Just for fun, I decided to see if I could come up with good designs for some of the other fighters we hear about in Action Stations, but never get to see. This is my take on a few of the Confed's ancient fighters.
These fighters definitely look like the predecessors to the more familiar ones--you can see the similarities in shape. However, I do believe that the Hurricane was supposed to mount a single gun instead of two?
Don't have Action Stations. Were the fighters really pre-cursors to the Hornet, Scimitar, Raptor and Hellcat?
thats pretty good, thought they look more like stylized Scimitars, Hellcats, Rapiers and Hornets to me. the Gotha is pretty good, I dont recognize what its descendant might be from first looks
well.. the kilrathi did steal a heavy fighter design from us who's to say they didn't model the kamekh after an ancient terran fighter. I'll probably flesh out those designs a lot more.. I just wanted to keep them simple for now.
When I first read AS, I pictured the Hurricane as something that looked like the Rapiers from the Movie. I never saw the movie at that time.
Loaf was saying something similar on IRC earlier. I may see about some redesigns. at least for the hurricane
I know! that's probably my favorite of the bunch. The Falcon's interesting too - but I was under the impression that it was a much larger ship? Still - interesting takes all around!
I like the art here - clean and simple. The designs I don't know about - they *look* nice, but also much too close to the original inspiration. Considering what a difference of twenty years makes, it's very strange to think that ships from a hundred years earlier would look virtually identical to those from the modern era. The Gotha is lovely, though, like a classic space rocket, although given its origins I guess the aerodynamics are questionable (isn't it originally a surface-to-space bomber?) I'd give it much longer wings, like a WWI bomber (which might also help accentuate the age of the ship).
The Gotha doesn't strike me as something WC-ish... while the other three are *too* WC-ish. The Gladiator is just perfect though. It's got Hellcat, Venture, and Scimitar, and in the right amounts. It's brilliant.
Those fighters look awesome for the most part! I can definitely see the transitions to the later ships. One piece of constructive criticism? You might consider putting a little more work into the Wildcat, it honestly just looks like a sort of cartoony picture of the Hellcat V.
I would have to agree with the consensus. The art is beautiful. However, they could use a little more break from the designs they're based on. Possibly alternate engine arrangements, different tail setups?
On the other hand, the USN WW2 fighters the WC fighters are named after (F4F Wildcat and F6F Hellcat) appear similar to one another, so from a stylistic viewpoint making the two WC craft look similar isn't totally "out there".
True, though the F6F Hellcat was barely two years following the Wildcat's development and deployment; one might expect more of a difference between Confed's fighters, which, one gathers, had somewhat longer a span between the two of them. Do we have much canonical development history on either fighter? The Wildcat of course appears because Forschten couldn't get AWAY from the "WW2 in Space" meme, and so every fighter that deployed was named after the ones at Midway in that book. (Have I mentioned I loathe Forschten's slavish, obsessive devotion to the meme to the extent it impacted his writing in later books?)
