Way back when, there was an article about Starports in Traveller titled „Happy Landings“ by Thomas M. Price, published in White Dwarf magazine. It featured quite a few nice details about the layout of typical starports and also set the perspective of scale to another magnitude. A few days ago, I decided to create these starport types in Blender for potential future use in a 3D animation or just for reference.

Class E Starport

I started with the most simple installation, the Class E starport. This one comes in two variants. One with and one without an adjacent Scout Base. The first and second preview renders show both versions. You can see the circular shape of the scout base in the distance in the second picture.

Class D Starport

Then, based on the models created for the Class E, I started assembling a Class D starport, which also adds a startown to the concept. There also is a scout base shown in the distance. The whole port including it’s startown is circumfenced, as both – starport and startown – are under imperial jurisdiction and thus extrateritorial land on any planet. The port itself is also separated from the startown, to prevent civilians and drunken sailors alike roaming the installation. Being somewhat larger, the Class D port also features more Parking Bays.

Class C Starport

Based on that Class D starport mock-up, the Class C was created, adding more parking bays and pads, as well as a larger startown.

Class B Starport

Again based on the previous effort, this installation already shows size. Featuring two Landing Fields, connected by expansive Taxiways, that also lead to as many as 20 Parking Bays – not counting the Scout Base shown in the distance. The Startown again grew to about twice the size of the next lower Starport Class and the Support installations between the Landing Fields boast numerous Repair Hangars, Warehouses and Storage Facilities. The Size of the circumfenced area is aproximately 6 by 11 kilometres (for comparison: the runway portion of the landing field is aproximately 1 kilometre wide, with a total length of 5 kilometres (including the landing pad on one end).

If time permits me to do so, I will try to assemble a Class A starport next week. More renders will follow, as I plan to improve the materials and texturing. Also in this process I will try to define individual components to be reused without the need of individual editing. I hope to be able to create various starport layouts using these common components later.

Class A Starport

This time the Class A Starport differs slightly from the „Happy Landings“ Article, featuring more Parking Bays and an enclosed Navy Base. The image shows an Installation capable of servicing close to 500 smaller starships (up to 1000 tons) in its 71 parking bays plus a few hundred on the three landing fields.

ToDo

I plan to refine the materials an texture details. The landing field an Runways are to get some basic markings showing the runway and parallel taxiways, as well as the landing pad and the parking positions on the field. The scale of most of the hangars is off. These need to be scaled upwareds by a factor of 2.5 to 5 depending on the model used. The other models are all in the same scale as my Traveller starships.

The Class A Starport devellopment is currently on hold. I will first split the starports into individual files (they are all in the same file currently), to bring down the polycount, as the Class A Starport boasts as many as 60+ Landing Bays, three Landing fields (one being a Navy Base), all the associated support infrastructure and a Startown even larger than adjacent to the Class B Starport.

Textures are either procedural, or based on textures from maxTextures. Except for a few buildings from „Utopia City Blocks“ (by Stonemason). Parts of the Startown are made with Scene City (though some changes were necessary to get the total count of tris from more than 75 million down to something manageable by my computer).

I stumbled over the „Happy Landings“ Article while cruising the web on my regular sites. The „Atomic Rockets“ section of Project Rho featured the Maps used to assemble the models.

Grab it while you can. I just topped up my Traveller eBook library with the available Bundles of Holding and from what you get – at less than 50 bucks – it’s very much worth the investment, I’d say (even though I already own GURPS Traveller 1E and Starports paperback editions).

