Bengal WIP

With Major Striker latest Bengal model and Howard also presenting his Bengal carrier for Pioneer I have also taken up my Bengal projekt. I have originaly started it a long time ago, dropped it, started again, dropped....

Now I have again made some progress.
The general idea is still the same. Combining elements of different referances we have on the Bengal-class.
For example the Claw Marks, the TV show, the movie and ingame graphics and cutscenes.
I will also add some of my own ideas like I have added manouvering thrusters to the ship. AA defence, some windows and other stuff might follow.
I am also trying to get scaleing more "right". For example I rescaled the fighters to a more reasonable size that is basicly confirm with the landing animation but not as hugh as the Clawmark values say they would be. If they would some cockpits would be bigger then my living room ^_^

Well enough talk let me show you some pictures.

That is how it currently looks like.

_________________
Yes

Hey Lars, good to see you! Smile

Like I said on WC Planet, I'm interested in seeing the final product and finding out how you plan to mix all the examples of the Tiger's Claw together. It sounds like it would be quite a challenge to balance the respective features of all the versions and still have it look distinctly "Claw".

That's looking gorgeous, Lars. Question, though: What are you planning to do about launch tubes? I remember in your first model you had 3 tubes on each of the back "wings", and three tubes under the small wings on the sides. This time it seems to me you've lowered the side wings such that there's no room for tubes under them?

_________________
PU (Privateer: Parallel Universe's Home)
WCpedia --The Wing Commander Encyclopedia

Thanks. I hope I can finish this project someday. Current progress if very slow.

The lauchtubes will still be under the smaller wings but non on the back wings.
The space is truely a bit small to but them there so I have to think up some solution but I think I will manage it. Only point is that these tubes aren't realy tubes anymore. The space from the upper hangar to the lower one is quite small so these tubes will also be very short or just some doors into space. I will have to see how it will turn out. Currently I am back to the landing hangar and giveing it details. At the moment I am integrating the rows of windows that we saw in some of the WC1 cutscenes. The first is in and the rest will follow.
I am also thinking about what could be behind these windows. Maybe some are crew quarters, messhall...something like that.

I am open to suggestions ^_^

_________________
Yes

Well, when I was working on my Bengal, someone pointed me to your work back then, and I took inspiration from it for the launch tubes, and made them fit. These are very early WIP pics, so don't look at external details; everything on the outside was redone. Just the internal tube details are what I want to focus on:

As you can see, by placing the side-tubes at 45 degrees, I'm getting a fair length out of them.
The entrance for ships into the tubes is from underneath them. An elevator. Not from behind, as there's really no room at all behind them.

In the picture below, we're inside the ship delivery tunnels, looking towards the back. The tunnel passes under the launch tubes. At the far end it turns to the left, to go into the back wing.

Here you can see the shape of the tunnel in perspective, from a cutout:

And now I can't find the images of my old work on the tubes at the back wing, but I can describe it: Basically, the 3 tubes were towards the upper half of the volume of the "wing" and the tunnel entered the lower half of the wing's volume, so the tunnel ran along under the 3 tubes, so as to have elevators to take the planes up into the tubes.

My tubes were too narrow to be called "canonical", unfortunately, but there was no way getting around the lack of space.

As for internal subdivision, that's the million dollar question. What I've been planning to do is to collect ALL canonical references on the matter of carriers in one place, and begin to make a connected graph of relationships. For example, in Heart of the Tiger, Blair's office has a window looking into the ships bay. That's one datum among hundreds, which, when put all together, might yield a pretty concrete picture. But I haven't done it yet... Sad

_________________
PU (Privateer: Parallel Universe's Home)
WCpedia --The Wing Commander Encyclopedia

Nice model. I think I have seen the images somewhere. Will you continue with it?

I allways thought that the ship would have two decks. On where you are landing at and one under it where fighters are prepared to take off.
What I could do is drop the idea of the second hangar and make it so that the tubes are loaded via a lift from the upper deck. That way you would still have a tube they launch from. On the other hand it would limit the ship storage space for fighters even more. Now I could have at least 16 fighters waiting at the top and 16 in tubes at the second deck.
Anyway the Claw would never ever have 100+ fighters as discribed in the Clawmarks.

I would say that 64 would be a more realistic number and even than I don't have a clue where the crew and engines and all the other stuff should be.

Placeing the tubes angles also won't solve the problem. The Hornet has a freaking hugh wingspan and the Raptor is very high.
If it would only be WC3 ships or Rapiers and Scimitars it would make things much easier.
These ships are more compact in shape and so easier to store.

