infinitestars
patreon
Tabitha Design - Where to place all those rooms.
🕑 Added 2020-12-17 15:46:53 +0000 UTC
Revisiting the Tabitha’s Designs.
First, a special shoutout to our newest Patrons! Lieutenant Kagutsuchi and Commander Taka! Thank you for making Infinite Stars possible!
We’ve been working on the 3rd episode which will allow players to start moving around between the various sections of the UIC Tabitha, but we’ll do a post about that and how players can create their own stories to be shared amongst each other a little later.
Today I wanted to take another look at the Tabitha's designs and share some of the work we’ve been busy with.
Visual Design:
I’m not sure if anyone has noticed, but the interior of the Tabitha (and all human ships) was designed to have a familiar futuristic NASA feeling since Infinite Stars takes place in the distant but still recognizable future. You’ll see several tubes and conduits along the roof and floors.
We’re also taking other factors into account like all the doorways and windows have rounded corners to withstand the pressure and prevent microfractures. Starships are like inverted submarines. Submarines are pressurized from the outside, where the water wants to crush the vessel, Spaceships are pressurized from the inside, where the vessel wants to expand/explode into the vacuum. Both scenarios place a lot of tension on your vessel's structure. Rounded corners help redistribute that tension.
The command consoles are mostly glass and with sensitive touch sensors. While this looks cool, it also needs to be practical. As beautiful as the glass interfaces were from Minority Report, you don’t want to be distracted by what’s happening behind the glass.
Armor:
Those of you that have played through the second episode might have noticed that the Tabitha doesn’t have any shields. This is because we felt Star Trek-like shields are still a way off for humanity. Instead, the Tabitha has dynamic armor. Interestingly enough it’s a technology that has been around since WW2.
It started off with outward-facing, explosive charges being placed between layers of armor. If an armor-piercing shell penetrated the armor, the explosives would go off and disrupt and deflect the projectile. As you can imagine it didn’t work too well with infantry standing near your armored vehicle.
The Tabitha has dynamic armor functioning on a similar level. It has two layers of air-gapped/insulated armor. The one layer is electrified with a massive charge, while the second layer is ‘grounded’. If a projectile punctures the armor, it creates a bridge, discharging the electrical charge, and in most instances vaporizes or deflects the penetrating projectile.
(You get to see this in action during the second episode)
Weapons:
We haven’t really expanded on the offensive capabilities of the Tabitha, but from the second episode, we know that the Tabitha is armed with railguns. While not mentioned in the episode, the Tabitha also has access to missiles and other weapon systems.
But on to the actual designs.
Now that players will be able to start moving between rooms, we needed to start indicating where these rooms are.
From our research, we know that the bridge won’t have any windows looking out into space. You want to keep your command crew as safe as possible, hence the bridge is deep inside the hull of the ship, behind layers and layers of armor. It made sense to place the bridge and CiC in the aft section of the ship.
We also know that while humans can survive in zero gravity, there are still various instances where you simply can’t go without gravity. The most prominent of these are the medical sections. Without gravity, even simple tasks like blood drainage become unnecessarily complicated. It would make sense that medsec is in the center section that has artificial gravity.
We’ve also determined how the crew acquires their food, you’ll recall that we mentioned that aeroponics would also require gravity, mainly for the sake of the fish in the algae tanks and the reproduction of poultry. Another section that has to go in the center section.
Lastly, due to the dangers from carbon dioxide pockets forming in zero gravity while sleeping, the living quarters are also in the middle section where there is artificial gravity.
We have still a few more sections to add, and the Tabitha’s layout will fill up in no time as we continue to design and expand on the game.
I hope it was an entertaining read!
Not a patron yet? Check out some of our thoughts that went into designing our AI's and their lore that's still publically available.
You can get the first episode of Infinite Stars free on Itch right now. Episode 2 is available to patrons only for the time being, but once enough time has passed, everyone will have free access to it (Probably when we launch the next Patreon episode).
You are very welcome to sign up to our mailing list where we sometimes send out exclusive news and opportunities relating to Infinite Stars.
