Big Tank

[Quike Garcia]

Looks more like a 20x102mm (and the one beside is a 12.7 NATO M2 AP I'd say) A10 shoots 30x173mm, being 173mm the length of the cartridge case alone .

Here you have a great resource for different ammunition, with lots of pictures http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk/

[Velocity Kendall]

Hmm could be. I bought it from an airshow in Kansas for $5.. The guy said it was from the A10 behind him ( i fingered the gun hehehe) but Ive no idea really. Heres it is.. is blue training? Id hoped it was DU but dont think it is..

Dims are
20mm accross the blue bit by 168 long..
Brass thing is 30mm wide, 107mm long

[Quike Garcia]

That's a 20x102mm M61 Vulcan round. Blue means exactly that it is inert. I have at home an A10 projectile (without the case), I'll try to take a pic this weekend and show you. It's truly shiva's dildo (Like a Coke bottle)...

Yes, I'm an ammo freak.

[Velocity Kendall]

Hahaha nice! Need you in class so you can do a presentation on it! Its all about the show and tell. Its lucky Duc (F1XEvo) sometimes pops in to be Gun Dad and Bad Cop, first to explain the inner workings of weapons and second to bollock people for not doing any work hehehe.
So the vulcan is not the same gun as the monster in the A10?

[bill618]

That’ll shiver Shiva’s timbers, coming out of a Warthog.

[Velocity Kendall]

Shiiiiiiiiit.

ok we were talking clearance..
thoughts?
how would you break it or beat it?

[Velocity Kendall]

hehehe

[Falchion]

The problem I'm seeing is that the chassis is still too low. What you've got is going to be able to clear the big Bremer walls, but just barely. There's still the matter of "what if" situations where your tank isn't in ideal combat environments where the walls aren't so neatly traversed. And if you're blowing things up, why not have fixed tracks instead? Not to mention the increase in tread articulation wear (Might want to throw in a few tubes linking the tracks to the chassis as well).

That said, digging how it's going, and you may want to start throwing some N/ERA tiling on the chassis since the turret's been wrapped with chicken wire.

[Velocity Kendall]

"Might want to throw in a few tubes linking the tracks to the chassis as well)."

Yeah Ill bash all that kind of detail. Assume thats the case whenever somethings obviously missing supports or hydraulics etc. good call though. i think it would all fit more or less, ill see if i can find mechanisms that do this kind of thing. suggestions welcome.

"The problem I'm seeing is that the chassis is still too low."

keep in mind its still twice any normal tank with tracks maximally retracted. It looks quite low as its proportionally wide. on that note i want to break the tracks up more. it looks too much like an Abrams scaled up. i want it to be wider and lower than an abrahms, like how a supertanker is to a cargoship. megaflat.

"There's still the matter of "what if" situations where your tank isn't in ideal combat environments where the walls aren't so neatly traversed."

Always gonna be. Always. Clearing a 12 foot wall is probably impossible but, rule of cool.. Although on tip toe it would probably sink!

"And if you're blowing things up, why not have fixed tracks instead? "

Do you mean so they cant extend as above? In that case it would get beached a lot I think.

Right, racer time, gotta go steal from Howard Hughs for a bit.
Recessed rivets...
After racer its a combat hover craft, you guys up for it? i know nothing about them. gonna need schooling. and going to set class a boat. hey would anyone mind if i sent them this way, for your gold dust crits?
Ive given the gang till end of the month to finish this we got a while yet anyway.

[The Fez]

I like where this is going.