_________________
Yes

	gevatter Lars wrote:
	Nice model. I think I have seen the images somewhere. Will you continue with it?

Thanks. Yes, but not now; there's a lot of stuff that takes priority. PU needs new versions of ALL ships. The models we have currently are utter garbage. So, one of us is working on a new Galaxy, another of us is working on a new Orion, and I'll probably soon start working on the Tarsus or Centurion, and we got to do them all, civilian, confed, militia, hunter, pirate and kilrathi ships. After that, we got to redo all the stations. And then, after that it will be the time to tackle the rest of WC ships.

	Quote:
	I allways thought that the ship would have two decks. On where you are landing at and one under it where fighters are prepared to take off.

That's exactly what I did. There's actually enough vertical space to have one or two more decks sandwiched between. The only reason I didn't put such a mezannine deck is that the elevators from the landing deck doubled as ship air-locks. IOW, my landing deck was not pressurized. And I know that William Forstchen came up with an idea of a plasma barrier on the door to keep the air inside, but besides it being a completely bogus idea, the canonical fact is that if you look at the original game images, people walking on the landing deck always have helmets on their heads and oxygen tanks on their backs, and the ships that are parked on the sides of the deck are behind red-tinted "glass".

Quote:

What I could do is drop the idea of the second hangar and make it so that the tubes are loaded via a lift from the upper deck. That way you would still have a tube they launch from. On the other hand it would limit the ship storage space for fighters even more. Now I could have at least 16 fighters waiting at the top and 16 in tubes at the second deck.
Anyway the Claw would never ever have 100+ fighters as discribed in the Clawmarks.

I don't know; I went through calculations several times and got very different results just by changing a few assumptions, such as...

	Quote:
	The Hornet has a freaking hugh wingspan and the Raptor is very high.

Are you using "official figures" for the sizes? Because if you deduce the size of a hornet from looking at the size of the cockpit, it's not very big at all. Or, say a Hellcat: If it was really 27 meters long or whatever it was, then the cockpit would be almost as big as a small church. The length figures from the manual are just figures someone came up with by throwing dice while drunk, I believe.

_________________
PU (Privateer: Parallel Universe's Home)
WCpedia --The Wing Commander Encyclopedia

There was a release of models from [forgot his name]. He made a lot of the Privateer models and other ships. You might want to take a look at these and use them for modeling referance.
I think the pack was released at the CIC not so long ago.

As for the hangar and fighter size. Well I don't think that there is that much space left.
I have looked at shots from the landing sequenz and scaled the fighters according to that. The result is that they are still quite big but the cockpits are now more or less fitting to the people.
I think the Hornet came down to under 12m in length. Thats a reasonable size when compared to todays fighters.

Still if you take a look at the fighters and the general size of the hangar its allready quite hard to squeze a second flightdeck into the ship

At least the Raptors hight might be a problem. Also remember that there should be some reasonable amount of armor on the underside.

What I will most likely do is that there will be specific tubes for each type of fighter. In the original the tubes where allways at the same dimensions no matter the size of your fighter. So I guess its fair to say that they had tubes that where made for a special kind of fighter.

Well even if I leave out the lower flightdeck it won't be enough space for tubes. Because of the width of the hangar entrance the bays are allready close to the outer walls.
I don't have an image at hand right now but its realy close.

_________________
Yes

Well, right above the planes you have like a walkway with a rail. Above that there's a black strip. If you add those heights, you got a deck. And the black strip at the bottom, that could be another deck. The problem is width, as you say, but elevators sort of solve that problem. Each of those stalls where ships are parked could feature an elevator.
In my design, I was planning to separate ship storage from deck and maintenance functions.
Ship storage was going to use the front section of the Bengal, under the landing strip, and the upper back section, under that inclined plate behind the tower.
I'll see if I can dig up the mesh and take some shots.

_________________
PU (Privateer: Parallel Universe's Home)
WCpedia --The Wing Commander Encyclopedia

The problem is realy to get the scaleing right. I still got the feeling that something is wrong with the numbers the program gives me.

Beside that I have rescaled the fighters so that the Hornet is down to 13m in length instead of the 20m it originaly was. Its still hugh.
I think when I would scale it to fit the starting sequenz it might be even smaller. On the other hand I think that 13m for a spacefighter is allready quite small. Todays aircrafts are about the size and a spacefighter would need at least the same amount of equipment and stuff. On the other hand its Scifi.

Well I think I would stay with these sizes I have got now. They make more or less sense to me and are even backed up by canon stuff.

