So, I've been working for quite a while (2-3 hours) and I came to a drawing that I am quite satisfied with. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you one of my final submissions, so please don't copy this par :P, you can use it as inspiration though!



Anyway, I present, the Automaton Destroyer (Culler), Equipped with two dust engine cores as well as a large surface area available for modification, this Automaton platform is ideally suited to be a cheap, but heavily armed attack ship capable of being bread by larger Automaton platforms in large numbers. Most of these ships begin life in atmosphere and are constructed by hundred-year-old Automaton platforms that quickly produce them in large numbers. As part of the Automaton culture, platforms which are to set out for war amongst the stars have a very special plant life introduced to them. This plant organism is able to feed on the energy produced by the dust drives, and survive in open space, growing within the Automaton platform, a reminder of what they are all fighting for.

I've actually never played Horatio before, so sorry if my stuff looks too much like it :P

Codename_Veers wrote:


You can see my finished work here: /#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/13112-automaton-ship-design-competition

Yes, as I stated at the beginning of my thread it is almost impossible to come up with a total unique concept. I hope though, that my finished drawings will look diffrent to the SW-Ships. ^^

Yea it's true...

Just going to post my Crusier here now. Kudos to Panzer since he inspired me to do a flat design, from the sideview it looks chunky but... its a flatter ship, trust me. Yes, it is similar to Panzer's design but mine is very different. On similarities it is flat, there is two cores, but one is hidden since it is sideways, just left of the main core.



Anyway here.



Sickle:



Tell me what you think, i worked on this from complete scratch, managed to portray the cityscape on the "roof" a little better. I must have spent a few hours on this, i think i started around 10:30pm. Couple of hours work.



Edit: I think flat/ platform is the way to go with automatons to be honest. Apart from my Dreadnought i have in mine, i just want that to look very tall/ huge. Very easy to do with big and chunky "plate mail" all over it.

Very nice work digital Hawk! I am glad you agree that the ships should be flat-ish and not gigantic flying Automaton head haha. Think about one thing though, the amount of detail you are putting into the pictures will be heavily wasted since the models will likely not be able to handle a mini city on top of them! Just something to think about, otherwise I like it Any thoughts on mine? I want to start the dread soon

Panzer wrote:
Very nice work digital Hawk! I am glad you agree that the ships should be flat-ish and not gigantic flying Automaton head haha. Think about one thing though, the amount of detail you are putting into the pictures will be heavily wasted since the models will likely not be able to handle a mini city on top of them! Just something to think about, otherwise I like it Any thoughts on mine? I want to start the dread soon

I want people to get a feel for the design, i know for a fact that the design will be fiddled with enough by Amplitude to fit in the game as a model. The "mini-city" would literally be little blocky bits and domes on the ship, nothing really intricate and fancy, rather than the impossible crowded skyscrapers with lots of lights for each and every Automaton living there, with a ton of detail and spinning cog wheels at ludicrous speeds. You could say im wasting my time with the detail, but i have no idea what to texture the ships with so i just made random shapes with a line to fill in the "dark" areas that will look a little blocky as well. I don't exactly have a gaming rig, i want to play as the Automatons in manual without suffering FPS death.

Digitalhawk96 wrote:
I want people to get a feel for the design, i know for a fact that the design will be fiddled with enough by Amplitude to fit in the game as a model. The "mini-city" would literally be little blocky bits and domes on the ship, nothing really intricate and fancy, rather than the impossible crowded skyscrapers with lots of lights for each and every Automaton living there, with a ton of detail and spinning cog wheels at ludicrous speeds. You could say im wasting my time with the detail, but i have no idea what to texture the ships with so i just made random shapes with a line to fill in the "dark" areas that will look a little blocky as well. I don't exactly have a gaming rig, i want to play as the Automatons in manual without suffering FPS death.

Yeah, I understand, but I cant relate since I have always had a top gaming rig. Still though, I'm glad you are so passionate about the Automatons! Good luck on the rest of your designs!

Panzer wrote:
Yeah, I understand, but I cant relate since I have always had a top gaming rig. Still though, I'm glad you are so passionate about the Automatons! Good luck on the rest of your designs!

As i have said, i have vision. Passion for the Automaton? Why yes, they play to my style of play perfectly. Their whole design is great, their actual affinity is just so good, especially when i figured out how to properly use it... now to master it i suppose.

I'm not sure if anyone said this before because I didn't read all of the thread. So sorry if I only repeat something.

