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Astro Cross: Flashback 1942 (was naming alien ships)
03-04-2013, 01:00 AM
So I'm designing a space fleet, but the names I've got are really pathetic, obvious mutations of the english word for the visual inspirations, like calling something based on a dog a 'dagg.' So, I'm soliciting suggestions sight unseen.
I am happy with 'klogg' for a 1 man fighter and 'chulogg' for the elite varient, 'boloss' for a heavy bomber I'm ambievalent to. I need:
shuttle
mecha shuttle
destroyer
cruiser
battleship
carrier
cargo/fleet collier
human carrier, better than 'Alamo'
human battleship
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Oh, and a mobile drydock construction/repair vessel
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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Remember when you could run terms through Google Translate a few times (English to something, something to something else, and so on) and get some odd phrases that sound alien? It looks like they've really cleaned up their act - these don't sound alien at all!
English -> French -> Icelandic
shuttle -> navette -> skutla
mecha shuttle -> navette mécanique -> vélrænni skutla
destroyer -> torpilleur -> Torpedo bát
cruiser -> cuirassé -> járnsleginn
battleship -> navire de guerre -> herskip
carrier -> transporteur -> flytjanda
mobile drydock -> cale sèche mobile -> drydock farsíma
But maybe somebody else will be inspired by them, so here they are.
As for names of humanity's ships, do what real navies do - name it after a battle the navy won (usually battleships), name it after a city in the navy's home country, name it after a naval ideal, or re-use the name of a successful warship from the past.
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"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
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Don't forget the names of political or social figures. It'd also be funny to reuse the name of that RL-never-built-because-insane battleship class, and battleships, that Gibson used in SSM  IN.
Regulus, Horatio, need to look up the spelled of the Roman nicknamed 'lefty', Theseus...
Mine the Astral Drop thread, Enyo, Bellona, Nike, Victoria, Eris, Discordia, Bia, Athena, Sophia, Hope, Invincible, Invictus...
Birkenhead...
Oh, I've got an idea for the alien names. Grab text, grab, say, first letter of each word, cut string into chunks, adjust as needed.
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What was the 'never built because insane' BB? In a setting where a twin hulled carrier that *turns into a giant robot* is a perfectly logical design philosophy, it would take a long cruise to reach Insane.
(Physics gets the shaft here because robot pilots are mechanically augmented espers, the more humanoid the machine the better the pilot can identify with it and the bigger it is the more power it can channel, both aspects making it stronger and more resistant to damage. So mecha yay, tanks nay!)
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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You want a badass name for a battleship? Jervis Bay: merchant ship with a few outdated 6" guns installed, fought a rear-guard action against a German pocket battleship's 11" guns and held for 20-some minutes, time enough for most of the convoy to get away. It deserves a battleship named after it.
For the aliens, I notice a tendency toward double consonants. It happens an idea I'll never do anything with used a lot of double-consonant names, so how about (I'm not assigning these to ship types, that's for you): morenn, hosser, eltorr, cassy, melleth, drogga, khellakh, destoll, pragg....
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Hmm.
Well, we know that whatever language you're dealing with likes its gutteral sounds - so let's try deriving a root or two.
The recurrance of 'logg', 'ogg' or '-gg' in two of the names for related craft suggests that it's either an ending like the English '-er', turning the verb 'klo-' or 'chulo-' into a noun, or a word in its own right connected to what they are - 'mecha' or 'fighter', probably.
What I'd do would be go with the latter - a fighter is a 'logg' and another word for the subrole of a 'klogg' gets abbreviated as 'k'. I like 'boloss', myself - if only because breaking it down as 'bo-', attack, and 'loss', shuttle, means that an 'attack fighter' would be a Blogg.
Let's see... out of a hat, 'pachh' for 'ship', applying to anything with a permanently-aboard crew and capable of interstellar flight. Historically, 'destroyer' derives from 'torpedo boat destroyer', so if 'k' - 'kral'? - has something to do with killing small things or escorting then the role would be 'kralpachh', 'antifighter ship'. Alternately, a vessel of the same weight bracket designed to hunt larger prey would be a 'bopachh'. A cruiser is a longer-ranged, more independent type - if 'chu' means something suitably generic like 'war' or 'combat' then a cruiser, the default generic warship, would be a 'chupachh'.
For the battleship... Actually, I like 'chuleginn', which'd probably render out as 'war beast' or 'war titan'.
