Why do we never get ships like this in the ship design threads?
Design Contest Voting
... Competitive edge? People WOULD want to save their best ship designs for prizes provided by this competition.
Any rule against voting if I submitted a ship?
when I squint all of the ships look the same
Thoughts -
The paintjob on Torrohead is too dark for my tastes, I feel it could use some more highlighting to offset all of the roof-boondongles things have. It's too dark to really make out anything against Imgur's black background.
Maw mk VII, while an interesting idea that's reasonably well executed, is too cartoon-y and simplified in comparison to cosmoteer's graphics. The railguns and engines contrast too much with the black. Maybe if the design was abstracted more it would work better.
Scrapyard - it seems built along the lines of the junker, but larger and with a more symmetric paintjob. I think a paintjob that orderly works against it's ramshackle constructions.
The Shrike has a simplistic shape and doesn't utilize the third color much. I like how the thrusters are given a sense of being recessed by the paintjob.
Ardama has a nice paintjob, utilizing strong contrast and working the the color palette of cosmoteer. The thrusters and ion prisms blend in. I like the repeated eye motif.
RedBaron is irking me because you can put spaces in ship names just fine! The railguns break up the paintjob. What would otherwise be an expanse of curves of red an black is interupted by straight lines of grey. If you look at Excelsis, the built in ship, you can see how it makes the railguns less glaring by having white higlights scattered about the ship. I think it would look better without the railguns.
Chien Phuong has a space in the name! The paintjob is nice, but... odd. having smooth transitions within but cutting off abruptly in some places. I admire building the entire design to look like a bird.
Crystal Angel blends design and decals to give it an insect-y feel. I like how the purple of the shield generators was used as an accent and it was armed with relatively color-neutral cannons instead of lasers, which would leave bright red boondongles on top of the ship. Also, the reactors go well with it. I feel it could use some more dark bluish-green in places, but otherwise good.
Astra, by Namek, is doomed to be blown up by Frieza. One of the smaller contestants, alongside the Shrike. Interesting design and nice use of diagonal lines. Nice use of open spaces, shields break up the lines a smidge.
Radiant Class Destroyer has an eye-searing paintjob by virtue of contrast. The frontal armor and rear sides bug me by being the only places to use thin lines instead of the tile + wide ones used elsewhere. The design is interesting in it's use of those scaffold-y thingimagijs that give it a secondary shape of sorts.
Bloodhound is red. Very red. The paintjob uses entirely shades of red. I like how it blends with the Ions. The design is interesting, and I think the two frontal tongs are the least interesting part of that. The lasar maw and side-spikes have interesting shapes while the nose is just kinda blobby with holes in it.
For my own entry...
... I forgot I was using modded decals, here's what it would've looked like, except with red paint in place of blue.
(Alternative name: Tastes Like Apple Pie)
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Hatter Thanks. Well, Chien Phuong's decal/paint has dual or triple purpose depending on how you look at it. On one hand it's appropriate for a bird with 4 sorts of feathers in paint (and 3 physically). One feather doubles as fire falling off combined with its icon and the burst ~fire paint. The outlying lines are appropriate for typical animal colored lines and also serve to represent extra long feathers unique (imagine asian phoenix) to this bird but this is probably not that visible in this current build. The budget extremely limited the choices in this build. I had to use corridor where there should be armor. Despite its looks and its weak armament it's strong in AI vs AI. 
Your design is very nice with good paint lines. The only combat design flaw that stands out are the frontally covered wing prisms which would become useless once the primary one is destroyed.
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Hatter I actually tried with white paint to get the rails to not stick out so much, but it didnt look like i wanted it to look. sure the rails do impact the visual quite a bit, but given that the real one also has white marks that stick out like lights in the darkness, i feel like its ok; as for the space, for some reason it wouldnt save with a space between the words, dunno why. i dont mind it really tho
your ship still has a good style without the colourmods, even it might be a different one, i like bothXD
Edit; the name is actually only because i didnt know what else i should name itXD i mostly just number my builds or use something that i heard just a sec before naming or that just came to my mind(later with this build), given that the build is more black than red it actually doesnt fit tooo well, but whatever. im better with building than with naming(if you have a better/more fitting name tell me, Memories might be able to change it if i like it as wellXD)
IVIemories Just out of curiosity, is there any particular reason my ship didn't make it? I'm not salty or anything, I just consider it the best I've made yet, and I'd like to know if there was any fatal flaw, so i can fix it next time.
Not any real reason other than nobody choose it. I can't speak for the other moderators but for me personally all the remaining ships were really good, so it was a tough choice.
CaptainRedstone I was wondering why mine wasn't here
I'm not too upset that QuadraStar didn't make it to voting - there were a NUMBER of design flaws I had left in there because I was too excited for the idea. One of the main ones was that despite this being a working ship, THE AI DOES NOT RECOGNIZE SELF-DESTRUCT MODULES. Or if it did, I did not set it up correctly. Something about control groups?
There was also a less-than-satisfying paint scheme and a basic shape. By itself it might have gotten lucky if one of the mods had taken an interest in star-shaped ships, but combine that with the above flaw, and it was just guaranteed to not make it. It also really sucked that I could not submit a new version of it to rectify the mistakes.
Moral of the story - Do not submit early, even if you are prone to forgetting to submit things. Chances are you are going to test your ship out and realize there are things you could improve.
always test before you do anything else with it, except saving, you might want to do that first(lost a few ships that wayXD)
IoBondrew You could always check your lost ships folder
RandomCommander Moral of the story - Do not submit early, even if you are prone to forgetting to submit things. Chances are you are going to test your ship out and realize there are things you could improve.
Alternatively submit rev 7 of a design right when the contest opens. :-P
I haven't found the easy way to setup AI vs AI battles so I don't know how well the AI will handle it, but Maw's 'Octal Maw' rail-gun array is glorious to watch in action. Two crushing alpha-strikes, then sustained random fire at 1.5-2 meteors per second. A bit of a glass cannon though, Easy to loose half the array to concentrated counter-fire if you get too close... (I swear that the guns chain 'splode diagonally at times)
I'm much more of a builder than a painter, But I think it's best to keep base color of Maw black so the other paint pops. (Even if it does make the engines and rail-guns stand out.) I also like the simple design, as I find the more psychedelic paint schemes jarring. Still plenty of room for improvement. For instance, I wanted to give Maw laser eyes instead of laser nostrils but the clear space in front of shields has stumped me so far...
botlawson Alternatively submit rev 7 of a design right when the contest opens. :-P
Huh. You would think that would be disallowed somehow, but I don't think I see such a constraint on the original design contest thread for this year!
Splendid, I'll just make a folder for Design Contests Only and just make a few ships for certain themes and/or the inclusion in Bounty Hunter! That will at least keep my interest in Cosmoteer longer should I fail to find anything else about it interesting (which it keeps being interesting for me, so that's unlikely).
CaptainRedstone usually its there, but sometimes it wont save the lost ship so i loose it. happened only a few times, and mostly to proof of concepts anyway, so i saw what i built it for and didnt realy need the ship anyway after
7 days later
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Congratulations to @Equalizer for winning the design contest with his ship the Ardama
Second place goes to the Crystal Angel by Mr Zig Zag
Third place is tied between the Red Baron by @IoBondrew and Astra by @Namek (both ships will enter bounty hunter)
IVIemories unstickied the discussion.
Good to see the Astra getting in! Next time I'm gonna have to make a better ship...