The most way most modern tanks solve the clearance problem is that they don't. I might suggest the same approach I think your solution is novel, but I would make the degree of articulation even more subtle. The point here is that the more articulation you have to deal with, the more you have to fuss over mechanical details. The degree to which one must suspend their disbelief is also proportional to the height of the obstacle the tank is attempting to overcome. Here are some excellent diagrams of the M1-Abrams (most notably the one concerning the powertrain:





Personally, I would just avoid trying to solve the whole clearance problem altogether. I think it's counter-intuitive to the whole ethos of your design. The whole idea behind this tank is presence, ferocity, and indomitably. When I imagine this thing trying to traverse over some low barrier, I just see vulnerability and awkwardness. This is the sort of tank that would sooner blast through a barrier than try and carefully clear it with some complicated suspension and powertrain design. You could have a team of engineers on the tank that simply destroy obstacles with explosives as necessary. You came up with a solution for moving across barriers, but the moment you come up with a solution, you have to ask "Is there a better, more efficient way to solve the problem". For instance, one that doesn't require you to spend a couple of hours figuring out how to make the powertrain convincing. Just sending out a team of engineers requires virtually no design work on your part, and is, thematically, more engaging. If this thing is in a game or a movie or something, having literal guys go out to demolish the barrier will be exceedingly more dramatic than having the tank slowly crawl over some obstacles.

Or, better yet, the tank is equipped with some sort of device that can apply an explosive agent (like thermite, but hotter, because it has to burn through concrete) to an obstacle, and then just barrel through the obstacle once it's been cut to ribbons via chemical reaction.

I mean, think about it like this. You've got a railgun on this bad boy, which means it's using magnets to accelerate a slug of metal the size of a dachshund to some bonkers fraction of the speed of light, and it's got to worry about traversing a 4 foot tall wall of concrete? No. Fuck that bro. It traverses nothing. It moves through objects as it pleases. It is unstoppable. It's hunger for destruction is unquenchable. If you're wondering if it will then you know it fuckin' will-a. Call it Ares, god of war, and center your entire design ethos around that. It will be clear to anyone who looks upon it that it is meant for one thing and one thing only. Utter and total annihilation of anything beyond it's big-ass gun.

[Velocity Kendall]

Mwa ha ah aha hahahahahahaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!

Love it.

IS THIS FUN OR WHAT?? Stop being jerks and get into tad so we can do this every week.

You know, if the pivot was at or near fig 5 on the diagram, ie the drive sprocket, it actually might just work to have some articulation. just 5 or ten degrees. like a motorbike rear wheel. I htink dodging a standard tank trap is a neat enough trick to keep it in. like its doing 40, scopes an upcoming 4foot wall, lifts its skirts and takes it, smooth and flat.
clearing 20 foot walls is... well, you make a good point re hypervelocity linear rifles...

to clear concrete it might just be easier to shatter the thing and bulldoze it..

on that... two big super capacitors, the rail, the thing that rides the rail and the projectile. needs to look techy, cool, tough and resist small arms fire... hit me...

re power, the rifle and drives will need a lot of juice. all electric. a fuel cell maybe, or a cool techy cold fusion rig. no radioactives but 1billion degrees if it cracks...

"The most way most modern tanks solve the clearance problem is that they don't." ha ha haha

[LaCan]

My 2 cents of tank philosophy.

Modern tank designs are pretty much the same as ones 100 years ago when they were invented. The core of the idea and execution hasn't changed at all.

It's a simple concept; Cram as much deadly power as possible onto wheels, protect it with as much armor as needed while retaining as much mobility as you can.

You don't want to compromise any of these 3 factors in a tank design: deadliness, impenetrability and mobility. The main problem any extreme solution faces is inevitable give-and-take between them.

That's why tanks are never >big<. The bigger they are, the more armor they need to protect themselves. Consequently, more horsepower to carry all that shit around at sufficient speed. All historical mega tank attempts failed in practice. Either too expensive to maintain or just too clumsy.

Good tank design is a sweetspot between those 3 things, again: deadliness, impenetrability and mobility. The complete tank design history is a history of optimization towards that sweetspot.

Tank paradigm is efficiency, sadly - in killing.

Nothing is arbitrary about real tank designs. They are pure function. I doubt anyone designed a "look" of any tank ever. They look like that out of necessity. Of course, during the course of history fetishizing kicked in and tanks became perceived as having an aesthetics in and of themselves.

