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Hello (person who is reading this), I will tell you some good design choices you can do for your ship and give you examples. 2 big rules are:

1: NEVER BUILD BRICKS - Yes, even for battlestations. To put it simply, they don't look nice. They can be used as "dummy" test ships (Weapons Tests, how strong your ship is* ect.)

2:DON'T BUILD TOO BIG - If you do this with weaker/older computers (or just have non-gamng laptops), this could prevent you from finishing your build.

There is an unoffical rule for people like me, and that is:

NEVER USE LOTS OF MODS OR OUTDATED MODS - This prevents people from using your ships without download Mega-to-Gygabytes of data, or just having to go back versions of the game.

Anywho, lets get on with asethic ship-building!

First Steps

1. Ideas to the Build Screen

When building your ship, please note some sort of design you want to create. If you want to make a ship from a movie or game series that is scaled as close as the game will let you, look up top-down views of the ship. Next, see if there parts that you can use in-game to build the ship. But remember, you have to take liberties with some ships. A ship cannot be the size of a planet without some consequences to your computer. If you cannot find the parts you like, try out a mod for that series. Afterwards, try to build that ship again with the mod's parts. Lets say you want to build an ISD, but there are no parts that have turbolasers. You look around on the forum and SW:ACD is a good mod all-round for Star Wars. You've now built your ship! Lets see if we can update it.

Fixing Problems

For design, please note you can OVER-Compensate. Yes, you can have generators as a poorman's lighting system, but your ship cannot be a power-generating machine without blowing up like a firework. With Cosmoteer, Having the bare-minimum with extras is better then Over-compensating most of the time.
For example: Lets say you wanna build a nicely built dreadnought, but you want it to be heavily gunned. You've got 3 Options.

  1. You under-compensate with your guns and is frail as an egg.

  2. You make the ship able to support a nice design, but your guns and armor just compensate for your taste in both.

  3. You over-compensate your ship with guns and armor, thus making your nice design uselessly bulky and is horribly Eye-catching like a Terrible RPer.

2. Finishing the Build

Painting

Unless for RP reasons, there is no other reason to NOT Paint your ship. It makes it feel.. uncomplete. Also, make your paint job one of two things to not make it look wrong or just.. plain.

  1. Use Colors that work well together ( Burgandy with Black makes for more menacing colors, white with lighter blues for example.)

  2. Don't use primary colors together. I don't mean don't use those colors at all, I mean Don't use them at the same time. Red, Yellow, Blue, don't look good with each other.

*If the ship can push the block without much effort, it's design is powerful engine wise. If it isn't, you may need to upgrade your engines' format for better speed and manvuerability.

BattleCruiserCommander 2 things: red yellow and blue can work quite good, I have to say so myself.
The other thing... Realisticly speak8ng Blocks of ships, are the most realistic part of a combat space ship... As there are no reason to keep it airodinamic, and other more complicted reasons I will not go into.
The reason to not build a brick like ships is simple.... Its not good looking... I think that what you should have said there, it would make more sence.

      Stormi_chan Well I meant the base colors unfaded or mixed. I didn't include fading and such since it's harder to explain, at least for me.

          BattleCruiserCommander

          I have some problems with this guide myself, so in the coming days I will write quite a post adressing all problems.

              The problem with this guide is it's not a real guide. It's more a collection of partially random & obvious ideas that often also go off-topic. A guide has to offer insight beyond the obvious and come with explanation of the same. The topic is an art topic but nowhere does it addresses art.

                Lafiel BattleCruiserCommander

                Now I have 2 options, critisize this whole guide, even tho it would never really grow into a guide, only if Commander really puts effort in it.

                Or I can make my own guide, but I find that option... A bit less nice, since Commander already put time, perhaps not much, on this one.

                      Namek There's too much to address. It's better to relabel, rename and turn this into a discussion. Honestly, I think at the minimum this article needs to be at least 10-20x longer just to cover the basics. I think you could even write a book and still not done. Painting alone is worth a topic of its own for example.

                      You could do it just like how I organized things on the wiki and call a guide like : "Namek's guide on aesthetic building" that way it's your opinion on the topic and not an all encompassing universal compendium. After all this has something to do with taste and taste is not universal.

                          Lafiel Maybe I should look into it, as Im a graphic disighner, and paint quite well I think... You can ask drak if you want we did some builds together.
                          And you are correct, painting ships is a lot toy need to considers.

                              Stormi_chan That would be great.
                              The problem is we got a huge topic, yet, obviously a lot of people expect something quick and easy.
                              So everything written needs to be summarized into simpler form. The art examples can't be made simple. They could be reduced to the most basic form, though. It's gonna be difficult. All these require a lot of time and effort to do. It's probably best to divide into sub topics and work off each one.

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