But I think that the Automaton don't live on their planets but on their ships. So they should have lots of space for this reason.

Only wanted to say this. Maybe someone will think of it when drawing.

Lord_S wrote:
I'm not sure if anyone said this before because I didn't read all of the thread. So sorry if I only repeat something.

But I think that the Automaton don't live on their planets but on their ships. So they should have lots of space for this reason.

Only wanted to say this. Maybe someone will think of it when drawing.

I had thought of this when i was drawing, its just really hard to portray this without time to draw a top, bottom or an angled view. I have my last prelim to think about tomorrow, then i will have to do my other art project for a final piece, graphic design. Then i will get back to my ship drawings.

This is the Automaton Procreation Sphere - interstellar class colonization vessel. I wanted to have an ecologically clean, homogeneous, non-evil-borg look to their design. The Automaton settlers live in tightly packed sentience minimization chambers. These chambers are connected together to a hive mind cloud network that oversees the interstellar mission of the ship. Thrust is generated via a unidirectional anti-gravity emission cortex along the hemisphere. Defense systems are minimal, but include ablative hull armor around the settler units, and an automatic minimal power "sleep mode" that makes the ship appear to be little more than debris floating through space whenever an unknown vessel is detected.

Files:



Automatorn Procreator.zip

Since it looks like I'll be getting my sketches uploaded later than sooner, I may as well post some of my ideas before more submissions are posted that make mine look like I'm copying haha.



I am trying to make my concepts follow some basic guidelines which are:

-Have a silhouette that will be unique to make them easily identifiable when in the galaxy-view (such as any other race's ship is easily identifiable from it's silhouette.. we,, Shopons and Pilgrims not always)



-Heavily consider the culture of the Automatons, therefore.

-Their ships are their cities and industrial capitals.

-Suggested that there may be plant life growing on their ships/orbital stations.

-They, therefore their ships are geared towards peace and trade



-Incorporate their culture and history, but not their bodies into their ship aesthetic.

ex.-Horatio ships are beautiful and elegant, which only makes sense when one knows the culture of The Horatio.

-UE ships are blocky and have many aspects that one would associate with a strong military purpose.

-Hisho ships are really the only ones that have their anatomy protrayed in it, but works quite well for them, as it's similar to the Samurai that wore demon masks into battle to strike fear into the enemy.

rudderbutt wrote:


-Incorporate their culture and history, but not their bodies into their ship aesthetic.

ex.-Horatio ships are beautiful and elegant, which only makes sense when one knows the culture of The Horatio.

-UE ships are blocky and have many aspects that one would associate with a strong military purpose.

-Hisho ships are really the only ones that have their anatomy protrayed in it, but works quite well for them, as it's similar to the Samurai that wore demon masks into battle to strike fear into the enemy.

I definitely agree with this point, but I also want to point out that there IS a trait in the Automaton culture that would allow for ships that resemble the "species's" physical appearance:



The Automatons seem to regard themselves - and their faction - as a single entity. In their diplomatic text, the Automatons usually refer to themselves in the third person singular. (Instead of saying "I seek mutual enrichment" or "we seek mutual enrichment" the diplomat says "The Automaton seeks mutual enrichment.") With that in mind, I don't see why this "we're all components of the same giant mechanism" mentality could be extended to their ships. In other words, they might view their ships as being like... giant Automatons.



That in turn would justify the ships looking like, well, giant Automatons.

Troodon wrote:
I definitely agree with this point, but I also want to point out that there IS a trait in the Automaton culture that would allow for ships that resemble the "species's" physical appearance:



The Automatons seem to regard themselves - and their faction - as a single entity. In their diplomatic text, the Automatons usually refer to themselves in the third person singular. (Instead of saying "I seek mutual enrichment" or "we seek mutual enrichment" the diplomat says "The Automaton seeks mutual enrichment.") With that in mind, I don't see why this "we're all components of the same giant mechanism" mentality could be extended to their ships. In other words, they might view their ships as being like... giant Automatons.



That in turn would justify the ships looking like, well, giant Automatons.

This lore extrapolation stuff is fun and you are right in some regards, but the Automatons as a whole are a species of individuals just like humans. Each has their own views and goals and each pursues their own lives, but the lessons and memories learned by them on the old Reyan Homeworld are so far engraved into their minds that they are united completely in body and spirit when it comes to issues concerning the species. Their Ultimate high government consists of the original Automatons built by the Reyans hundreds of years ago, that live in their massive and worn floating platform, the magnificence of which dwarfs even the mightiest dreadnoughts in the galaxy.



