Saturday, June 4, 2011

Fighter Carrier Fleet List (Rough Idea)

Update: I have a new post that shows you more pics as well as how to build this ship. Check it out here!

While checking out Minecraft airships I encountered a really fascinating image. Someone made a floating aircraft carrier!:


This, of course, makes me want to construct my own fleet of fighter carriers. Will this happen? Maybe. Here is a list of possible ships I spent today thinking up. They are named for the Yogscast's Minecraft series. I tried to make it sound realistic and serious, but with how the Yogscast works that's not totally possible.

Shadow of Israphel class:
USS Shadow of Israphel (CVX-01)
USS Xephos (CV-02)
USS Honeydew (CV-03)
USS Knight Peculier (CV-04)
USS Reverend John (CV-05)
USS Duke (CV-06)
USS Granny Bacon (CV-07)
USS Mistral City (CV-08)
USS Fumblemore (Fumblemore sublclass, extra TNT cannons and Creeper-class fighters, CVA-09)
USS Astley (Fumblemore subclass, CVA-10)
USS Lysander (Lysander subclass, stronger balloons allowing for further range, CVB-11)
USS Jasper (Lysander subclass, CVB-12)

Verigan class:
USS Verigan (CVX-13)
USS Karpath (CV-14)
USS Adaephon (CV-15)
USS Grizwold (CV-16)
USS Nubescu (CV-17)
USS Braeburn (CV-18)
USS Isabel Peculier (CV-19)
USS Fireblast (CV-20)
USS Angus Eyeless (CV-21)
USS Grimjaw Slugface (CV-22)
USS Spacker LeChuck (CV-23)
USS Tinman (CV-24)

All 24 ships carry complements of Creeper class bombers and Skeleton class fighters. Creepers are heavier and thus less populous than Skeletons. I wanted to as a joke include a USS Honeydew II as a Verigan class carrier, saying that (perhaps as no surprise) recklessness led to the original's destruction.

Friday, June 3, 2011

Fleet of Airships Concept, and, Missing the Old Minecraft Feel

While viewing this thread, I was struck with inspiration. The person was wanting advice on how to improve the design of an airship. I made a reply saying that the person should build not just one ship, but a whole fleet of them. This idea got my creative cogs turning.

I am curious about naval craft, mostly due to my status as a Star Trek fan. There are various types of naval warships: destroyers, which are fast, maneuverable and well-armed; cruisers, which are a step up and noted for the ability to go further without needing to be refueled; submarines which can be used to evade detection; and my favorites, the aircraft carriers. So when I design fleets of sea ships, starships, or airships, I am quick to build various categories - that is, destroyers, cruisers, fighter carriers, stealth craft, etc. I could, theoretically, design one or more classes for each type of ship and build airborne fleets over the skies of the land headed toward combat or just patrolling. Maybe each nation has some sort of fleet in the sky. For real life nations I was thinking of building fleets analogous to what they really have. For instance, America with its 11 aircraft carriers, there would be 11 fighter carriers over the coastline or at sea. (And of course, the flagship would be called the Enterprise.) There are various other destroyers and cruisers so those would be made as well.

I hope someone out there is keeping track of all the ideas I've posted on here, because so far there are a great plethora and I'm barely done with my first one, which is to complete my home base. I've also thought of making a sort of Heaven, possibly stationed over Jerusalem, Israel. However, the Tower of Babel isn't too far... perhaps the building would accomplish what it was built for: to reach Heaven!

To be honest, I've noticed that I don't have the same feel I did when I was playing legitly. I've looked at the way the Earth map is shaped. It's relatively... flat. Especially in the areas where I am working. There are mountains however they don't so much gradually appear as much as jut from out of nowhere. The sand and grass intermittently mesh together. I sort of miss the often surreal but beautiful terrain the vanilla Minecraft code would generate, where you would have deserts right next to rainforests, mountains standing besides oceans. In the Earth map, there's nothing like pockets of coal ore or diamond. Heck, there aren't even caves on this map. The exploration of the caves, the mining of resources, stuff that seems so drab... I kinda miss it and wish that were present on the Earth map. As it stands resources are randomly placed at all levels meaning you can find diamond five units down. There's no clay or lava above ground nor is there gravel. Even the trees are odd... and all identical. I hack in unlimited supplies of each block or item I need and have /instantmine from singleplayer commands enabled so everything breaks with one hit. It's all so... artificial, different from what Minecraft was really meant to be.

So I think these things and consider moving to my MinecraftWorldDemo file, or at least playing in both. There are semi-developed nations in those so the floating fleets could be stationed at the nations. Although I like the feel of playing in a newly generated map instead of resurrecting one that's been sitting there, already explored and developed.

Monday, May 30, 2011

Rave Room, Sub, and Portal Idea

My latest project is making a rave room. The design is like this: at the bottom there's a specific setup of redstone wire and torches which causes them to blink and burn out erratically. There's a different design for redstone and torches along the walls which, again, makes them blink and burn out randomly. The setup is used from this video. I want to make it so that the torches and wiring below the glass floor aren't perfect rows but are somewhat erratically turned so that there are random rows and columns. The whole place is made with black wool and a glass staircase leads up to it. It's going to be something like 18x18, which is plenty of space for me to jump around like a maniac whenever I want to. In addition I would also like to have a sort of DJ station perhaps with only a redstone torch for lighting where I could turn on or off various note sequences...

Which leads me to the world of note block music loops. The main problem I have is that I cannot get them to repeatedly loop over the same notes simply by turning the circuit on with a switch. Instead I have to power it with a redstone torch, break the torch, then before the power has gone through the redstone repeaters place a piece of redstone where the torch was so that the circuit remains powered. Only then will it make a loop. I would like to know if it's even possible for it to loop repeatedly just with the flick of a switch.

I've spent some time working on a rendition of a submarine I was able to tour the inside of when I was younger. The sub was the USS Croaker, stationed in western New York. Near where my dock is on my Earth map I tried to recreate it. The submarine is 144 meters long, 6 meters wide and 6 meters tall. It looks like a really long stick. I called it the El Shaddai. Now that the prototype is sufficiently completed I'm starting on the second version of the prototype, the ESX-01A, El Shaddai. It will be 13 blocks wide, quite a bit shorter, and probably taller as there was a lot of other stuff I didn't build the first time as I didn't even know the stuff was part of the submarine I toured until I saw a cutaway plan of it on the Internet.

Courtesy of the Yogscast, I've seen Let's Plays of Portal 2 and the Portal 2 mod for Minecraft. In addition I've watched a Let's Play by someone else of the original Portal game. So I've been thinking... what if I were to make a course that is sort of a mix between Portal and an obstacle course? Since I don't have the Portal mod and don't intend on downloading it any time soon, I can't quite integrate it into this idea.

Instead I will use various blocks and their abilities. I expect that gravel or sand will be used to make pillars and build staircases, while dirt blocks will be used like cubes and also for making stairs that aren't supported by other blocks. Perhaps it will also have aspects of obstacle courses like difficult jumps and using ladders. The MC Portal used water for elevators between chambers so I  may go ahead and use that as well.