So yeah, if you're not going for scfi gratuitousness or mecha silliness, it's good to keep in mind those three principles. This means no dicey protruding stuff, no heavy rotating parts reaching far from barycenter, no stability risks, no spurious interventions on critical parts like suspension or drivetrain etc.

If monster chassis is a given, a tank designer will probably compact it full of equipment. Look-wise there would be a lot more greeble.

Try to put a photo of fully equipped Abrams in scale next to your design. That's probably a detail level you would want to propagate around the whole body to make the thing convincing and establish sense of scale and menace.

[Velocity Kendall]

So yeah, if you're not going for scfi gratuitousness or mecha silliness, it's good to keep in mind those three principles. This means no dicey protruding stuff, no heavy rotating parts reaching far from barycenter, no stability risks, no spurious interventions on critical parts like suspension or drivetrain etc.

Defintiely this. ID for entertainment is definitely different than ID. Its closer to toy design, although without having to worry about choking hazards. Real tanks are designed by engineers and welders and as you say look that way because they have evolved to.

But for entertainment things, its all about rule of cool. I prefer the realism/coolness balance closer to realism; i like those kind of movies and games I guess.

Tanks in mobile phone games, and physical toys are much further the other way, all zany design, very little real functionality. (as tanks... as toys they are highly design for moulding, construction, choking hazard, etc)

Depends on the IP. My imagined one would be... near future plausi-tech thats weird enough to be memorable. so, what it, in this future it turns out megatanks do in fact make sense, what would they look like. So long as it looks like it might work its enough.
Otherwise an A grade would be a tracing of an Abrams. I suppose you could do that, but its missing the point, and failing the class/to get paid.

As an example, from my favourite movie 2001, the Discovery has a centrifugla gravity torus thing. Totally useless in real life, wouldnt work at all in those specs, youd fall over due to coriolis and the ship would slosh and the gravity wouldnt solve the health problems for complicated engineering and medical reasons, but it totally works because it looks like it should.
Syd Meads Leonov was much more realistic, and a bit less interesting I thought. The Disco just worked. Although Mead is my all time hero hehe.

protruding stuff and the baricentre tho, that does need thinking about fo sho. if the audience will have their suspension of disbelief ruined by something clearly just broken in its design, its going to need changing. at the moment everything is arranged so the missiles dont shoot the radome or anything, but could be tighter and more thought through.
the three way compromise is definitely heavily weighted toward being very deadly and being very heavy, and very slow. So defensive mix is to prevent being killed by airpower. Air power killed battleships already, but the Phalanxes might go someway toward stopping rockets and the SAMs the tankbusters and cruise missiles.
so like, it drives in, unstoppable, 20 guys pile out and survey the devastation.

Yeah Im not a massive fan of the fetishation of violence. Syria doesnt look like a lot of fun. but milspec stuff has such an amazing, gawky-elegant aesthetic i cant resist. aesthetics are a concern so minimal, atleast in terms of the machine. its all pure function, and looks amazing as a result. often very chracterful. of course a weapon is an aesthetic tool, ie it paints landscapes with destruction and anyone seeing this will be awed or whatever, but theyre as styled as a chisel or other tool. pure function. its appealing. the only styling is by a GI with a paint brush.
i try and balance it in the stuf i spin off for my own entertainment, like the tianaman square thing, of the tiny person standing up to this huge horrible thing.
or the guy sneaking up on it as yet unnoticed. to kind of undermine the whole weapons are cool thing. its an internal conflict; weapons ARE cool. but killing and death arnt so great. i guess i always side with the underdog too. robin hood style! the tank is such a symbol of fuck you. im like oh really well fuck you! suck my IED!

"Try to put a photo of fully equipped Abrams in scale next to your design."

heres where im stealing ideas..
http://brainfunkd.tumblr.com/

btw in the blueprint above thats an abrams. but naked without any extra bits.