_________________
Yes

Here's a picture of the landing bay I was doing:

We're looking in, from the landing strip, towards the back of the ship. I believe your landing bay is a lot longer, and probably a lot more correct in so being. But in any case, what I wanted to show you was the elevators idea. You'll see that to the left and right there are holes on the floor. It's not easy to see from this perspective, but on each side there's actually a pair of rectangular holes. Each hole would normally be filled by a flush surface that can move down. So, a ship gets moved over one of those four platforms, then the floor begins to drop...
Those rectangular boxes above the holes, on the ceiling, house the airlock covers. So, once the ship drops to be entirely below landing bay floor level, the elevator stops there, and the top comes down from that box in the ceiling, and closes above the ship. The interior is then pressurized. Once pressurized, the elevator continues down into the pressurized areas of the ship.

Here we're looking down the holes in the floor. They'd be like 20 or 30 meters long and about 15 meters wide, each, so a man would look pretty tiny standing next to them:

We're looking down, and towards the back, and a bit towards the port side.
If we then descend through the holes, while keeping the same camera angle, except a bit more level, we see the two tunnels going to the back of the ship, passing under the launch tubes:

The launch tubes are covered by gray sheet metal and may not be easy to recognize. You see where the ceiling drops ahead? The drop forms a V shape. That's because the tubes are at 45 degrees between sideways and forward-pointing. Towards the center, at the vertex of the V shape, that's where the back ends of all 6 tubes are. Each tube has a vertical elevator/air-lock right at the back end, so that whole area of floor towards the center is where there'd be a total of 6 elevators where ships can be raised into the launch tubes. The tunnels then continues towards the back, turn and go into the back "wings", where the other six launch tubes are.

Those aren't the only destinations, though. Past the 6 elevators under the launch tubes, I was planning additional elevators taking ships up into a ship storage area behind the control tower.
And behind us, in the picture above, there currently is a wall, but I was planning to put a couple of holes into that wall, leading into the interior of the front part of the ship, the area under the landing strip, where I was planning to have ship maintenance and additional ship storage.
Notice also that after the ceiling drops to accommodate the launch tubes, it never rises again. There's plenty of room above the tunnels going towards the back wings, which could extend the width of the first ship storage area I mentioned.

This is not to suggest an identical layout. Just food for thought. There's a gazillion ways you could organize the internal layout. I think, though, that elevators are mandatory. They are also canonical, from Academy. And, speaking of Academy, I was planning a larger elevator in the middle of the landing bay, for larger ships like shuttles and Broadswords that wouldn't fit through launch tubes. So they'd be brought up into the landing bay, and take off from the landing strip.

Here's top and side transparent views, with the launch tubes highlighted:

So, the landing bay floor is just above the ceiling of the launch tubes; and the tunnels to move ships around inside the Bengal are hugging the bottom, passing under the launch tubes.
It seems to me, though, that the landing strip in my model is several meters higher than in yours. I believe I followed the canonical references pretty closely, and so I think this is something you might want to look into. Raising the landing level would give you a whole lot of room under it, IMO.

Compare this image to your perspective view in the first post:

Looks pretty much the same, but when you look at my side elevation and your side elevation, it seems I got a ton more room under the landing level than you do. May have something to do with the shape of the hull. I think the front part in your mesh angles down more than mine, so the landing strip being level ends up lower at the entrance to the bay. In my side view, the level of the landing, at the inner bay, divides the height of the hull such that one third approximately is above it, and two thirds below it. In your side elevation, it divides the hull about half above half below. That results in a pretty inconvenient division of the interior space, I think.

Or, compare with this other picture:

The "trench" of my strip is less deep, you see? Lots of room under it.

EDIT:
I think my bottom is more curvey, too:

Well, I do remember there being canonical disagreements about the hull's shape. The Claw Marks diagram is actually a pretty bad diagram; full of errors and inconsistencies; one has to refer to the original, in-game images to get something more "correct" --and by "correct" I mean true to the original game. It's like the story with the famous blueprints. They are dimensionally inaccurate, self-inconsistent across the views... One can't use the blueprints as references to model the WC1 ships; one can only use the blueprints as inspirations for greebling, really.

See also how the angle of the chamfered surfaces at the bottom of the side changes from front to back:

This render is almost orthogonal; --from very far away at very high zoom. The shape of that chamfer was necessitated by the references; it wasn't my invention. But you won't see that in the Claw Marks diagram. The Claw Marks diagram is a careless sketch someone did without reference to the original model. You only see such subtleties by looking at the in-game images...

http://wcpedia.com/dw/doku.php/wc_info/ship_classes/confed/carrier/bengal

like...