Assuming that a mecha shuttle is basically a drop ship... Let's say that 'zeg' or 'zerag' means something like 'parasite', so a 'zegloss' would be a shuttle that carries parasites, and a 'zegpachh' the equivalent warship. A drydog or mothership could easily be a 'zeraginn', a 'parasite titan'.
This also implies that, whoever these people are, their carriers tend to be smaller than their battleships - which was how it worked on Earth until the advent of the supercarrier.
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
"It looks like a destroyer-sized version of a Tillman-class battleship. Twenty-four 16-inch guns in four sextuple turrets, but this one is a three-eighth scale model, and appears to have been upgraded to modern capabilities."
Sadly, the crash took out much of the FukuFics archive for last year. So, we no longer have ECSNorway's explanation of why the design Tillman favored was so very flawed.
I think we are also missing three to six chapters of PIN, as I screwed up and did not keep a copy. I am certain the individual names of the ships are in one of those chapters. (I think it may have gone to thirty, but my memory may not be entirely reliable. Mediaminer has up to 24, I think.)
These 'ships' are more like magical creatures made by a Great Old One. They digest, they are implied to reproduce, and they don't knock themselves over firing their guns.
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Well, the fighters and bomber are transformable, and while the difference between the klogg and chulogg (aside from pilot proficiency) is that the latter has wings where the grunt unit is just a bullet shaped fusilage with guns in the nose and three engine pods at the back in (A)ttack mode. (B)attle mode is of course humanoid while (C)ombined mode has arms and legs but is still mostly aerospace fighter. A is fast and aerodynamic but weak, B is pokey but agile, accurate & strong, C is balanced. The boloss
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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is never streamlined per se, even in A it's a gribbly sphere with guns and missiles poking out and 13 rockets on the bottom/back, and C is a quadroped 'spider walker' base with the six huge guns gathered to a single turret style group at the top, and the two lighter rapid gun arms in between. B folds the light front legs away to stand and the big guns are a backpack, they're not too useable there but you won't get instagibbed with an enemy in melee range. Missiles are all over in all three modes, however.
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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So, taking a stab at the root word idea, softening the 'k' to 'chu' likely denotes either the elite status or better suitability for atmospheric use, since it can get aerodynamic lift and use more thrust for speed/turning but has more mass to accelerate for no benefit in space.
And may I just say that you people are awesome? All of this stuff is golden. I need to read it again while not concentrating on remembering this part, but seriously, geat stuff here.
This is for a de-tm'ed Flashback 1942, btw.
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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Jervis Bay - APPROVED
WRT shuttle vs destroyer vs mecha shuttle - the first is mostly designed for use in secure areas but can carry up to 8 boloss or 16 klogg/chulogg, the kloggs with room left in the cargo pods, the boloss replacing the pod entirely. A destroyer actually uses the same core module but has a long range drive and weapon unit filling half the docking ring. A mecha shuttle is basically a heavily armored box with drives and a bridge attached, it's for getting two dozen klogg and 3 boloss into
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somewhere an armed someone very much does not want them to be. The battleship and carrier are about the same keel length (the alien fleet don't transform because no single pilot is entrusted with that much power) but the carrier is roughly a disk versus the slimmer BB - a lot of that is hangar space rather than structure, without mecha they'd probably have similar mass. The cargo ship is actually the largest because they have to supply several ships each for long deployments, though the repair ship is both
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longer and wider even when folded flat for travel, though of course it can open out, and extend itself indefinatly with temporary additions to accomodate more docking slips, tethered asteroids for resource extraction, etc. Any other ship type can at least mostly fit into the deployed form without extra additions, and several of the smaller, more common types at once.
I really have to get a real computer working and do more than sketch grade work on this... the power of (my lack of) Macross30 compels me.
