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Was already doing that before you even posted.calvin1211 wrote:Personally, I think you might want to try extending the metal parts around the entire edge of the landscape bubble.
That was my intention the whole time, just hadn't gotten around to it when I posted that first WIP screenshot. Here's what I currently have:
They're pretty good books, but they can be a bit tricky to get used to. They take place in a super-advanced space civilisation called "The Culture". Humans in the Culture can effectively live forever, regenerate from most wounds, have glands in their bodies which they can use to produce hundreds of different varieties of drugs for recreation or to help improve performance. It's basically paradise. Anyone can have whatever they want, there's no real laws because there's no incentive to break laws anymore, and humans are effectively left to just spend their whole lives chilling however they want while the Minds, super-intelligent AIs, run more or less everything. Ships like GSVs are usually run by between 1-3 Minds.jwa8402 wrote:Now that's more like it! Makes me want to investigate the books actually.
Can sometimes be hard to wrap your brain around things in the setting with just how absurdly advanced most of their technology is. My ship, while I'm calling it a GSV, doesn't really look anything like a GSV would actually look like, because layers and layers of decks wrapped in shields and capable of rearranging themselves into all sorts of different shapes wouldn't really work as a BSF ship, but in the books there's this moment when a character looks out of the window of the ship he's in, and sees what he thinks is another ship in orbit of a planet, only to be informed that it's not a planet he's seeing, it's a GSV, and that image, plus some others, inspired me to make something similar in BSF, even if I couldn't stay true to the overall described design of a GSV.General Systems Vehicles (GSVs) are the Culture's largest type of ship, ranging between 25 km and 200 km in each dimension (including the fields protecting them and forming the exterior of their life-support system). GSVs which provide accommodation for biological members of the Culture generally have populations in the millions or billions, and can be considered worlds in their own right. However, they are also, with some lead time, able to transform into massive factories or warships. In one of the Culture novels (Excession), a GSV unloads its organic population and transforms itself into a very fast-moving shipyard/mothership, effectively deciding the outcome of the main plot thread. In the Culture novel (Surface Detail) Veppers is informed that a single large GSV would be able to combat a fleet of 230,000,000 simple warships - representative of the combined force of an entire lesser civilisation - alone.
GSVs generally have little resemblance to traditional 'ship' design expectations, as they are enveloped in multitudes of fields which allow them to dispense with anything resembling an outer protective hull or shell, instead often being covered with parks and outside buildings. Their layers serve different purposes - from atmosphere containment, foreign object barriers and sensory input/signalling to traction fields for interstellar movement.
GSVs are so complex and so vital to the Culture that they are described as generally being controlled by three Minds (although the System Class GSV Empiricist is described as having seven in "The Hydrogen Sonata". So far (2008) Banks generally assumes that a GSV's three Minds agree on major issues, but has also explored the possibility and consequences of major disagreements, which can result in the losing Mind(s) being forced off the ship and the winning Mind(s) taking full control.
Classes of GSV are usually named after the largest planetary geological/geographical features. Some of the known classes of GSV are (in decreasing order of size and capability):
System Class [multiple separate components suspended in a force field up to 200 km long]
Plate Class [53 km long, 22 km wide, 4 km thick, or, including fields, up to 90 km long, 60 km wide, 20 km thick]
Range Class
Equator Class
Continent Class
Ocean Class
I feel your paaaaaaaain. I was thinking while looking at it, "He better be careful not to go over the limit..."Anna wrote: EDIT: And I seem to have run into a problem where the ship won't load in BSF. Guess it's a good thing I didn't close Shipmaker. Might try deleting some bits and seeing if I can get it to load. I hate going over the code limit.
Luckily shipmaker will still load ships that are over the part limit for BSF (I don't even know if there is a part limit in SM, I'm sure I've gone over 1000 before and no problems except for lag). The finished version is certainly impressive.Anna wrote: EDIT: And I seem to have run into a problem where the ship won't load in BSF. Guess it's a good thing I didn't close Shipmaker. Might try deleting some bits and seeing if I can get it to load. I hate going over the code limit.
"Lacks flaws and is near perfection" is nice to hear, though.