Well, actually I can't remember how I came to the conclusion that that chamfer had a twist but I do remember being a pretty inescapable conclusion.
And, in all truth, my model doesn't even fully follow the original in-game model. Would be a lot flatter if it did; I kind of averaged and mixed the various references.
And, actually, the original game images were for vga mode 11, which feature non-square pixels (320 x 200 mapped to a 5:4 aspect ratio), so those reference images should be scaled up to 125% vertically before using them as references.

So, the image above should rather be,

Another gottcha of in-game images is that they are perspectives, NOT parallel projections, so one can't take reliable measurements from them. Things on the side that is closer do look bigger than things on the other side.

As for those discrete steps above and below the front section, don't assume there were such discrete steps in the model. I used a program I wrote myself to scale up the images using line detection and anisotropic filtering for anti-aliasing; but the algorithm works with small matrices and can only antialias properly very slanted lines. Lines that are close to horizontal will still show steps where the original image changes by a pixel. Those steps are simply the size of an original pixel. The shape of the model was most certainly smooth.

You can tell here from the shading:

Again, properly scaled:

In other words, what I'm suggesting to you is that your model could use a bit of tweaking of the front section: I think the bottom needs to slant upwards a bit more towards the front, and the tops of the walls flanking the landing strip should slant downwards a bit less. Then, when you project the landing strip horizontlly from the front to the back, the floor of the inner landing deck will end up a few meters higher. Then you'll have plenty more room under the floor, --for the launch tubes, and yet one more level.
Doing this would also correct the fact that the walls on the side of the landing strip right now look too tall, as far as I can tell from the angle of your pics. Would be interesting to see a render from inside the bay, like I did here:

As a matter of fact, I tweaked the front part of my model precisely to get the height of the walls into the right proportions.

It's good practise, btw, to go to the trouble to place cameras exactly as to get views that match reference images. Takes hard work, but once you got them all in place it makes it very easy to get the shape right. Just keep in mind that this model was a work in progress. My walls are too slanted, for example; should drop more vertically; and the inside wall should slant back; I just never got around to finishing this stuff.

_________________
PU (Privateer: Parallel Universe's Home)
WCpedia --The Wing Commander Encyclopedia

Frankly, I know nothing about blendering or artwork in general, but browsing this thread I wonder if you don't regularly get emails from the gaming industries, trying to recruit you guys.

So Lars, a warm welcome from a compatriot! (you're german, aren't you?)

I just found out that my program fucked up the scale. I had it set to meters (metric). So I thought eveything is fine. Now I found out that for some odd reason some parts are masured in inches instead of meters.
So now when I said 13m he showed me meters but multiplied this with inch as a basis. The result was some parts where to big.
I have to go through the entire model to find whats wrong and whats right.
I have also taken a look into fighters scale again and taken the sideview where you see a person sitting in a fighter to scale the fighters accordingly.

The new size seams to fit things much better but as said I will have to go through the entire model again but from the first inspection it looks like only smaller details are effected by this odd error.

@Monkhouse
As you just read I will first try to sort out this program error and then I will come back to your ideas. So far I can only say that the ships outline is quite closely following the Claw Marks drawings and I would like to stay with that. Beside that the details are modeled into the basic hull so moveing around all these vertexes again might become quite a pain ^_^
Still I hope with the new scaleing for the fighters it will be better.

@Dilloh
Thanks for the welcome and yes I am from germany. If you are searching for a german WC forum you might also want to visit the WingCenter.de

As for beeing recruited....well my knowledge is only limited as are my abilitys. For beeing in the industry would most likely take much more then this stuff. My model still got a lot of errors in it and when I just look at how fast Howard created his model I must say that I am still far of beeing that good.
On the other side it could be interesting.

_________________
Yes

@Dilloh: Thanks! Well, I think both Lars and I are more meticulous than fast. But the industry probably wants fast, more so than meticulous.

@Lars: What program are you using? In Blender I know there's "proportional editing", where the proportion can be set to linear, among other functions. Set to linear, and with a range of the length of the front section, you could grab the tip of the forward end and drag it up, and the whole front section would move up, proportionately to the distance from the body; greebles and everything.

If you decide to stay with the Claw Marks diagram, it's your decision, but I think it's a pity, personally; I don't think that diagram was ever meant to be a modeling reference; and too many modellers have done that already, and they all ended up with Claws that didn't really look like the original Claw from the game. It will be a pity to see you following their footsteps. Claw Marks diagram == wrong source, IMO; GIGO warning.

_________________
PU (Privateer: Parallel Universe's Home)
WCpedia --The Wing Commander Encyclopedia