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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One last post to summarise the plot - less than a year after The Great War ended a collier ship had a drive accident and arrived in LEO, with no time to make repairs before the orbit would degrade. Since the crew is massive, it took over a full orbit to evacuate and Blue refugees ended up all over the world with whatever craft and goods they'd launched with, and the main hull came down semi intact somwhere. Cultural assimilation of the Very Near Human Blues was unexpectedly rapid and thorough, news that
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when others came looking for them in a decade or three policy was to conquer or exterminate was less welcome, with the wide spread battle fatigue all across society. The tech stimulation was helpful though, and humanity made a go of pulling together... for a while. WWII kicked off anyway, becoming the pressure cooker to put upright configuration war machines into service and refine them until transformation is achieved... just before the Blue fleet shows up after all. Oops. Initial loss of territory and
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older military equipment (with its users, generally) is severe, until the remaining top units of all sides begin coordinating and concentrating. The experimental super-carrier needsabetternamethanAlamo becomes the core of counterattack operations, together with the salvahged and weaponized Jervis Bay. Psy ops with loudspeakers and embedded musicians are a major tactical as well as strategic element, making Blue pilots retreat in disarray or even defect at staggering rates, to the point that by the end of
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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this period human pilots in pairs or trios serve as cadre for squadrons otherwise all fullblooded Blues. (Pilots must have Blue heritage, to be strong enough espers.) The war ends when the most fanatic commanders are fragged so the rest of the fleet can be like the earthlings. General recovery and prosperity ensues for a while, until a better indoctrinated, non frontier survey fleet shows up, but there's a third generation of mecha by then, and Blue heritage is common enough for themto be the main weapons.
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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That really does sound like a hoot of a game to be in. It's a pity that I've determined that the only way I'll ever play Mekton again is if someone actually paid me a living wage to do it. So I guess I'll just have to wish you the best of luck.
As for the supercarrier... I'd suggest either Ouroboros (referencing the Macross-esque setting Dream Pod 9 put together for their one-off d20 mecha supplement) or Ra (referencing the Submarine Battleship Ra as well as the Egyptian god.)
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
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Um, I should clarify... while hardly opposed to it as the setting for a p'n'p or forum game, I am in fact proposing it as a less ambitious videogame design project than my everything-plus-a-full-kitchen-and-bath Ninja Robot Space Fighter, using Irrlicht and Irrklang for graphics and sound engines and probably python for scripting. Though even I will be surprised if it all comes together-
The power of Macross 30 compels me! The power of Macross 30 compels me! THE POWER OF MACROSS 30 COMPELS ME!
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Gameplay would be generally similar to the Artdink games (Macross Ace-/Ultimate-/Triangle- Frontier, and 30 being the latest) except in Hard mode only energy weapons reload. Given that in the described late 40s era energy weapons are not available except on the supercarrier and salvaged collier turned battleship unless captured or salvaged from enemy units, which are also faster than (hence hard to melee with) the initial prop driven Lightning and Shinden, Hard Mode is Hard. PsyOps musician-pilots FTW!
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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Ah. My misunderstanding, then, and I'll really wish you luck, because that sounds like it'd be an awesome ride.
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Well, it would be technically possible, just, if I really got my shtick together - the Irr* family engines are fast and simple to use, the 3d modeling isn't a problem, texturing is blah but doable, and I even took programming classes through the 400 level in C++, so there's enough foundation to learn the rest. There are considerable obstacles even so, mainly my tendency to slack off, lack of functional hardware, and utter lack of $$, hence the diy bug rather than buying a ps3, tv, and the actual M30 game.
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That's actually a rather reasonable project. Might even be a good excuse to learn Unity- I seem to remember that the basic version of the engine/IDE is free. Either way, you've at least got a well-defined scope, the background technical knowledge, and sufficient art-fu, which is more than most amateur game programmers seem to have.
Wish my own game project was going so well... >.>
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I've been writing a bit.
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I did look at Unity engine, but settled on IrrLicht because it's on the zlib license, meaning "completely free for whatever you want to do and we'd like it if you slap our logo in the intro splashes but that's not required either." The sound engine IrrKlang is not quite so liberal, requiring a 99 euro license for commercial use, but that's basically chump change when it comes to commercial licensing. It's also well supported for Code::Blocks IDE, and has a couple of scene graph editors (one from the same devteam that's got a 14 day trial, but the parts that are disabled are to do with Flash and JavaScript web deployment, not the things that load in IrrLicht, and another by a team making a game that's supposed to be quite good also. And the forum community was quite helpful with my pathetic noob questions like "What do all these errors mean when I try to compile the library?" and "Anyone know where to get the DirectX 8 or 9 SDK, my creaky old XP machine doesn't support the newest stuff and it's ludicrously huge compared to them, too."
It also opens hella lots of 3d formats, including the readily available Quake2 and Quake3 maps and player models so you can throw some in as place holders to see and test your own content in. And there's a Blender exporter to the native format, though it's not been updated for the latest releases (I think it was Blender 2.5ish and IrrLicht 1.6, two or three releases ago each)
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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