The scout that came too late (for the contest).
The Altarian Scavenger.
(Early small fast long range superior scout and survey ship)
Always on the lookout for opportunities.
I looks likes it is the baby of an Altarian and Thalan ship encounter.
Premise.
I had problems with getting some animation working the way i desired, so i build this ship as a test case for various animations. In the end i solved it by using hidden connector parts. The part i used was the small cube, and those small cubes i minimized to keep them from showing in the final ship.
By using this method i was able to split a single hard-point into a mount hard-point and an animation hard-point whose settings i could manipulate independently from each other without them interfering with each other. In the Scavenger the hidden components allow me to animate the 7 (6 of them folding) survey antennas and the 3 fanning lasers. In reality there are only 1 survey module, 2 lasers, 4 hyper drives, 5 sensors, and 3 life support components used, all others are either mirrors or completely fake. The low techs allow the ship to be build really early in the game.
Take note of the fact that the folding antennas folds but stay on their location even while they have both an offset and a rotation from the mounting hard-point, and how the lasers pan on their sweeping arm while keeping connective locality (both on the laser connection to the arm, and the connection between the arm and the wing) intact.
The Links.
(2014/12/24 update design files to correct origin/scaling problem).
The design files.
Altarian Scavenger Animation Demo.
The Screenshots.
