Oolite Bulletins

The Jade Shadow is a ship out of the ongoing Star Wars post movie book series. I take no credit for the design of this ship, or it's concept. This oxp is simply my attempt to create a version of the ship for the game Oolite.
The ship is named after it's original owner, Mara jade. One time assasine for Emperor Palpatine, Mare Jade became a Jedi Knight after Palpatine's death. After chasing Luke Skywalker around with the intent of revenge, Mara ended up in love with Skywalker, and they were married. Mare Jade was an ace pilot, ship mechanic, and Jedi Knight. Her ship, the Jade Shadow, is a much newer design than Han Solo's Millenium Falcon, and is at least as fast, and dangerous as the famous smuggler's ship. It's size is about in the Python range, but it's design makes it difficult to compare to any of the core Oolite ships. In the books, the Jade Shadow sported several weapon types, from high powered blaster cannon, missiles, and blaster turrets. Most of this was not possible to recreate in Oolite, so I settled for equiping her with two forward facing ball turrets, and two aft facing ball turrets. She also has forward, aft, port, and starboard lasers, and a missile launcher. I'm afraid this ship is well into the "Uber Ship" catagory, because I couldn't bring myself to make her less than how she is represented in the books from which she was derived.
The pictures I have of the Jade Shadow, found on-line from several sources, all differ slightly, but have the same basic body design. I took what I liked best, and this ship is a conglomeration of several artist's versions. I threw in a couple of my own design tweeks as well. Pretty much all the designs I got on-line picture the ship as a light gray, ivory, or silver color. The name of the ship was virtually screeming to me that at least one version should be a jade colored texture. I came up with two varients of the jade textures, as well as the original ship textured in mettalic silver. The stats for the JadeShadow are below. I hope Ooliters enjoy her as much as I have.

Box Link - https://app.box.com/s/xrylau78p7xizg8otj60

ship_size = 86.0 x 33.5 x 149.9
energy_recharge_rate = 5.5;
max_cargo = 350;
max_energy = 650;
max_missiles = 8;
max_flight_pitch = 1.4;
max_flight_roll = 1.6;
max_flight_speed = 550;

Please feel free to see more about this ship on my wiki page (link at bottom of page).

PIX:

Hey Mandoman,

I am sure it must not have been easy to get the rounded shape into a decent form, that's why I only do flatties. , Great stuff, keep it up.

dertien wrote:

Hey Mandoman,

I am sure it must not have been easy to get the rounded shape into a decent form, that's why I only do flatties. , Great stuff, keep it up.

Thanks, dertien. I bet you could do it too. You just have to dive in and experiment. It's not easy, but anything good never is.

nice work mandoman, that looks like a really complex ship design to model and it looks like you've managed it fantastically well!

Griff wrote:

nice work mandoman, that looks like a really complex ship design to model and it looks like you've managed it fantastically well!

Thanks, Griff. I'm afraid it might be an eye sore to the "Quads to Tris" guys. I tried doing that, and when I unwrapped the thing for texturing, it was such a pile of spaghetti that I couldn't make head, nor tail of it. I switched it back from the "Tri" setting, to the original setting, and the unwrap was much cleaner. It does appear to have a few faces that stick out too much, but I actually kind of like my ships like that. Don't know why.

You've done a good job, curved surfaces are really hard to do, OK there's maybe one or two triangles in that top pic that might flow a bit neater if they had their edges spun around but that's just being really picky
Is it blender you use to make your ships? i don't know that program at all but you might be able to work easier and quicker with curved ships if it has a 'subdivision mode', where you'd basically be working on a much lower polygon mesh, probably about 30 polygons or so and the program would be automatically dicing this up and smoothing it into a nice curved surface, there's a neat overview of this technique here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckOTl2GcS-E
the beauty is that you only really have to work with a few polygons and points so you can build the shapes much faster and it's easier to fix any edges that you're unhappy with

Yeah, I'm familiar with that. I even used it to a much greater extant when making the Comet. In was the only way to really round off that front globe section, not to mention the smaller barrel sections. Maybe I'll try using subdivisions more in my next project. Thanks Griff.

I have had to make a correction in the shipyard.plist for this ship. I forgot to give it a chance designation for availability. I apologize to those that have already downloaded this ship. If you don't wish to hassle with deleting the version you have, and downloading the corrected version, simply open the shipyard.plist with a good text editor application, and change the "chance = 0.0" to what ever number you would like. The corrected version has chance set at 0.2, due to it's "uber" nature, but you may set it as you wish. Sorry about the hassle. The link on the original post is now the link to the corrected version.