New Honorverse renders uploaded

The E wrote:

wastedfly wrote:Still makes me wonder, why Keyholes were jammed into BOTH sides of the ship, when they could just as easily be positioned on a singular side making the effective girth of the ship greater or dumped dorsal/ventral where girth armor is not effected at all.

BCL(B)

I think the issue is that the dorsal and ventral sides are already occupied with other systems, like heat exchangers and docking bays. Putting both Keyholes into one broadside makes deploying them more awkward, and given that you want Keyholes on both sides of the ship, probably counterproductive. In addition, whatever broadside you put them into will be much weaker than the other one, both in terms of armor and weapon mounts, making it much more difficult to maneuver the ship effectively in combat (as in, you will always have to orient your strong side towards your enemy unless you particularly like having holes punched into your ship).

You wouldn't have the redundancy, and you'd still need the broadside telemetry links for the Keyhole; but I've always kind of wondered if you could have designed the Agamemnons with a single keyhole that mounted aft of the pod doors.

Yes you'd have to drop the keyhole to roll pods, which might be a slight disadvantage in an emergency - but in any normal situation you'd want the keyhole out before firing.
And doing that would have avoided the pinch points between the broadside keyhole bays and the pod core.
OTOH having only a single keyhole also cuts the tethered active defenses by half; so giving that up for better side depth/armor might not be a net win. Certainly on something the size and toughness of an SD(P), or even the BC(L) the dual keyholes seem justified. But for a BC(P) it seems slightly more debatable...

Also lengthening the 'hull' like that might have a slight decrease in acceleration (because you're stretching the compensator field), but it shouldn't be too bad.


Anyway just a random thought.

I believe there would also be a problem with the propulsion systems - my understanding is that the alpha nodes need to be within a certain distance of the ends of the ship, which limits the size of the hammerheads. Taking a Keyhole on the end of the aft hammerhead would probably take it beyond the maximum distance from the aft alpha nodes.

I'll point out that the port and starboard Keyhole docks need not be directly opposite each other.

dreamrider

Dafmeister wrote:I believe there would also be a problem with the propulsion systems - my understanding is that the alpha nodes need to be within a certain distance of the ends of the ship, which limits the size of the hammerheads. Taking a Keyhole on the end of the aft hammerhead would probably take it beyond the maximum distance from the aft alpha nodes.

Maybe, but taking a quick pixel counting estimate the Keyhole on the Nike renders doesn't look to be much more than 20-25m wide. I don't think that's enough of a 'bump' to throw off the node placement. Even if that entire width stuck out, with no ability to recess it, that's displacing the nodes from their (presumably ideal) location by less than 3% of the length.

I'd guess that wouldn't prevent them from working; but I didn't dig back for text-ev on the exact sensitivity of nodes placement.

Dca wrote:

MaxxQ wrote:
If you want a short, flippant answer, it would probably be: "Because I can."

Now, on to the serious answer (which basically boils down to the above answer).

No worries about NDA violations here. I've talked about this before and am perfectly willing to talk about it again.

The basic line is: There's book canon, and then there's movie canon.

Thanks for the extended recap. I'm a little disappointed in Evergreen's style choice too, but can't argue with the justification! I appreciate your continued efforts to maintain the book canon style and visualizations.

For what it is worth, as of Honorcon last year, Evergreen made a point when they were showing off the prototype of Secret Fleet to say "Don't expect any ship concepts in Secret Fleet to be templates for the ship concepts that will show up in the movie."

One big and acknowledged difference is that Honorverse ships do not have prominent drive nozzles, for apparent reaction drives...and Evergreen knows that. The concept art for ships for the movie makes clear that they will have drive rings and wedges.

That being said, in many ways, for devoted fans of the books, some of the early ship concepts that I saw are "worse", for values of that word.

One of the things that is going on is that some of the Evergreen seniors are convinced that the ships of the different powers in the Honorverse must be extremely visually distinct for a mass audience to be able to quickly distinguish sides. They don't think that more subtle differences of lines (in ships that are functionally the same) and different paint jobs are going to be enough for John and Jayne Q. to recognize the teams. On top of that, there is also some ideas that the ships need to complex enough to say "far future", and that the Haven ships in particular need to look "menacing".

Don't give up hope, however. Tom Marrone told me even back then that it seems like each iteration of sketches from Evergreen did get a little less "out there", and there is a lot of time til this project is locked into final art.

I know that a lot of fans have expressed their dissatisfaction with ship concepts to Evergreen.

There is an Evergreen sub-forum right here on David's site, and they do seem to read it. Everyone who has an opinion, go over there and tell them how strongly you feel that the movie ships need to look like the book descriptions, and like clean, functional vessels (2001: A Space Odyssey, anyone?)

I, for one would be excellently pleased if Evergreen would just lift Tom Marrone's and MaxxQ's concept art from HoS and DeviantArt (with appropriate royalties) and make those models the basis of what we will eventually see in action.