Im going to ponder it a bit. Maybe do another one, different. one with loads of little robot legs like the luggage in Discworld! but given the boxy kelly green milspec treatment. hmmm..

thanks for bringing this up, it helps to slice and dice the whole thing and think about it from the rule of cool entertainment design angle, and the skunkworks engineer angle too (or at least try and channel the engineer anyway!) Ron Cobb always said he was a frustrated engineer, in that he was too pussy to learn maths, so designed spaceships like an engineer might instead. i dig that!

[Giacomo]

milspec stuff has such an amazing, gawky-elegant aesthetic i cant resist.

That's because milspec stuff is intended to be completely functional, and not esthetic at all. Trying to create a milspec "look" is a lot like trying to write computer code in iambic pentameter. I'd recommend you either:

A) dig in, designate a specific use for this hardware, and follow that program rigorously and uncompromisingly without regard to estehtics, or

B) decide it's all about the "rule of cool" and come up with a bitchin' looking tank that doesn't necessarily make real-world sense.

You've basically flip-flopped between A) and B) for this entire thread, both in your designs and your explanations, and the product reflects it. For God's sake, grasp the nettle: pick an approach and follow through on it.

As always, just my two cents.

[Velocity Kendall]

hahaha wow chill man. its not an either or. youve seen near future sci fi games and movies right?
its not that complicated, the aim is design cool looking tech that might plausibly function and mimics real-world milspec stuff in terms of colour, detail scale disribution and that gawky xfactor only years of realworld testing can account for.
Like the dropship in aliens. Its B. when the missile things open the ship would spiral out of control. but you dont care cos it looks awesome. the wheels cant be made of jelly. but it can have an phsyically impossibly small battery to power its railgun... what does a realistic hyperdrive look like? i bet i could come up with some ideas but it wouldnt be by doing sums.

... i dont know radio propagation equations, but i do know what senior-trend era stealth looks like, and if you think thats not an aesthetic youre kidding yourself.. it looks like a bunch of triangles designed to scatter radar and so minimise the return signal. these days we have supercomputers to work out the sums, so stealthy planes can also be curvy, and fly quickly. but when they designed the F117 in the 70s they had to break up the surface so they could figure out the equations.. I dont have a supercomputer, but i can do a stealth jet by mimicking the f22 or the old f117. the original was styled by maths but it can and has been mimicked in concept art since.

I guess im saying dont get cross, play along.. B with a flavour of ersatz A, emphasis on maximising that flavour's believablity to the averagely nerdy viewer...

[The Fez]

IS THIS FUN OR WHAT?? Stop being jerks and get into tad so we can do this every week.

I am seriously tempted at this point.

I would contest the degree to which designers of military hardware eschew aesthetic. For reals, holmes, the engineers at Lockheed were not surprised to discover that the F-22 looked totally radical as shit when they finished designing it, like "Oh my science look what we have done here today". I don't think that 'slick factor' is simply a happy, unintended consequence of utilitarian design. At least not all the time.

Of course, I could be wrong. It could very well be that the perfect confluence of form and function just so happen to produce "beauty", and that engineers unintentionally create stuff that drooling military buffs (like myself) happen to enjoy.

I think it may be a little too extreme, however, to ignore one design approach ("rule of cool" vs. utilitarian design) over the other. We can't afford to, actually. Something like a tank is ultimately designed by hundreds of people, and involves consultants from different fields of expertise. There might be three guys whose only job is to run ballistics simulations on reflective armor at different angles, and they're going to do that for months. We're "designers". There's like one of you, and you've got maybe 1/3 of day to come up with a solid iteration for a tank design. We will ALWAYS be fudging the details. We don't know how to perfectly angle armor plating so that it can more efficiently deflect a HEAT round. Conceptual artists are, when it comes down to it, visual magicians. You DO have to pull off the hat-trick of making something both "cool looking" and feasible in terms of "real-world" practicality. Probably very little in terms of legitimate engineering thought went into designing Master Chief's Spartan suit, but how many of you actually stopped playing Halo to think about what kind of space-age material his base-layer is made of? Or what kind of mechanism controls the articulation of his shoulder joints? No. No one thought about that, because it's totally inconsequential to shooting aliens and looking like a badass anyway. Magic. Illusion. CONCEPT ART.

