It's even got a trash compactor that's big enough to put a person in!" 
So, at any rate, ADB wasn't ready to publish it. The product they wanted it to go in was on the back-burner. Then Steve and Jean both had health issues
(they're both much better now, thankfully 
), and they started the new Shapeways miniatures line. Jean said she couldn't even think of the back-burner project until the Revised GURPS book was done.
Ergo, I've been sitting on this for a few years. About once a month, I'd pull the files up and add a touch of "improvement" here and there. The doors didn't print well, so I went thru and replaced every single blinking door icon on the whole ship. No, I didn't count them, but I assure you, it has a flip-ton of doors. I had someone else review it and to clarify things for him, I made several minor changes. I think I've finally run out of things to "fix". I hope I did. You know the saying, "Perfect is the enemy of good." I am well past that point, I fear. I do believe I have OCD. 
Well, ADB uploaded the Revised GURPS books, so I exported the files to PDF and e-mailed them to ADB. And now I wait. Steve said he's got something personal in the works and thus won't be able to look at them for a couple weeks. No worries. I'm in no hurry.
). I wanted to be able to keep track of where each character was and how long it takes to get from the Bridge to Engineering, so I tried sketch out a rough deck plan. Floor Plan Plus v2 came out in 1995. I'm still using it today. It will run on Windows 7/32-bit but not on Windows 7/64-bit, nor on Win-8, nor Windows 10 even under compatibility mode. I sent on story to Steve Petrick for comment. Oh boy, did he have comments.
He thought I was boxing myself in by naming all the officers and several enlisted on the ship. That led to a discussion about the crew roster, the ship's TO&E if you will, which led later to ADB changing the crew size from 60 to 100, including doubling the number of Boarding Parties, in the Y2K rulebook.{sigh} By then I had the ship more than half done. I based the plans off clipart found in Scenarios Book 2 which was 82-mm long, so using a scale of 1:1000, my boat was 82 meters long. There was no way to cram 40 more bodies in that tiny thing.
After several misfires, I settled on making it 90 meters long. Tight but doable.Going back to the earlier discussions, Steve didn't like my asymmetrical design of running the turbolift corridors along the starboard side (not allowing for airlocks / docking ports on the right side of the ship). That resulted in the center-line turbolift design, which led to my obsession of making the entire ship symmetrical. I could have, for example, put a set of batteries to the left and a transporter to the right. No, I couldn't do that. I *had to* make everything a mirror-image. And so it is.
Another thing Petrick took me to task for was I had the Police boat run down a two-man "space truck". He said I couldn't use a ship in the story that wasn't in the game. As the Free Trader was a 30-man ship, it was far too big to work in my story. And Hey! I'm burying the lead here: that same Space Truck was PUBLISHED in Captain's Log #53 that was just released a few weeks back.
Maybe I should dust that story off.Except, the biggest problem Petrick had with the story is it didn't have any real combat. As the game is called Star Fleet BATTLES, they want/need combat stories with an accompanying playable scenario. This didn't have that.
At any rate, I continued to play with the 90-meter deck plans off and on for years. More off than on, to be honest. I would go for months without touching the files.
I nearly ditched the project more than once. I'd say I did half the work on it in 2001 while stationed in Korea.In trying to figure out just how big a set of crew quarters should be, I dropped in furniture symbols until it all fit. Well, now that I had one, I just copy/paste about 87 more times. Ta-da, done. But then I started looking at other things. "This needs more detail, and that needs more stuff." It just snowballed on me. Before I knew it, I had something looking pretty good. Good enough that when I showed it to Steve Cole and Nick Blank at Origins, Steve was interested in printing it "someday".
Nick was the guy who did the Free Trader plans and the wonderful Burke-class Frigate plans. In 2010/2011, ADB and Mongoose started the join venture for A Call To Arms: Star Fleet. Part of that project included creating all new 1:3125 miniatures. In 2012, they got around to making the police cutter mini. The first draft was enormous.
After a lot of discussions and calculations and more talks, we finally convinced ADB/Mongoose to bring it down to something manageable.It was still larger than my deck plans, which were probably 85% done at that point, but I was okay with it. I kept finding things I wanted to add to the plans and had run out of room. The new design was 20% larger, 108 meters long, and allowed me to add another deck. It also had the swept-back warp pylons and much larger warp nacelles. I had to rework the mounts and bracing but otherwise that was minor to my work.
So, for the second time, I scrapped a mostly-done set of plans and started over. This time, however, I wasn't really starting from scratch. I made the outline and then did a lot of copy/paste from the second version into the third. It went together fairly quick. In the Spring of 2013, Mother's Day weekend, my wife and I drove down to Amarillo to hook up with the ADB crew to convoy over to the Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary in New Mexico.
