Behind the Scenes

posted on December 5th, 2010, 4:45 am

That ship looks rad!  You guys are so awesome.    Thanks for the sweet early Christmas present, just in time for the week long Christmas/new year LAN party!! 

posted on December 5th, 2010, 5:21 am

Sweet!

posted on December 5th, 2010, 5:34 am

I love the look of the new ship i also like the way that the shot was presented. I dig the in universe presentation and i hope that you guys will consider doing more reports and pictures this way in the future

Starfleet Intelligence hmm.

posted on December 5th, 2010, 10:38 am

And still the designs differ quite a lot. It's like with Starfleet vessels where almost any ship has a saucer, two nacelles and a primary hull. Same elements but each design has its own basic arrangement and / or some extras like a third nacelle or a pod.

A Nebula and a Galaxy do look different although they share the same components. Feel the difference?

a defiant and an excel look nothing alike, there is a differnce.

but a leahval and a generix and a norexan all look similar. green, have wings, have a neck with a head. romulans ships do tend to look alike, and this is fine by me cos that is romulan style.

posted on December 5th, 2010, 11:28 am

a defiant and an excel look nothing alike, there is a differnce.

but a leahval and a generix and a norexan all look similar. green, have wings, have a neck with a head. romulans ships do tend to look alike, and this is fine by me cos that is romulan style.

Why do you mention the Defiant when I already told "almost all starfleet vessels have a saucer and stuff". Defiant counts within the few exceptions which should be self-explaining....
I can only see your point when someone tries to simplify design questions... but I don't and difference even between similar designs or designs which share the same basic elements is still difference and nothing like "equal". The ship in the shot still looks most similar to a Generix and not like a Leahval just because it has wings.

posted on December 5th, 2010, 12:07 pm

i mentioned the defiant to point out how different ships can look.

the remore looks vastly different to a new orleans.

the akira looks different from the galaxy.

starfleet has diverse ships.

the romulan fleet doesnt really, they have a unified design idea. the leahval is one of the more distinctive ships, but it isnt that differnt, wings, and a neck with a head.

posted on December 5th, 2010, 4:43 pm

Hehe. Nice!

I know what my new desktop background will be.

posted on December 5th, 2010, 4:47 pm

It doesn't help that "almost all starfleet vessels have a saucer and stuff" doesn't cover much. Every era has a style little to nothing like previous ones, and even ones from the same era have little in common.

posted on December 5th, 2010, 4:51 pm

Why do you mention the Defiant when I already told "almost all starfleet vessels have a saucer and stuff". Defiant counts within the few exceptions which should be self-explaining....

Welcome to arguing on the forums, where your post won't actually be read, but will somehow be fully responded to.

posted on December 5th, 2010, 5:01 pm

Hey Optec,

I like the design to be honest the design is 80% there for me. The top layer of wings are still a bit off for me. From what I can see of the ship it looks like a Valdore modification.

The best deigned ships from what I have seen each part of the ship had a resin why its there I can not tell at this point why it had the top layer.

Example.
Lets say the wings opened in a fight displaying a rack of disrupters that would make sense, if the ship lands on a planet its wings let it fly in air or may be they are a add on for extra cew/storge/upgrade space.

What a busy week!
The 3.1.4 patch was released quite unexpected - even for the development team! In the past, we followed a more content-oriented release strategy, which made every update more or less a small expansion pack: a lot of content, but a large time between the patches. As our multiplayer community continues to grow, we feel the urge to react on smaller bugs and balancing issues faster, which requires more frequent patches with adjustments but less content. So we decided to change our release strategy accordingly, in order to support the community as good as possible.
But that caused a hell of work, as we had to remove the work-in-progress Borg faction redo and restore the 3.1.3 Borg. It also requires to wrap up balancing testing in smaller units and design content updates to make them releasable in smaller packages - which is especially difficult for large-scale changes like the faction redo. Yet, we are confident to master this challenge.
The more frequent patches do also offer new opportunities to us: Delivering small pieces of content, like new Veteran abilities, with every patch. Discovering new stuff is half the fun of a game!

So, what's next on the chopping block? At the moment, we are working on multiple fronts. The most important is probably the Borg faction redo. We are redoing most of the Borg gameplay and implementing their "next generation" features, like expanding Borg space, a more Uni-Matrix feeling, the must-have assimilation and adaption, in order to make them feel as close to the shows (at least the good ones ) as possible. The faction redo can't be split into several parts to be released in smaller patches. We can't just change, let's say, the way collective features work, without also adjusting the vessels they apply to. That's why the faction redo will be developed "in the background" throughout the next patches and released once it is done. Other features, like the new veteran abilities or a complete new way of how mixed-tech works (more about that in one of the next blog posts) are easily separated from faction redos or other changes and will tickle in with the next patches.
You are not a Borg fan? Do you feel like the next patches won't bring any candy to you? You don't have too! Unlike the Borg faction redo - which is a rather fundamental change - many small changes and features of the redos of other factions were separated into independent content upgrades and will be released as soon as their development is finished in one of the more frequent patches. There are, for example, disturbing reports of new Romulan development to reach the battlefield any moment!



We are looking forward to see where the next patches will lead us. After all, the Fleet Operations "soon" might finally get a little closer to the real-world "soon"!

posted on December 5th, 2010, 5:29 pm

lol there is no way a starship could rely on lift from its wings to fly. unless it was flying ridiculously fast.

the best it could hope for would be better performance in atmosphere, but that sounds like something for a fighter to do.

posted on December 5th, 2010, 5:34 pm

From what I can read of the SFI files, it appears to be a much smaller starship compared to the Norexan Warbird. The design itself even appears to be older than the Norexan blueprints. Might be the first starship prototype deploying a new Romulan construction framework, which only got into regular production lately.

Now the question remains, why do they even push heavily armed strike cruisers in their production program, where everybody else is busy recovering from the Dominion War. We are friends now, after all!

posted on December 5th, 2010, 5:46 pm

Thanks for the update, Optec .  Always much appreciated 

posted on December 5th, 2010, 6:06 pm

ooo thanks optec. a heavily armed strike cruiser. maybe something designed purely for harassment.

posted on December 6th, 2010, 8:21 pm

This is going to be fun!