To that end, I think VC's approach is entirely legitimate.

[Giacomo]

B with a flavour of ersatz A, emphasis on maximising that flavour's believablity to the averagely nerdy viewer...

...or as the famous (apocryphal) quote runs: "Sincerity is the most important thing. Once you can fake that, you've got it made." There's no such thing as an ersatz concept with a high degree of "flavour" (or flavor) and and "believablilty." You either have a concept or you don't.

I don't want to start a flame war, so I will now respectfully withdraw. Those backhoe pix are amazing, by the way.

[Quike Garcia]

Man, I think that, as a fictional tank, is going great. LaCan has a great point. As a rule of thumb, you can have always in mind that advantages grow with the square, but disadvantages grow with the cube. The bigger the tank, the more surface to put stuff (square) but the more weight to move (cube). There's always the sweetspot where the improvements do not compensate the disadvantages anymore, and there's usually where the optimal designs are around.

With this size, I'd look more to inutilize the tank rather than destroying it. A couple of IEDs may be able to leave it stranded and out of line, rather that trying to use 4 or 5 300000€ missiles to try to make a dent on it.

[Quike Garcia]

I am seriously tempted at this point.

Of course, I could be wrong. It could very well be that the perfect confluence of form and function just so happen to produce "beauty", and that engineers unintentionally create stuff that drooling military buffs (like myself) happen to enjoy.

I'm also tempted.

And you're quite right. On an aircraft design there's almost nothing left for the looks, but in the end, the combination of functionality and minimalistic design brings out an strange beauty. If you don't believe me, check the C-295

[LaCan]

Speaking of fatal flying beauties, I'm in love with Russian SU 30. It's a thing of aberrant allure.

I also find Global Hawk drone strangely compelling. It seems like it has actually been designed for looks.

[Velocity Kendall]

Giacomo please dont go, I respect you way too much to have some silly flame war. I disagree with you is all. I already gave an example (the Aliens dropship) that was both highly believable and totally impractical, and many, many modernnmovie and game franchises have such designs. Star Wars innit. A spaceship thats a metal can full of the stuff we meat people need to live isnt practical at all. Id make a tiny superdesne computing substrate star wisp and live in its memory or something, but that looks a bit dull.
Most obviously mechs, which are impossible for many many reasons from power supply to knee bearing loads to being super vulnerable to tanks to heat dissipation. Doesnt matter cos they look sweet. The gundam rationale, that radar was unworkable and so hand to hand combat is necessary, is the level of make believe i think is about right for IP.

Quike loving your thinking. Spocklike logic. totally agree about the mass cubing; i made the tracks crazy wide to at least try and compensate..

""flavour" (or flavor)"

Hhahahaha hey its not called American. There are Us in colour and flavour and no frikken z in organise.

Speaking of fatal flying beauties, I'm in love with Russian SU 30. It's a thing of aberrant allure.

I also find Global Hawk drone strangely compelling. It seems like it has actually been designed for looks.

haha a man of taste!

i can credit the idea that in the days of H Hughes, if it looks good itll fly well still applied. but surely today this equipment is 0% aesthetic. why then as we've discussed does the F22 look soooooo good???

Some other drool-worthy classics

The Blackbird (surely the most beautiful plane ever?)
Hughs H1 (ok ok not a warbird, but so sexy)
F14
F117
B2
B1-B (or that big russky version the BlackJack)
Tacit Blue (the ugliest duckling ever, i love it a lot)
The Vulcan and Victor nuclear bombers
The Spitfire
The P51 Mustang
and this origami wonder, the Bird of Prey, from the Boeing Gorgeous Deathmachine Collection


did anyone adore this book as a kid?

[Waipunga]

Hey Al,
Having built boats and mucked about in them for a while (yes I know, no need to remind me....I am old-er!!) I am up for a bit of critiquing if you need it for TAD.