GURPS Traveller Essentials Bundle of Holding contains:

STARTER COLLECTION

• GURPS Traveller 2E
• Starships
• First In
• Deck Plan 5: Sulieman-Class Scout/Courier

BONUS COLLECTION

• Behind the Claw
• Humaniti
• Starports
• Modular Cutter
• Deck Plan 2: Modular Cutter
• Deck Plan 1: Beowulf-Class Free Trader

GURPS Traveller Imperial Survey BoH contains:

STARTER COLLECTION

• Far Trader
• Alien Races 1
• Planetary Survey 3: Granicus
• Deck Plan 3: Empress Marava Far Trader

BONUS COLLECTION

• Alien Races 2
• Alien Races 3
• Alien Races 4
• Planetary Survey 1: Kamsii
• Planetary Survey 2: Denuli
• Planetary Survey 4: Glisten

How it works: The starter collections begin with attractive low prices, which can be topped off by paying more to get the bonus colletion included. The price raises over time depending on previous payments. A quick descision pays off.

I guess it was about time to register my own domain for the site. So when I installed the Jetpack-Plugin for WordPress and registered a dedicated wordpress.com user-account, they offered my to register the same as a full fledged domain: travellerillustrated.com

Nice, but I wanted that domain with my webspace provider of trust and registered it. So from now on we will also be available through http://travellerillustrated.com

Rosendal class Shuttle

The shuttle is a large interplanetary passenger and cargo vessel. This type of shuttle can operate between a port and an orbital facility fitted out to allow easy docking, but normally is used for interplanetary trade.

Now, there are several illustrations of Traveller shuttles and none of the deck plans that I am aware of actually show this particular craft as drawn by William H. Keith, Jr. for GDW’s Imperial Encyclopedia, but for me it is THE shuttle and so I went on to make a 3D model for my Frontier Transport.

This is what basically came out:

The craft can also be seen in the following images:

Rosendal Class 90ton Shuttle WIP

I have to declare my current system is not capable of rendering the scene prepared for the calendar. Due to memory allocation problems Blender crashes when processing a file with more than 1.4 GB on Win32. That is a limitation of the OS, not Blender.

So to ease my pain the last days have been busy to get a donated HP Proliant DL145 G2 Server up and running. The AMD64 Opteron 285 based machine runs on Debian 7 Wheezy 64 Bit with a MATE desktop environment, 8 GB of RAM and a number of services necessary for remote dealing with the beast. Another 8 GB of Ram went into the machine three days later (the latter being only borrowed form the donator of the machine) and so far she rocks…

Due to it’s age, performance comes at a certain cost: noise. Seven 5cm tubular ventilators sound like one hairdryer each and make an infernalistic noise that just prevents a human being to share the same room with the system at max performance. However it does successfully render the entire scene and is twice as fast as my aging workstation. So that makes the monster a necessity to live with. And never judge a gift horse by it’s teeth…

The inaugural run of the new RenderMachine went interestingly smooth with very nice speed and comfortable remote usage (it’s located in the next room and the noise is bearable with the connecting door closed).

The image below has a memory footprint of 6200+ MB and was rendered in 18 minutes and 30 seconds. My old machine usually made it through half the render process in 20 Minutes and then Blender crashed.

Final Image: “Meet the Lone Lady“

The image above shows the finished scene. Personally I like the dawn lighting and the washed out colors, als well as the contrast the Aero’s car paint provides. The first scene had Logos of most of the Traveller Megacorps. It looked really great. But I managed to delete all the SVG’s in one go and had to start over. Less is often more, so the Akerut logo boldly overlooks the starport. A tiny Bazar-Sign at the end of the landing field hints toward the existence of a startown. Well the cup of hot brewerage now has a smoke/steam effect too.

That’s about it, I’d say. Cheers.

Il’l keep ya posted!

Edit November 23rd, 2013: It’s done. I’ve submitted my donation to Ian and hope to get through the final descision making process. Thanks for taking a look.

Edit April 2nd, 2014: No calendar published this year. I must admit I’m a bit disappointed. However Ian – the editor and publisher – stated he was short a few images to fill the cal, so I guess we’ll have another chance next year.

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Community – The official Traveller Calendar 2014
Category: Community,Traveller — admin @ 14:21
Sep
13 2013