Lynx said:
I don't like it. It looks too much like a bird.
I agree that it's too bird-like... that's too "in-your-face" a reference for me, it kinda puts me off the whole thing. I'd go "Oh, right, Firekkans are BIRDS! Good thinking, man!" whenever I saw it in a game.
Lynx said:
If they Firekkans would ever build their own ships, they'd be kind of low-tech since they have almost no infrastructure, so it'd probably look edgy and simple.
Edgy and simple... man, let go of your WC3 addiction.
If EA only had kept working on WC for another year or two, the Firekkan ships we see in the WCO sketches might have been truly canon (as opposed to "unreleased canon"), but they're still the closest thing to a Firekkan ship we've ever seen.
They kinda followed the same basic principles that Vermin used in his model, except without blowing them out of proportion: they had long and thin wings, sleek noses/cockpits which resembled beaks in shape, minimalistic engines, a fragile look overall, and reasonably simple layouts that subtly resembled birds (small body with internal engines + 2 or 3 big wings).
Granted, WCO would take place a few decades after Confed's first contact with the Firekkans, but I think that due to their nature and lack of technical prowess in the field it's reasonable to believe there wouldn't have been any major advances in Firekkan spaceship design from, say, 2660 to 2680. They'd probably get technology from Confed (at least for the duration of their affiliation to Confed), but I don't think their design philosophies would evolve much.
IMHO Vermin started from a very good concept but just got a bit carried away.