Keep up the fight, Maxx.

dreamrider

dreamrider wrote:I'll point out that the port and starboard Keyhole docks need not be directly opposite each other.

dreamrider

I might just steal that thought.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Dafmeister wrote:I believe there would also be a problem with the propulsion systems - my understanding is that the alpha nodes need to be within a certain distance of the ends of the ship, which limits the size of the hammerheads. Taking a Keyhole on the end of the aft hammerhead would probably take it beyond the maximum distance from the aft alpha nodes.

Maybe, but taking a quick pixel counting estimate the Keyhole on the Nike renders doesn't look to be much more than 20-25m wide. I don't think that's enough of a 'bump' to throw off the node placement. Even if that entire width stuck out, with no ability to recess it, that's displacing the nodes from their (presumably ideal) location by less than 3% of the length.

I'd guess that wouldn't prevent them from working; but I didn't dig back for text-ev on the exact sensitivity of nodes placement.

Your estimate range is *way* off - by 20-33% +/-

dreamrider wrote:For what it is worth, as of Honorcon last year, Evergreen made a point when they were showing off the prototype of Secret Fleet to say "Don't expect any ship concepts in Secret Fleet to be templates for the ship concepts that will show up in the movie."

One big and acknowledged difference is that Honorverse ships do not have prominent drive nozzles, for apparent reaction drives...and Evergreen knows that. The concept art for ships for the movie makes clear that they will have drive rings and wedges.

That being said, in many ways, for devoted fans of the books, some of the early ship concepts that I saw are "worse", for values of that word.

One of the things that is going on is that some of the Evergreen seniors are convinced that the ships of the different powers in the Honorverse must be extremely visually distinct for a mass audience to be able to quickly distinguish sides. They don't think that more subtle differences of lines (in ships that are functionally the same) and different paint jobs are going to be enough for John and Jayne Q. to recognize the teams. On top of that, there is also some ideas that the ships need to complex enough to say "far future", and that the Haven ships in particular need to look "menacing".

Don't give up hope, however. Tom Marrone told me even back then that it seems like each iteration of sketches from Evergreen did get a little less "out there", and there is a lot of time til this project is locked into final art.

I know that a lot of fans have expressed their dissatisfaction with ship concepts to Evergreen.

There is an Evergreen sub-forum right here on David's site, and they do seem to read it. Everyone who has an opinion, go over there and tell them how strongly you feel that the movie ships need to look like the book descriptions, and like clean, functional vessels (2001: A Space Odyssey, anyone?)

I, for one would be excellently pleased if Evergreen would just lift Tom Marrone's and MaxxQ's concept art from HoS and DeviantArt (with appropriate royalties) and make those models the basis of what we will eventually see in action.

Keep up the fight, Maxx.

dreamrider

Re: Bold - I can't speak for Thomas, but *I'm* certainly not holding my breath.

There is also a forum here: http://forums.tales-of-honor.com/ that is run by Evergreen. It's mostly concerned with the game and the comics, but I don't see why one couldn't post in the General Discussion forum any issues one may have over the design/look of the film - after all, the film is fairly prominent on the home page for that site (under Watch): https://tales-of-honor.com/honor-harrington

Never understood Evergreens problem with different painted ships. Did anyone have any problem over the years when movies had two sailing ships that looked fairly identical but simply had a different sails/flag? No. It is all how you cut the scene sequence.

MaxxQ wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Maybe, but taking a quick pixel counting estimate the Keyhole on the Nike renders doesn't look to be much more than 20-25m wide. I don't think that's enough of a 'bump' to throw off the node placement. Even if that entire width stuck out, with no ability to recess it, that's displacing the nodes from their (presumably ideal) location by less than 3% of the length.

I'd guess that wouldn't prevent them from working; but I didn't dig back for text-ev on the exact sensitivity of nodes placement.

Your estimate range is *way* off - by 20-33% +/-

Hey for using MS Paint to grab rough numbers off an angled view I'm a bit surprised I was within -50/+100%. Still even if it's 33 meters across (assuming I missed on the low side) that's still doesn't seem too massive an extension on an 815 meter long ship.

And again I'm wondering if the tradeoff might have been worth it; not making a case that it's definitively better that dual broadside keyholes on the BC(P)s.

Jonathan_S wrote:Hey for using MS Paint to grab rough numbers off an angled view I'm a bit surprised I was within -50/+100%. Still even if it's 33 meters across (assuming I missed on the low side) that's still doesn't seem too massive an extension on an 815 meter long ship.

And again I'm wondering if the tradeoff might have been worth it; not making a case that it's definitively better that dual broadside keyholes on the BC(P)s.

Well, adding Keyhole to BC(P)s pretty much pre-supposes a new generation of BC(P) designs. I think we know from various Pearls and other comments of tMWW that THAT isn't going to happen, at least not for Manticore.

dreamrider wrote:Well, adding Keyhole to BC(P)s pretty much pre-supposes a new generation of BC(P) designs. I think we know from various Pearls and other comments of tMWW that THAT isn't going to happen, at least not for Manticore.

???

Aggies have Keyhole...