OK Tanks. Well, did a bit of time (14 yrs) in the army as an engineer then as an infantryman eventually ending up as an officer (should have stayed as a sergeant but hey that's another long fun story.)
So for my few cents worth. The more complex :the more vulnerable. The bigger :the easier to hit, the more crew :the more access hatches, the heavier the need for huge power plants, so the need for tankers with all that lovely volatile fuel for evil shit heads like me to blow up........
So hate to chuck a few grenades your way but the bigger the tank means a huge investment made which can be royally fucked over by a bunch of infantry popping up out of holes in the ground.
What you have with these magnificent machines of yours is self propelled artillery. They stay at the rear and fire over the top of everyone. They are a hellish valuable asset so they will never ever be up in the front lines climbing rubble and the like. That is what combat engineers are for. They clear paths for valuable prima donna-like assets to be guided through.

OK, what you need to do is look at the overall picture. Look at all the plethora of systems surrounding these machines and then design them to fit inside all of it.

Shit hot goods though man. Hats off to you for that.

[Swamp Thing]

You could make a transformer tank - the tank is just covering a deadly giant mech!!!1
But you could also make it a "tanksporter", like a giant tank that transport smaller tanks, or some other vehicles which need protection until they arrive at the battlefield (like being pro at melee-battle but vulnerable to missile attacks etc. while being on the move). Maybe that is a stupid idea, but I felt like sharing it...

In terms of complexity I'd rather become creative instead of analyzing it to the point of a tank-architect. Frank Lloyd Wright said "Form follows Function", however, this mainly as an architect who didn't want his buildings to collapse, killing thousands of people. I think you could decide for yourself what machines are needed, how big they are and what abilities they might have, as long as it makes sense.

[Velocity Kendall]

Steve youre boat knowledge will be invaluable I think.

To make this simpler, lets say the brief demands a giant tank. Theyre common in games like Command and Conquer. Thats usually how game work works; theres a list of assets needed and you design them, without going too far into arguing with the AD about the literal practicality of the things. I know this makes non-concept artists wrinkle their brows with the silliness, but its just the way it works. If the AD demands a sword made of lightning, you just do it wihtout saying it could never work and designing an exact replica of a steel broadsword instead.

SwampThing youve got it!

[LaCan]

The aesthetic vs. function mystery will probably never be resolved. Ever.

Here's one way to speculate about it.

Most human made objects are extensions of the body. In case of complex technology they are also projections of mental powers of homo sapiens into physical world. They may partly be projections of "dreams".
Consequently, any functional object will, to some degree, reflect proportions of the human body. Either directly or as something that accommodate them. We perceive this quality as potential "beauty" by a principle of mere familiarity.

So by borrowing this human-centric system of proportions from real designs, you'll probably make something that looks believable, possibly "beautiful". It doesn't matter if you approach the process like an architect or just flimsily paraphrase and transpose existing designs. When ersatz-ing, you actually smuggle some of it into your design without even knowing. That's why reference is important when creating a concept. You may mutate and combine it in unseen ways, but you can't really go far out without losing authenticity. You can't just invent random convoluted splotch and call it "Millennium Falcon the spacecraft".

This may account for mecha popularity. Mechs are meaningless functionally but they still impose systems of proportions that humans appreciate intuitively (human body, car, dog, horse...)


Btw. phrase "Form follows function" was coined by Louis Sullivan, not Lloyd Wright.

[Velocity Kendall]

I read a bit about Sullivan for my degree dissertation. It was a fantastically pretentious load of crap but I tried to imagine how superhuman AI might interpret the form follows function axiom.
Its pretty obvious that modernist buildings which claimed to be functional machines for living were often very ugly and unsuccessful, but this was becuse the architects had poor understanding of human psychology. How would a machine with a perfect understanding of human psychology design buildings? Amazingly, arbitrarily well, I imagine. Perfect to the limits of physical law and individual human desire maybe. But you can please all the people all the time.

