I needed to come up with a selection of weapons for the 3WE. For the Royal Marines, I needed them to be familiar to the popular selection of Aliens, but also sufficiently different to belong to another military. I then wanted to pad out the options for them before turning to constabulary and civilian weapons.
Fortunately, I found enough suitable models among my old purchases to hopefully do the job. Here they are in a couple of sheets.
Someone in the Free League forums asked about space-craft for company executives. I found a couple of models in my collection that would fit the bill for executive shuttles, the larger one is suitable as a small trans-light ship, while the smaller one makes an attractive short range shuttle.
A couple more images - both of these models had interiors I was able to render and do some cut-outs for. The first is an alternative APC design with a little more ground clearance than the classic one from Aliens. Then there is a heavy mobile command vehicle. I was thinking of using both of these for the Royal Marines.
I'm not going to abandon the faux computer displays, particularly for on-line games. However, they aren't good on the old eyes and really aren't printer friendly, so I'll be doing things the other way around now, starting with the faux drawings and then converting them to computer displays when needed. If someone would like a green computer display of one of these, post and, if I've some time, I'll see what I can do.
Some of the selection below are repeats that I've improved a bit, with some new examples.
Here are a couple more images. One is the mech loader as a drawing, the other is a car in both green display and a drawing.
After looking at how to create faux green computer screen technical displays, I thought I would look a little at how to render the images as faux drawings, or at least something a little more printer friendly. Here are a couple of examples.
Something I’ve been hearing and reading a lot with regards to games like Traveller and Alien, is the term retro-future, referencing the apparently dated vision of a future technology based on that of the 70s and 80s, treating it as an aesthetic and part of the charm of the setting.
I’d like to suggest that this is a mistake, and that the clunky looking technology seen in the films of that time are a fairly good representation of what I think spacefaring technology does, and still will look like.
Compared with that of the recent past—and I’m old enough to consider the 70s and 80s to be recent past—modern tech is sleek, elegant, sophisticated, and even fashionable. This is consumer technology. Industrial technology looks a little different. Compare consumer technology to the technology in, for example, the International Space Station. Check out some pictures. Baring the odd laptop, there’s not much there that wouldn’t look at home on the Nostromo. And the space capsule still in use to ferry astronauts and supplies, as well as to provide a means of escape? The Russian, formerly Soviet, Soyuz capsule has been in use for more than forty years, with not a great deal of change—and for very good reason.
The more sophisticated your technology, the more there is to go wrong, the easier it is to break, and the harder it is fix.
In space—and it really doesn’t matter what scale of space we are talking about, be that orbital, interplanetary, or interstellar—you will always be a long way from help, even a long way from just calling for help. If you run into a problem, help is very unlikely to get to you in time, so either you find a way to solve the problem yourself or you die. Space is unforgiving that way.
The upshot of this is, of course, that the technology you depend upon needs to be robust, reliable, and repairable. Efficiency is a bonus but only that, the three Rs of of spacefaring trump all other design considerations.
Strictly, the 3R design mantra should be considered extensive. It is not just that you need to be able to repair as much as possible, from your engines through to the electronics that govern life support, or the motherboards of your computers. You can no more call up a software engineer in deep space than you can an electrician, so software must also meet these requirements—and this includes operating systems. In Alien, this is not quite the case with their shipboard AI systems but for other games, I would certainly apply the principle.
The tech of the original Alien films does a good job of getting it right. And for that, I’ll forgive them their other sins of gravity and trans-light travel.
I needed to come up with a selection of weapons for the 3WE. For the Royal Marines, I needed them to be familiar to the popular selection of...
