CTO #5 - Regarding Starships

I thought this time I would let images speak for themselves. :D

NX-01 Enterprise

Nova Class & Refit

B'rel Class Bird of Prey

2009 NCC-1701 Enterprise

Future Vulcan Ship

Daedalus Class

Custom Ships

Next episode is likely to showcase a whole lot of interiors for the Enterprise D, as I am hoping to have some kind of mass room building event. The best work from that event will be shown in one of my future videos for the server, and we're bound to get a lot done on the D from it, so I am really looking forward to seeing how many people participate.

Live long and prosper!

Nothing Major

Not a lot is going on right now, at least, I'm too lazy to make full posts about it. :D

- Recently imported the Equinox deck plans by PatchyPatch

- Some work has been done on NX-01's hull by LoakeyRonso and girhawk.

- Several freebuild projects have had interesting additions to them recently.

- Server plugins have been updated and everyone now has access to multiple homes using /sethome

- Voyager may be an upcoming project when the deck plans get worked on.

- Interior work on the Enterprise D has been happening here and there, mostly quarters but also a few various other rooms.

- Recently I was able to link dropbox to our schematics folder so now it is possible to export just about anything from the server as a schematic without my assistance retrieving and hosting the file.

One thing I would like to do is organize some kind of "build off" day where everyone logs in and builds as many rooms as they can on the D. I'm thinking of a weekend, probably a Saturday in a week or two.

There would  be no obligation to log on all day, only whenever is convenient to you, but the goal is to build as many rooms in the Enterprise D as possible. I'd like to assign a few individuals the task of gathering up the best of those builds so we can have a poll voting for the best of them, and that location will be included in my video (still a work in progress but I have done some recording for it!!)

I have another CTO coming up soon, so be sure to stay tuned!

* Bluegobln salutes you *

CTO #4 - Hornet Class (or something)

Anyone who frequents the server knows I like to jump around the dozen or so separate projects I have running at any given moment. I also like to start new ones. Recently I was browsing starship blueprints and came upon one I liked a lot. I found it elsewhere but later realized the images were available on Cygnus-x1 as well.

That is the USS Hornet. Well... I don't like the name much (I hate bees and all varieties of hornets and wasps) but I do love the design. Among other things it carries a squadron of small but powerful fighter craft.

So I set to work, stepping briefly away from the standard formula of deck plans in favor of testing my handcrafting ability. It was a long and painful struggle! I think I will take the time to use deck plans in the future.

Here's the progress so far, hull nearly finished and some of the turbolifts set up (mainly the central shafts).

My version is smaller than the measurements listed in the blueprints, but the decking would be ridiculous if I kept the scale exact. I attempted to comfortably adjust it to "realistic" levels and also fit it into minecraft, and as a result this version will end up with an extra deck and a lot of double floored decks (which allows for better ceilings so no harm done really).

I also made the saucer edge a bit taller to accommodate Minecraft's unfriendliness toward shuttle sized vessels. That should allow us to make a bit nicer details for the saucer bay.

No fighters yet, just fine tuning the hull shape before details and interior start to get love.

We're always on the lookout for interesting stuff on the MineTrek server, so please let me know in the comments or elsewhere if you think I should share something in a CTO episode!

All hands brace for impact!

PS - the Ironhour is the name I am using for this ship. It is a name I created back when I played WoW and just seems to me to represent some sort of burst of strength to me. The ship is well suited as a strike craft or patrol vessel, it kinda fits. :D

Virus Woes and the Enterprise E

So today (right now actually) I am formatting and freshly installing the operating system on our server hardware because of a nasty little virus. Typically with a virus I can identify it online by its activities, but this one seemed to be too unusual a case to be identified so.

What it did was close off a section of my hard drive, a folder in my main OS directory actually, and hide it from view. When I say hide, I mean it was hidden in all ways - I could not see it with hidden folders being shown, I could not see it with hard drive scanning software (made for recovering lost files and such). As far as I was concerned this folder was literally nonexistant.... except that it was slowly but surely filling up my hard drive to the brim.

That is, actually, how I found it in the first place. The hard drive capped out and I thought "how strange". So I cleared up some extra space (over 20 gigs actually). After that, a few days later, it capped out again. Whaaaat?

It was pretty obvious something was up, so I started looking for the culprit, some program or folder was growing at a pretty quick pace to pull that off, and that meant it had to be quite large by now (at a minimum 20 gigs, right, but probably more).

I was able to identify this nonexistant folder because I could see the size of its contents, and the number of files, but when viewed directly there was simply nothing there. I tried every trick I could think of to open it, but even if I managed to enter a folder that was hidden (by typing its exact name) I was unable to see a single file within that folder anyway and so was stopped again.

I'm not typically forced to do a fresh OS install, but in this case I simply gave up on other solutions because I think at best it would take me longer to clean the system anyway. A fresh OS is quicker! I designed the system to allow easy fresh OS installs anyway. :D

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On another note: we've been working on the Enterprise E on our server! At present it is only a shell, and one in the process of  being cleaned up, but it may one day get decks just like the Enterprise D.

We're planning on extracting slices of the shell as decks to create by hand in an image editor. The only downside to this side project is, well, there are no blueprints available for the E. That means we'll be working from scratch!

Well not entirely from scratch, really, but the only materials we have are descriptions of the decks contents on various websites and a few side cutaway images of the ship. That gives us a pretty solid place to start, but ultimately there's so much that will need to be done to create these, trial and error with each of its 24 decks until we're satisfied with the quality.

All else aside, we'll probably base a lot of the interior space off the Enterprise D. It seems to me that the design of the ship is close enough that it aught to be a similar style in most respects.