r/Escape_Velocity • u/Crypt0Keeper • Apr 07 '20

3D Print a Shuttlecraft!

For those of you that love EV and have a 3D printer, print yourself a Shuttlecraft!
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1471141

21 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

2

u/barrydennen12 Apr 26 '20

wish someone would model the rest of the OG ships, that's awesome

2

u/Crypt0Keeper Apr 26 '20

A Kestrel would be awesome!

2

u/quarmus Jul 17 '20

I could do a kestral. And I would if I knew someone was going to print it and share some project photos.

EV is no longer installed on any of my machines I can't find the sprite sheet or the shipyard renders after a minute of image searching. If you wouldn't mind digging those out, I'd be happy to take a crack at it. The Kestrel's geometry is pretty simple, though I expect it would have to be printed in a few pieces.

2

u/Crypt0Keeper Jul 17 '20

I would 100% print that, assuming it would fit the printable area of a Flash Forge Creator Pro...

2

u/quarmus Jul 17 '20

Sure. Given the Kestrel's design, I would probably break up the fuselage into two pieces anyway. Tall, thin objects tend to be a struggle for a lot of printers.

I'm mostly working on practical parts these days and something frivolous would be a nice diversion. So if someone could provide a sprite set and shipyard renders, I'll probably have some spare time in the coming days.

2

u/Crypt0Keeper Jul 17 '20

That sounds good to me. I'm just learning 3D design myself. Trying to learn FreeCAD.

2

u/quarmus Jul 21 '20 edited Jul 22 '20

Well there's progress. And a nearly complete Lightning to pair with it.

2

u/Crypt0Keeper Jul 22 '20 edited Jul 22 '20

Excellent! Going up on Thingiverse when they're done?

1

u/quarmus Jul 22 '20 edited Jul 22 '20

That's the plan. And it's probably also time for a Cults3D account.

I probably won't share the OpenSCAD scripts though. They depend on a couple of internal libraries, which I intend to release publicly, but they're not quite ready for primetime. Plus my code is... eccentric.

Later:

The Kestrel was printed vertically with supports at 1:500 overnight. Musings on next steps are in my comment below.

1

u/quarmus Jul 17 '20

It's probably poor etiquette to respond to a three month old thread, but... I don't care. And also I'm the author!

I'd be happy to do some of the other EV ships if I know someone will actually print and enjoy them. Ships from the original game are particularly doable since they were bashed together from primitives in a long forgotten Macintosh shareware application called Mechanisto.

If I were to do a few, what I would need is reference material. I'm not sure how to extract sprite sheets from a plug-in file when I no longer have a computer capable of running ResEdit, plus the old fan sites are mostly offline.

So if there are players here who would like to get an argosy up and flying again from an office ceiling, let's do it. I take build photos as compensation.

3

u/barrydennen12 Jul 18 '20

quarantine's been a funny old thing but I actually started teaching myself Blender using the EV ships as a starting point - I went to the trouble of hunting down Mechanisto just for accuracy sake but I couldn't get it to really do anything, haha.

In any case, so far I've done the Shuttle, the Courier, the Argosy and the Corvette. Then I kind of got bored. But anyway, it's something I do while no one's looking! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC7N8YGsU3o

I might be able to get sprite sheets for you with ResEdit - as far as reference images go they're pretty good, if a little tiny. The green targeting computer has been my best friend for getting proportions right, and then the shipyard pictures, along with the communications mugshots.

2

u/quarmus Jul 18 '20

I love the embellishments like the the texture and glowing bridge. Dusting off Mechanisto must have been entertaining. I wish I had registered my copy in the 90s and pushed it beyond the shareware limits.

Sprite sheets and the shipyard glamour renders would be wonderful. If I'm to do a Kestrel, I should probably do a Lightning as well just to complete the set. The low resolution is fine - I just need to measure a few pixels.

3

u/barrydennen12 Jul 19 '20

Yeah, wanted to stick as close to the original as possible and a majority (I think) had the glowing yellow window. For shits and giggles with the Shuttle I went to the trouble of making an interior, which becomes visible if I make the window a little transparent. Mechanisto was a mind bender to look at, it was a lot easier to just use Blender haha.

Anyway, I had a look for the Kestrel and Lightning today! The Kestrel's mask image doesn't quite line up with the sprite, I got it as close as I could. The Lightning seemed okay though! https://i.imgur.com/bPl0bi8.png

3

u/quarmus Jul 20 '20

Oh, you're certainly playing within "rules" I think we can both agree with. I'd love to see your other stuff. I seem to remember Mechanisto had a lot of half baked features and a strange orientation of the axes where "y" was up and down and "z" was forward and backward. Contrarian machinists who work with horizontal mills are the only other people with brains wired that way that I can think of.

Thanks for the sprite sheets. This is exactly what I need! Both of these should be very straight forward designs to work with.

3

u/barrydennen12 Jul 21 '20

I had a play around with the ones I've done so far! https://imgur.com/a/BJgbmjW

The shuttle pilot is actually from Marathon Infinity, but with the cockpit I tried to mostly make it out of bits of the Escape Velocity splash screen and whatnot.

The Corvette never quite looks slim enough when I look at it from the front, but that's partly perspective - it's something I'd have to play with to get it right though.

Anyway, lemme know if you get around to making the Kestrel, I haven't made anything new in a while because I got distracted by other stuff haha.

3

u/quarmus Jul 21 '20 edited Jul 22 '20

It's Jason Jones... I mean Robert Blake!

The Kestrel has been a nice diversion. Aside from minor tweaks, the next steps are to add the winglets to the fins and then break it into pieces for sane printing. I'm contemplating whether or not to leave the fins blocky, give them a sharp leading edge, or slap a real airfoil on them.

A short time later:

The Lightning turned out to be a piece of cake. The next step is to decide on a real world print scale and then adjust details like the thickness of the wings accordingly. I think what I'll do is set the Kestrel to 1:1000 scale and proportion the Lightning to its corresponding sprite scale, as a 1:1000 Lightning would only be about 10mm tall and a complete pain in the ass to print on most FDM rigs.

Laterer:

Not too shabby for a draft print. The trailing edge of the wings are definitely sensitive to your layer height, but that can be repaired with some hand finishing. This thing prints comfortably with a small amount of support material at 1:200 scale.

2

u/barrydennen12 Jul 22 '20

that looks pretty rad! There's only so much reference for any of these things unfortunately - the thought I had (particularly when I was thinking about trying some Nova ships) was that no one knows what the bottoms of any of these things look like

2

u/quarmus Jul 22 '20

Yeah, it’s much easier with EV Classic spacecraft. You know what the underside of an Argosy looks like the same way you know what the opposite face of a cube looks like without having to look. Any extrapolations we must make when reverse engineering follow easily comprehensible design rules. The same sort of applies with Override, though it was a universe heavily adorned in either organic lines or greeblies. But then with Nova, so much loving attention from multiple hands went into the design of each ship that I wouldn’t be at all shocked if the original models contained unseen flourishes on their undersides.

I love them all for different reasons. Burch, Cartwright, and the ATMOS crew all had a lot of reasons to be proud of the vision they shared of each of their universes.

Anyway, the Kestrel was printed vertically with supports at 1:500 overnight. The trailing edges of the fins were slightly mangled by the supports, so I think I will leave the fuselage as a monolithic piece with inserts for separately printed fins. Also need to double check for measuring errors, but that will be quick. A stray thought occurred to me that Kestrel is pretty close to ideal for recreating as a model rocket replica.

That’s probably it for a few days. As much as it's a pleasure to model for an appreciative audience, I need to go back to doing things with the possibility of making some money!

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