It'll be interesting if we ever meet an alien to ask what they find beautiful. Its pretty obvious beauty is strongly tied into the reproductive urge, but why are swords beautiful? Actually Im assuming everyone in the world thinks they are, which is obviously not the case... to some people, the detectors on the LHC are beautiful, because of what they reveal about the universe. Some people love rubber and whips although i find that boring.. Hmmm.
I like samurai swords because they are well made, and we always like seeing people do things well right? So partly they are performance art. And partly they are the word POWER rendered in marbled steel. And they are so obvious in their purpose. That seems to apply to a lot of milspec stuff.
Its all about ideas for us humans, and some ideas, made physical, are very appealing to our individual sensibilities. And some sensibilities are fundamantal and common to everyone. Satisfying Mazlows pyramid of needs being key.
Shone through the prism of technological culture by hairless tool making primates these fundamental ideas can be literature, engineering, performance, music, sport, exploration, science.

Im fascinated by cars, as highly intricate a mirror of their makers and users as youre likely to find. in particular supercars, which i think are wonderful. fun, arrogance, pursuit of speed, all combined in the most sophisticated ways we know. taking something; the raw materials provided by the universe, and assembling them into something that has a kind of life. like weapons not of war but of entertainment. and not merely being utilitarian tools, but aesthetic delights too.
When done right, i think supercars are among our most joyous creations.

look at this. i think its utterly marvelous.
I dont want it, any more than i want the Mona Lisa (although id have a cezanne or two) but im delighted they exist.




or this


or these


or these knights in experimental armour


or these battle scarred street fighters






and the most marvelous thing about these joy machines isnt the way they look, which i love, but the way they move. i spend hours with my friends racing round the 9mile long Nordschlief in the gran Torismo video game. Because the cars dont really drive, they dance. And they all have different characters. Guiding a terrifying Zonda R through the Green Hell isnt like running a race, its like dancing a tango with a slightly crazy genius dancer whos in a cold rage.
Its a billionaires toy, a posing pouch for idle princes, but the Cistine Chapel was painted for a Pope about as holy as Saddam Hussein, and yet it shows us the face of God.
And when youre dancing with the car it seems alive, responsive, full of charisma. Wilful but skillful too. And honest and free. Qualities we admire in people we like. Thats magical. high interactive art.

[Velocity Kendall]

You can't just invent random convoluted splotch and call it "Millennium Falcon the spacecraft"..

Im not so sure. This remains my favourite alien ship/entity in cinema. It has this form for reasons of its own.



We already know life on earth can be startlingly alien, so while an actual alien might act or move using some familar (to future humans) principle, it might be radically unlike us. And the tools that mirror it are mirroring something deeply alien.
What might be reflected in the vessel of an entity composed of pools of turbulent water, like the Qax, or who fabricate themselves things from spacetime like the Xeelee?
The point is to fake alien-ness you might need to go random and or perverse and the bizarre in your designs. And indeed with milspec stuff, sometimes hinting at some powerful but mysterious power can be dont using the strange.
The F117 Nighthawk looks the way it does for mundane physical reasons, but I personally think it possess and increible aesthetic power, which has influced design for decades. I mean, they retired the last one years ago, the project is 40 years old at least, and low poly surfaces are old hat. and yet it remains utterly astonishing to look at. You know it does something special, although how the triangles are invovled is not immediately obvious. A strong theme like that, your mind just assumes the pattern is there for a reason.
If I lived 200 years from now thats what my space car would look like.

[pauloricardo]

hey man, for someone who just wanted some crits about the visual impact, you are making a very big research work... it is very interesting to see it... nest regards and very good job.

[Swamp Thing]

Btw. phrase "Form follows function" was coined by Louis Sullivan, not Lloyd Wright.

Haha, my bad!