I had enough of a "first draft" done to present to Steve Cole. I laid the printout on the table and I still remember how he sat there going through it. All of a sudden, he started laughing so hard I thought he'd fall out of his chair. "It's even got a trash compactor that's big enough to put a person in!" So, at any rate, ADB wasn't ready to publish it. The product they wanted it to go in was on the back-burner. Then Steve and Jean both had health issues
(they're both much better now, thankfully ), and they started the new Shapeways miniatures line. Jean said she couldn't even think of the back-burner project until the Revised GURPS book was done.Ergo, I've been sitting on this for a few years. About once a month, I'd pull the files up and add a touch of "improvement" here and there. The doors didn't print well, so I went thru and replaced every single blinking door icon on the whole ship. No, I didn't count them, but I assure you, it has a flip-ton of doors.
I had someone else review it and to clarify things for him, I made several minor changes. I think I've finally run out of things to "fix". I hope I did. You know the saying, "Perfect is the enemy of good." I am well past that point, I fear. I do believe I have OCD. Well, ADB uploaded the Revised GURPS books, so I exported the files to PDF and e-mailed them to ADB. And now I wait. Steve said he's got something personal in the works and thus won't be able to look at them for a couple weeks. No worries. I'm in no hurry.
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In the category of hindsight being 20-20 and lessons learned: Think about your final output format before you begin adding detail to your deck plans.
Umpteen years ago, I created a bunch of really cool CAD icons / symbols for various things such as helm & transporter control stations and computer terminals. I put a ton of really cool details into the icon. They look great in the native program (Floor Plan Plus v2), of course. It holds together well when I export to large-size (8.5x14 / 11x17) high-DPI (1200+) with a virtual printer to PDF file. I went to OfficeMax to print a set of deck plans on 17x22 paper -- the detail is eye-popping gorgeous.
However, comma, when I export at a smaller size and then convert it to TIFF, what the publisher will use to print the plans, all those cool features I spent all that time creating turn into pixelated blobs. Don't get me wrong -- it should print out well enough (I hope) and the main features will look perfectly fine. It's just that part of me now wonders if I wasted time making such detailed icons all those years ago.
The moral of the story: If you know ahead of time that your final product will be printed on standard 8.5x11 paper, don't bother with details that simply can't be seen at that scale.
The other thing I have discovered is 25/50/75 percent shading looks great when zoomed in on the screen, but also becomes rather blobbish when zoomed out, and doesn't print well at smaller scales. Make everything hollow or solid. Ditto for cross-hatching. If you want cross-hatching, draw the lines in manually, and check it zoomed out to see if it looks like what you want.
The final deck plans project will be published in B&W, I presume. Just for my own fun, I thought I'd try an experiment with colorizing the plans. Not sure if I want to color-code by type of room, or to go for a more realistic set of colors.
Again, it looks great on the screen (as long as you don't zoom in too much), but everything is super tiny once it's printed on 8.5x11 paper. If I print it on larger paper, the details will just be blobs.
Umpteen years ago, I created a bunch of really cool CAD icons / symbols for various things such as helm & transporter control stations and computer terminals. I put a ton of really cool details into the icon. They look great in the native program (Floor Plan Plus v2), of course. It holds together well when I export to large-size (8.5x14 / 11x17) high-DPI (1200+) with a virtual printer to PDF file. I went to OfficeMax to print a set of deck plans on 17x22 paper -- the detail is eye-popping gorgeous.
However, comma, when I export at a smaller size and then convert it to TIFF, what the publisher will use to print the plans, all those cool features I spent all that time creating turn into pixelated blobs. Don't get me wrong -- it should print out well enough (I hope) and the main features will look perfectly fine. It's just that part of me now wonders if I wasted time making such detailed icons all those years ago.
The moral of the story: If you know ahead of time that your final product will be printed on standard 8.5x11 paper, don't bother with details that simply can't be seen at that scale.
The other thing I have discovered is 25/50/75 percent shading looks great when zoomed in on the screen, but also becomes rather blobbish when zoomed out, and doesn't print well at smaller scales. Make everything hollow or solid. Ditto for cross-hatching. If you want cross-hatching, draw the lines in manually, and check it zoomed out to see if it looks like what you want.
The final deck plans project will be published in B&W, I presume. Just for my own fun, I thought I'd try an experiment with colorizing the plans. Not sure if I want to color-code by type of room, or to go for a more realistic set of colors.
Again, it looks great on the screen (as long as you don't zoom in too much), but everything is super tiny once it's printed on 8.5x11 paper. If I print it on larger paper, the details will just be blobs.
I'm still plugging along with this project. I had to put it down for several months due to training for a new job and such.
I colorized one full deck, but I don't know if it's worth my time to do the rest of the ship. Is this something people would want to see as a product, possible something they'd have to buy from Warehouse 23 or other such strores?
Yes? No? Don't care?
I colorized one full deck, but I don't know if it's worth my time to do the rest of the ship. Is this something people would want to see as a product, possible something they'd have to buy from Warehouse 23 or other such strores?
Yes? No? Don't care?
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