Realism in Equipment Design

[Sword Brother Adelard]

I think I lean more towards Apologist's view of what the pure STC system could do, than it just being a series of templates. The purest form could create new templates.

[Magos Takatus]

The loss of creativity then comes from the fact that none of you are musicians, nobody knows how to make instruments and play them and even if you did, none of you have sacrificed tens of thousands of hours to practice and none of you are familiar with enough actual proper music to have musical ideas of your own. Those ideas are also heavily discouraged, to the point of creativy = death, because the last time you had ideas *we got Avril Lavigne's cover of Fuel*

 

You will not create. You will only recreate and only in the framework that has already been provided.

 

You're no painters, in the 41st Millenium there are only colouring books.

I love this Metallica analogy. I had to edit your post slightly for comedic purposes. I hope you don't mind. :D

[Helias_Tancred]

The fact a Stormraven flies is all that needs to be said on this topic ;)

[gideon stargreave]

The fact a Stormraven flies is all that needs to be said on this topic ;)

Indeed, as others have pointed out. It is Much more important that it looks like a Space Marine vehicle than that it looks like it could fly.

[War of the Eagle]

So I think WH30-40k STC tank design is basicaly building tanks like you would in the game "Crossout".

 

Each STC is a peice of equipment and using an interface you can smoosh your peices together into a semi-working contraption. Each STC found is another part you can use in your smooshing process.

 

Find an STC for Sicarin tracks but bigger with a better load capacity? Quick slap armor and gun parts till the interface says you've reached your load limit and you get a Kratos. Have any ideas about armor slopes? Maybe but you haven't unlocked the sloped front armor part yet so heck with it.

 

Now imagine your biggest and best loadout you made in Crossout and you saved it to share with other forge worlds in the puplic library and you named it the baneblade. Now imagine the crossout interface bearly works and any loadout take 1000s of years to get approved by the devs to post in the loadout library so new players say heck with it and try making their own based of seeing a baneblade in a match but not having all the parts unlocked and not knowing the exact way it was smooshed together and you get the Macharius.

Edited May 29, 2022 by War of the Eagle

[Magos Takatus]

Nice explanation. Especially since it uses Crossout for an example. I liked spending ages messing about with that game even if I didn't get that far into it.

[Evil Eye]

[incoming aircraft rant from former plane museum guide)

 

You know that does have me wondering, what's the consensus on doing decent Imperial aircraft without them A: turning into bricks with wings or B: just looking like IRL jets with aquilas? There are good looking ones, but they're mostly Forge World (some sadly OOP). The Arvus Lighter is a lovely thing but that's a small transport shuttle, not a fighter aircraft, and the Marauder gets away with its chunkiness by virtue of being a heavy bomber and thus managing to make the lumbering blocky shape work to its advantage (it doesn't have to do anything especially fancy flightwise, so even as ludicrous as its aerodynamics are, it still looks right). In terms of things you can imagine doing dogfighting, evasive maneuvers, or uh, any kind of maneuvers for that matter, the list is pretty small. Probably my favourite plastic Imperial flyer is the Valkyrie (also one of the first), which also has the advantage of being the weird spawn of a Huey and a Harrier in terms of function (jet powered VTOL/hover capabilities, troop transport and gun platform etc). The other plastic Imperial flyers run the gamut from passable with conversion (Stormhawk/Stormtalon) to GOOD LORD WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THERE (Space Wolf thing).

 

In terms of Forge World, you have the Vulture, which looks awesome, but unfortunately falls afoul of being a highly detailed resin conversion kit for the regular Valkyrie because it becomes very painfully apparent on close inspection it is literally just an enormous engine with the fuselage of a Valkyrie bolted onto it. Like, there's no room for avionics, fuel tanks, or really anything else that would actually make the thing work because it managed the dubious honour of outdoing the MiG-25 Foxbat in the "Engines with wings and a cockpit" department. And the realistic, convincing engine tech sculpting makes that even more apparent because there's no way of excusing it as having miscellaneous techno-greebles which could be anything; it is obviously just a colossal turbojet.

 

 

A very cool turbojet admittedly.

 

Then there's the Avenger, which I am quite fond of; the gatling gun is a bit silly, but otherwise it's pretty much right for a ground attack plane produced by the Imperium. The exposed engine details, whilst a bit daft from a realism point of view, certainly fit with the industrial and decrepit look of 40K tech, and isn't completely ridiculous. The shape overall I'm actually very fond of, reminds me a bit of a Stuka.

 

 

 

A tragic loss of the older FW catalogue IMO is the Lightning, which in addition to borrowing the name of one of my absolute favourite jets (the English Electric Lightning) manages to get the look down of a high-speed fighter aircraft whilst also adding a rather nice art-deco look. Seriously, this thing is beautiful.

 

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2BVSCH8IxvI/UTtbnaFQVrI/AAAAAAAADoc/2PbiCCKKy3k/s1600/DSC03850.jpg

 

I'm not quite sure what the nose turbines are for, possibly cooling systems for the rocket motor(!) on the tail. Either way, very cool.

 

Alas, the successor, the Voss pattern, is a bit...blocky.

 

 

Whilst not terrible, it doesn't have (IMO) anywhere near the same level of appeal as the original.

