Looking for some ideas
Hi all,
I have very little experience of mapping but I am an enthusiastic writer of RPG scenarios and would like to enhance these with some improved maps. The project that drove me here initially is that I would like to update and re-draw some old (c. 1980) maps I did for Metamorphosis Alpha. For those unfamiliar with the game it is an interesting challenge from a mapping perspective as it is a sort of post-apocalypse setting but is set on-board a giant starship so I need to map the structure of the ship and then fit inside the geographic features both "natural" and functional. Any ideas welcome
Rufus
Welcome to the Guild Rufus! Well I'm not sure if there are any star-ship related tutorials here or not. There certainly might be, but I haven't ever needed to create a map of one before so I've never looked. You might check out the Sci-fi section though to see if you can find examples of what you are interested in, and then try contacting the artist to esquire how they did it. Also, have a browse around the tutorials section.
Cheers,
-Arsheesh
Thanks Arsheesh, I suspect just looking round will take weeks but that's OK, I should have a PC by then. I am currently struggling by on my wife's Netbook since my PC expired a few weeks back. By the time I have a proper PC, I hope to have some ideas of what to do with it
Rufus
Welcome, Rufus. You say "big ship"... There are tutorials for the usual Gaia Class ship -- the 24,000 mile circumference one. ;-)
If you mean substantially smaller than a planet but still big enough to have terrestrial-type geography, lots of the regional or local-scale tuts would do for the 'living surface', you'd just have to come up with the mechanicals and shell. Do you have design generalities in mind?
Last edited by jbgibson; 10-21-2012 at 04:56 PM. Reason: Stupidity (mine) .... Meant *circumference*. :-b
Hi jbg, thanks for the reply. I'm still without a PC so I'm moving at a fairly slow pace, trying to use GIMP and Inkscape on a netbook with a screen the size of a postage stamp. After a little fiddling around I managed to make an outline of the hull of the ship (each deck is approximately 22 miles wide by 48 miles long) and have then exported this as a PNG which I then imported into GIMP. I don't have much (OK any) GIMP experience so I'm now messing about with ideas. I used RobA's "Not So Random Coastlines in GIMP" tutorial to both create some lake outlines and to create a "mountain range" that runs all around the edge of the "natural" decks. I guess it's back to the tutorial list for more ideas now
Nigel
OK, that's a tidy little vessel. Have you got some artificial gravity going, tangent to direction of travel? Any provision for sloshing under accel or decel? Multiple decks... Cool, so some have a literal underworld & heaven!
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