Artist's commentary
SOE Urania
Novafox's shipyards entry for the contest.
Hand digitalpainted in Painter SAI, best 50$ you can spend for an art program.
*Dont feel bad if im not commenting on favorites, im saving them until after contest but a BIG thank you for making this my most popular work within 3 days, my previous most popular took 3 years to get to that point and sadly its a lousy line work (i think its in scraps now too) of a ship that just happens to wind up on google's search function when you typed in eve online for images.
Shipwright notes.
No technical notes on fitting abilites and peformance, CCP has a hard enough task fixing lag and balancing things as best they can within the engine of the game they made (ie rockets) plus im sure they have a nice team of designers that work out numbers alot better than I can. I would like to see a medium launcher and drone bay for a partial flight of medium of drones with replacements.
Main hull base is Amrrian but supplimental additions are from Gallente (additional shaping) and Caldari (sensor packets) inspirations. Not an exact mirror of the Caldari looking ORE ships whom are supposed to be Gallente. Profile is semi agressive to embody the act of going to the unkown and mostly offset by paint scheme for peaceful activities as SOE ships pose little threat to any actual military ship.
I choose cruiser sized because I wanted a good mix of utility survivability affordability and mobility. Where as a 1km long should would call for battleship assortment and though it would be able to do the job just as well it be too slow for getting out of trouble and the sorts as an explorer needs such in order to survive accidental run ins. Cruiser BPOs are cheap in relative terms and the ships in that class are very affordable and a pilot can easily seat themselves in a cruiser within a 14 day trail period.
Paint scheme is original as there are currenlty no real SOE ships currently in game to bounce the design or color theme off of. Despite this, it has been accused to being similar to EOM (Equalibrium of Man) ships paint scheme however EOM ships typically have silver and darker blues in camo patterns, while the soe ships have a more standard blues and white strippings pattern.
The name Urania is the name of the Greek Muse of the Stars. This helps fall into the fact this faction ship has heritage from both gallente and amarr as is the same fact for the SOE organization in eve. All my Sisters of Eve, ships are exploration themed in name and function. So Urania is the most respectable for the original intended design, a tech 3 civillian cruiser on the science front to rival the ORE faction. Where as Tech 1 ships are named for the event of exploration, and tech 2 named after spirits often lost or inspiring.
Overall I'm not too happy with the picture, I couldnt get the metal tones to come out as strong as I wanted to, also its Isometric instead of true perspective, I guess im still not ready to make good works in that perspective specially when it messes with shadows. Yet its the only picture I can reliably finish in a short manner for the contest and I'm not going back to some of my more complete older designs for this but it wont excuse me from going back and finishing an idea alreaedy in my gallery to full specturm some deserve. Also I intend after the contest to place the Urania in its natural habitat, though its a simple cut and paste job I need more practice painting space scenes.
Good news is I retired another note book full of ideas and updated alot of old stuff, though most are not eve related it was a good practice in updating my styles to current.
Incomming Update Note*
Going to update it with the offical 'Sisters of Eve' symbol from eve online's website, and get a MS paint to put in letters for me, ill have to blow up the picture first to AA the lettering from MS paint but it should do the job when I shrink it back down. Im also going to redo the line work to be a bit more accurate in particulare the references to each other. Currently the base for all 6 the Port side is ways ways ways off now that I look at it agian. Ill have to correct this and bounce the other 5 views back off of it so that the view points look convincingly matching the prepestive view.