My First Ship Attempt: Minbari White Star

[Spoot Knight]

Alternatively, I'd use a scatter beamer, and modify the deviation on the shots. I've always hated the mining beam sprite, the scatterbeam is cleaner.

Don't forget you can shrink the weapon sprite. (Which would make sense since the Q-GD Cannon is inside the nose.)

[2500kgm3]

As the overall shape, I'd say it captures the feel of the ship rather good. Maybe the nose is too "diamond-shaped rigid" and should be more rounded on it's sides.

About stretching, yes, it really hurts the model. I always try to keep pieces in a relative size to each other, in order to avoid this stretching effect. I suggest you rebuild the ship using sections in relative scale to the one used in the main body.

About the weapons payload, I'd say I don't get the why there are point defense beams, nor the reason to put weapons in the back of it, or the "unnoficial" weapons you used. If the point is, as you say trying to make a whitestar which does not lack in appearance, I'd try to mimic the behaviour of the ship in combat too, even if you consider it "your ship".

I also tend to dislike weapon stretching. To me, it seems amost as bad as section stretching.




Since I also have built a Whitestar, you'r right by saying yours is more detailed. As I built mine as a part of a fleet, I tried to not to go over a certain ammount of sections in order to avoid performance problems with the game when lots of ships were in a scenario. After all, it is a monitor, not a destroyer or a cruiser. I expected they would be deployed in fairly big numbers in major battles.
So the good looks of it are limited by the number of sections used. The Whitestar was for me the first ship of that fleet I built too, by the way.

On my next try to build a fleet, I went the other way. Making ships as detailed as I could. So even tiny fighters had really big numbers of sections. It didn't worked. 15vs15 fighters battles would lag the game heavily, not to mention using larger ships. Large ammounts of sections are great to achieve amazing effects in "one of it's kind" ships, but not practical for ships to be deployed in large numbers. So in short, I agree with you. It's too big and too powerful. But that is not really something bad. It's just that I think you used the "flagship" philosophy of shipbuilding in a ship that I believe does not fit that philosophy -at least, not from season4 onwards-

So I think my criticismn is coming from the "building a fleet around this ship as a reference" mindset, since that's what I did with mine. Nevertheless, it is a quite good ship for a first ship, although it is suffering from stretching as much as almost every other first ship we see around here.

[Kane]

Nice ship! Except colors are a bit off, but you have a good over all hull.