 

Forge World also gave us the Xiphon Interceptor, which I have to be honest, I'm not entirely sure what to make of. It's certainly leagues ahead of any plastic Astartes planes but that's really not saying much. Almost has a Studio AIC/Artmic vibe to it, which as cool as that is seems odd for 40K. I feel like this paintjob isn't really selling it though. Space Marine colours on aircraft seem to make them look very toyish, which isn't a good thing when the designs are already a bit farfetched (those flat leading edges on the wings, oh me oh my)...

 

 

 

There are of course a few others but we'd be here all day if I went over them all. So we won't. I will briefly mention a few others though- the Thunderbolt is one of the earliest designs and it really shows IMO, being rather unrefined and a bit too blocky for my tastes. The Aquila Lander is absurd but entertainingly so. The Thunderhawk, I'll be real, I've always found a bit daft, which is odd as the Storm Eagle and Fire Raptor are oddly aesthetically pleasing to me.

 

The thing I've noticed about these is that none of them have a truly unified look. Whilst not an inherently bad thing- variety is the spice of life, and the many forge worlds out there presumably do produce things to differing specifications- it does make me wonder how, if GW were to bring over the Imperial Navy range to plastic with a common design language, they would turn out. Would they come out looking curvier, like the original Lightning and like a lot of Cold War jets? Would they be more akin to the Avenger, with the more angular, utilitarian look? Would they go full Thunderbolt and make a fleet of jet-propelled sledgehammers?

 

Personally I'd actually be interested to see more curved designs- not just because they make things look like they might actually be able to fly, but also because it could actually tie in really well thematically with 40K design language. 40K has always drawn on "transition periods" for technology, mostly interwar but also cold war, and both produced some really interesting, and occasionally bizarre, designs, often with an emphasis on streamlined, curved shapes. In the case of the real world this was because we realized fairly quickly that blocks don't fly very well (and promptly forgot about this when stealth became a thing, to the point where modern aircraft are literally unflyable without complex computer assistance), and aircraft development went through two massive growth spurts- the monoplane era of the 20s-30s and the jet age of the 50s. In 40K of course, with technology being barely understood, they might produce curved fuselages because "Well, the Scrolls of the Protocol Aerodynamica says that curves fly better, so if we put some rounded fairings on this irregularly shaped lump it must fly!" in an oddly Orky manner. I'd even apply this to Space Marine aircraft- their power armour is very curvy after all, so it's not like they're allergic to curves...

 

As a side note, in WW1 pilots often had their aircraft blessed by priests before sorties, which would probably make the Ecclesiarchy very happy.

[BitsHammer]

I just want to say the Avenger Strike Fighter is my favorite of the FW aircraft and I usually think of it as 40k's answer to the A-10.

[Closet Skeleton]

So I think WH30-40k STC tank design is basicaly building tanks like you would in the game "Crossout".

 

Each STC is a peice of equipment and using an interface you can smoosh your peices together into a semi-working contraption. Each STC found is another part you can use in your smooshing process.

 

Find an STC for Sicarin tracks but bigger with a better load capacity? Quick slap armor and gun parts till the interface says you've reached your load limit and you get a Kratos. Have any ideas about armor slopes? Maybe but you haven't unlocked the sloped front armor part yet so heck with it.

 

Now imagine your biggest and best loadout you made in Crossout and you saved it to share with other forge worlds in the puplic library and you named it the baneblade. Now imagine the crossout interface bearly works and any loadout take 1000s of years to get approved by the devs to post in the loadout library so new players say heck with it and try making their own based of seeing a baneblade in a match but not having all the parts unlocked and not knowing the exact way it was smooshed together and you get the Macharius.

 

I think you're confusing the original Dark Age of Technology STCs with the Admech's STCs. There's no interface or any form of machine aid for vehicle and equipment design during the period of the Imperium. All design will be done by hand using bits of paper and then maybe carved from wood.

 

More like you want to be playing Crossout but all you have is a jigsaw puzzle from a charity shop that came in the wrong box.

[Claws and Effect]

I've always maintained that the equipment the Imperium uses was largely created by people who were looking at blueprints for things with no understanding of what they were actually looking at. And also no understanding of which sets of blueprints were supposed to go together and which ones weren't.

 

The Leman Russ: Some Techpriest somewhere found incomplete STCs for both a bulldozer and a battle tank and drew the incorrect conclusion that they were both part of the same STC.

 

The Chainsword: Probably a design for a chainsaw meant for colonizers that was more compact in order to take up less space. Keep in mind that neither Terra or Mars have trees and haven't for a very long time. A chainsaw would look like a weapon to someone who has never seen a tree before.

 

Essentially, the main reason 30k and 40k vehicles and equipment looks so horribly impractical is because it was created by people who didn't understand what it was actually supposed to be.

[War of the Eagle]

I think you're confusing the original Dark Age of Technology STCs with the Admech's STCs. There's no interface or any form of machine aid for vehicle and equipment design during the period of the Imperium. All design will be done by hand using bits of paper and then maybe carved from wood.

 

More like you want to be playing Crossout but all you have is a jigsaw puzzle from a charity shop that came in the wrong box.

Well I was using the game interface to help with the sake of the description of smooshing parts together. The idea of working with an amalgamation of parts to build something is still how i believe it likely works. You have a list of approved engions, guns, gunmounts, chassis, turrets, ect. If your combining them with wooden mock ups or on paper, the similarity to "crossout" is still there.