Space Engineers, 3.0 progress

Amazing really how out of control my creative side gets when I let it run amok heheh. This ship has considerably changed design at least four times yesterday. Most of the plan is ironed out in my head though so thats... a plus. Assuming I don't think up some new idea again.

Here we go :

Every ship begins somewhere. 2.0 was started right on the heels of me finishing 1.0 with the goal being double the size in all directions. 2.0c shown above is an obvious overhaul of 2.0 (a very very vveerryy much improved overhaul) with the goal of more hangar space than the meager little hangar 2.0 had. So there above is the 'start'.

Feedback from the sister and on the workshop agreed that the proportions of 'c' has more than passing similarity to Ferengi space ship design and I've decided to see where that goes. A new numerical series of ship in my opinion requires more than just subtle changes so this things going to be be bigger in every way. Above photos are of me deciding where the rear wings will be relocated. Originally I was going to build the new wing location block by block but that got tedious so...

I built a funky little... ship thing that uses merge blocks to relocate ship parts. Its in the first photo, the long block with engines in all directions. All I do now is toss a merge block on something I want to move in mass, link this little ship thing to it and move it. Works surprisingly well. I've now got 4 or 5 of these little ship things laying around the asteroid belt.  Above photos show the movement of the wings to their new future location. A bit wider and abit forward of 'c's positioning.

At some point after repositioning the wings I pondered moving all the main livable area of this ship out towards the wings and running the glass neck straight back to the engineering area. And since this ship has already been sliced and diced in many ways, f--k it lets do it. Literally cut the main body out and disposed of it (flew it at max thruster speed in to an asteroid near the sisters base, wrecked explosively well heh). Not readily visible here I took the top have of the ring / bridge and the bottom half ring / observation deck and pushed them up/down and back abit. If this is to be a 3 series, everything needs to be bigger in all directions after all. Now the third picture in this bunch is a nostalgic nod on my part to my first space based mmo I ever played, Earth and Beyond. The Terran faction was all about the free standing rings in their ship designs that always maintained minimal actual contact with the rest of the ship body. 3 here's ring will do just that. 

Larger thrusters added so I could get a feel for where this is going, the 'cross' holding them in position is 100% temporary, when finished the ring will have no contact with the large thruster assembly. Also built in small forward and breaking thrusters in to the ring's top and bottom segments. May add a small batch in the vertical segment's as well, still pondering it.

Last photo of this update, the support blocks now form two complete rings that encompass the sum of engineering. Inside them my goal is as close to a window globe as the game will allow and inside that globe will be large thrusters and all this ships jump drives / reactors. Still pondering how crew wing and production wing will connect to the engineering globe, more to come on this.

o7