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Topic: Welcome aboard the Spathi bridge (Read 11921 times)
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Draxas
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While the design and artwork are both incredible, one glaring flaw jumps out at me: If the Spathi have no way to manipulate objects without their shells (which I assume are artificial constructs), how did they manage to create those shells in the first place? I suppose they could use their "foot" as a grabber, but not only does it seem unwieldy, but it also forces the Spathi into the very vulnerable position of lying down, something that they would not likely be willing to do since they have no means to escape from danger.
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Valaggar
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Well, Arne said that the Spathi are, in his vision, in a symbiotic relationship with those shells...
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Arne
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Yak!
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Heh, I thought about that a little. I suppose they took over used shells from some crab species which somehow sheds bodies rather than skin/shells... and maybe the Spathi did some selective breeding on top of that. It's not like those clumsy claws would add much extra manipulative precision though. I think the Spathi might be doing a lot of collaboration and team work. Sum is greater than the parts, etc.
The real question is how the ZFP works with tools. I'm thinking they have tentacled hover robots which does the work for them while they kick back and relax.
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Valaggar
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But they still need a way with which to have worked before they invented those robots. With a bit of an imagination stretch, we could imagine that the green ones griped objects between their "neck" and their two "hips" and/or maybe even used telekinesis (see quote: "[...]Remember that time you said you could fix our broken chronometers with your `sympathetic psionic waves'?[...]" - rest of quote omitted to save space, see here for the full version). It was certainly slow and laborious, though.
The blue ones probably hit objects with their spring-like bodies to move them; faster, but with little accuracy (thus complementing the green ones' work).
The brown ones might actually have some tentacles or limbs below their brown "skin" (which looks more like a "cloak" or shell to me), thus rendering the contribution of the other two superfluous (though this begs the question of why did they stay allied with the other two races, if they were so useless). Or, to expand on the teamwork idea I used earlier, maybe they acted as overseers and planners.
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FalconMWC
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Avatar Courtesy of Slyrendro
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Wow Arne - Just cruising through for the first time in a while and your definitely one of the best SC artists I've seen. (love the Spathi ship)
When's the Vux beast coming up? Love to see your impression of that.... (or have I missed it?)
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RTyp06
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Arne, how good are you at landscapes.. particularly alien landscapes?
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Arne
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Re: Landscapes, I guess 2/5. Architecture, probably 1/5. I mostly do pinups. With alien landscapes the viewer tend to be less critical though, probably because s/he has no experiences seeing any.
Re: My SC stuff... It is beneficial to have an iterative method when doing (character) (re)design. I'm constantly redrawing stuff. Some might remember that I drew a lot of Spathi variants earlier. The VUX beast could probably be improved a lot, or atleast explored a bit better. With such a tiny sprite, the possibility space for (faithful) redesigns is quite large.
I suppose iteration a luxury I have since I don't have to publish a final design on a deadline. It's also a curse since it means I can work and rework until it's perfect, which will never happen.
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