As their creators did before them, the Automatons build their technology through clockwork and machinery. Although they do function in some ways as a single entity, they never put one of themselves above another, they are all simply Automatons and they understand what must be done to achieve their goals. Therefore their ships are simply re purposed floating platforms, in which there are all the vital systems necessary to sustain a variable number of their species. For example, a destroyer would be a platform that housed simple agriculture and a population of about 2-300 Automatons, but it was re purposed to become a combat ship, ready for war. As their creator, there was nothing ever in their culture or lore to really point to them being a "hive-mind" of sorts, and building giant flying Automatons would pretty much nullify their lore... but this is a contest, so whatever gets the most votes goes



Please don't *think* I am bashing your ideas, I am simply providing a response, and some facts and thoughts!

Panzer wrote:
Please don't I am bashing your ideas!

That's pretty mean

XD joke



machines with their own goals O_o. Pretty advanced ai for a race that couldnt say its planet from global warming produced from clockwork machinery

Submission Concept:

stasik28 wrote:
That's pretty mean

XD joke



machines with their own goals O_o. Pretty advanced ai for a race that couldnt say its planet from global warming produced from clockwork machinery

whoops! lol and did you read the lore in depth haha? They didn't create the problems on their planet. The Reyan clockwork master's use of highly poisonous toxic fuel in machinery caused the gradual destruction of the ecosystem and their last great project was to create a simple mechanical life form which came to be the Automatons. When the Reyans died off, the Automatons wandered the toxic planet with its empty cities and because of their simple intellect with no true sentience, they were not truly able to comprehend what was going on, even as they walked over the skulls of their forefathers... When the Endless supply ship full of dust crash landed there some decades later, the Automatons were still simple beings, almost like prehistoric cavemen. But the dust was infused into their bodies and reacted to the toxic fuel the Automatons were powered by in an aggressive way, replacing it, and improving their "minds". Through this process, the Automatons underwent a transformation that saw them develop sentience and leave the generally understood field of "AI" to become something entirely different, they became individuals, but they did not develop many of the internal faults of our civilization such as internal conflict. In many ways you could say they are naive, like children, still learning the ways of the world...



Have fun with that little piece of lore

Yea I read the lore, but how do clockwork machines produce toxins? O_o After watching stargate, I still see humans as the children :P but I guess I skipped over the machines having intelligence because that's not something I approve of after all those terminator movies and such XD

stasik28 wrote:
Yea I read the lore, but how do clockwork machines produce toxins? O_o After watching stargate, I still see humans as the children :P but I guess I skipped over the machines having intelligence because that's not something I approve of after all those terminator movies and such XD

The native planet of the Reyans had vast quantities of an underground mineral that can produce highly powerful reactions, but the byproduct is highly corrosive and toxic chemicals, many of which are airborne. The Reyans therefore were careful with how they industrialized and many of them died due to it, but eventually industrialization ran out of control, and the toxic chemicals began effecting the ecosystem and the atmosphere. All the clockwork machines including the Automatons (before the dust fuel) ran on this mineral which is what brought about their self destruction.



I watched all of stargate and loved it, so believe me I'm as afraid of the replicators as much as the next guy, but even so I wanted to create a young, naive, and slightly childish species that has a view of the world all together different from what we are used to. No more "we will burn your planet to the ground" machines, they just want to be friends and raise their plants

If you've watched as many robot related movies as I have, you'll know that they'll always turn bad :P (sowers: NOTHING STANDS IN OUR WAY!) But I feel that the automatons should have been inertia run or something .-. imagine toxic pendulum clocks back when they were popular, oh god why. Wait, I thought dust was more rare? Why isn't even a hero if its popular enough to run a race on it

stasik28 wrote:
If you've watched as many robot related movies as I have, you'll know that they'll always turn bad :P (sowers: NOTHING STANDS IN OUR WAY!) But I feel that the automatons should have been inertia run or something .-. imagine toxic pendulum clocks back when they were popular, oh god why. Wait, I thought dust was more rare? Why isn't even a hero if its popular enough to run a race on it

Lol I guess you have discovered one plot hole in my lore, but i'll explain it away by saying that the reason they went out into the stars is that they are looking for more dust as well as attempting to produce their own. The Automaton Dust Engines are efficient enough that the dust they generate through exploration and trade is enough for them to survive.