You got some interesting points. I once read that swords and clubs were ment as an extension of the arm. However, I think the reason we find them beautiful or cool is that hidden phallus symbol. You can interpretate a lot in everything, and I know that a sword had a lot more functionality than we see today (like the reason for the cross-guard wasn't just defensive but to smash other peoples heads). I once also saw a docu how we depend to categorize everything by what it resembles. Well, most weapons nowaday don't have a functional meaning for us, especially weapons that aren't in use anymore, so we start treating them differently. We all love samurai-swords, they're aesthetic and aerodynamic. As well as samurais and ninjas are treaten more like artists, less like warriors. You know they are, but we see them in an aesthetical, blade dancer way.

But to summarize, I just think it depends a lot on the weapon type you're drawing, weather you make great researches. A tank is a troublesome machine, because it isn't forgotten, and it isn't a simple construction. And many people were sitting in one. Usually every men who visited FAF or military. But still, I can't tell a lot of tank design and function. Let's face that usually most of our work is ment for a certain kind of consumer. Gamers, Comic Readers, Novel Readers, Movie watchers etc. / or fans of a certain kind of vehicle (like car magazines, or maybe tank magazine, obviously with a greater understanding of these vehicles). Then, if the tank is for a gamer, is it for a war-game or some cyber-shooter? The war-gamer will probably know more about tanks, but the player who plays cybershooters (well even if it is the same player) will probably care a lot less about functionality, rather than having fun with utopic designs, accepting unrealistic stuff. So I'd say the ultimate reason for research depends on whom you want to sell the product to. Nevertheless, we have a giant, unexisting tank here. So the question is, who do you want to sell it to? This is the quint-essential question that will decide weather your focus is visually or functionally. Maybe a stupid question in this case, since the tank is for TAD and the target was research. Sorry.

[The Fez]

I read a bit about Sullivan for my degree dissertation. It was a fantastically pretentious load of crap but I tried to imagine how superhuman AI might interpret the form follows function axiom.
Its pretty obvious that modernist buildings which claimed to be functional machines for living were often very ugly and unsuccessful, but this was becuse the architects had poor understanding of human psychology. How would a machine with a perfect understanding of human psychology design buildings? Amazingly, arbitrarily well, I imagine. Perfect to the limits of physical law and individual human desire maybe. But you can please all the people all the time.

If you thought Sullivan was bad, try reading some Lebbeus Woods, or some Peter Eisenmen. Architectural theory, these days, is about as coherent as a Elton John's wardrobe. I had a professor who would drop terms on us like "Hyper-pragmatism", and when you inquired as to how this over-word differed in any respect from regular ol' pragmatism, he would basically parrot back definition 1 for pragmatism. It's all steaming bullshit, and it's why our profession (architecture) doesn't make sense any longer to the general public.

Concerning "Form follows function", and all of that jazz, it's not like Sullivan actually ever described what he was talking about in any rigorous philosophical terms. In the past century, the phase has been taken to mean a cacophony of different things to different people across different professions. People get too hung up on it, really. Obviously, modern architects used it as their credo, and then wound up designing a lot of terrible, soulless architecture, and did a lot of botched urban planning. They're still doing a lot of that to this day. What the phrase entails is not so much a confluence, or a simultaneity of form and function, but an obsession with function proper. I've always thought that the phrase, formally speaking, is ass-backwards from the truth: that a function is a direct result of a configured form. When you're designing, and you're tasked with producing a certain "function", you know that you can only achieve that function given particular forms. You cannot conceive of achieving a particular function without first conceiving of the forms necessary to do it. You can, of course, consider functions in the abstract, like "cutting paper", or "rotating gear", but any inquiry into how these these functions must be achieved requires that one conceive for the necessary components for the job. The function "cutting paper" will not tell you that you need sharp object to do so, but you know very well that objects with the property of sharpness have the capacity to cut paper. It is in the moment that we grasp the essence of a form that we also understand it's usefulness and application, and not vice-versa.

This is why I have no problem just putting some cool looking stuff down on a page without consideration for whether or not it's coolness causes it functional aspects to be less authentic. It is enough that functionality is suggested, because you are as likely to achieve functionality with beautiful forms as with utilitarian forms.