Evolution of the British Leviathan

When Doug Chaffee submitted is first set of sketches for the battleships, it included the British as well as the French. As previously discussed, while the French went through numerous iterations before we finally crafted the perfect vessel for Leviathans, we still fell in love with the general concept for the French “style” right out of the gate.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the British. Now to be fare we didn’t provide as much specific direction to Doug for the British. The French, after all, had the tumble-down hull as an historical connection and that helped to craft a very unique looking design.

By comparison the British were almost…vanilla. As such, the first illustration we received was still far too wet-navy ship looking, especially in the stern. Additionally, the sides were exceptionally similar to the original sketch of the French battleship.

Doug took our comments and turned in a revised sketch that significantly altered the stern and added more details to the side tanks. However, again, if you look at the first two French sketches, we realized that we were still a little too close to that design in the stern and side locations.

As I mentioned before, one of the important visual aesthetic points that arose out of trying to distinguish the British “style” from the French is that there are three primary visual touch-points that need to be relatively unique on each ship: the stern (i.e. the ducted fans for propulsion), the smoke stacks and the electroid tanks. In fact I just approved the “style” for the Austro-Hungarian and Italian ships after revising the initial sketches to take those three points into consideration once again.

As a side note, on the last point I’m not talking the side tanks; if you go to the Wallpaper section and look at the full-color illustration of the French Battleship, you’ll note it has copper tanks along the side (these are the ‘trim’ tanks that help to stabilize the ship during flight) and then along the keel are much larger tanks…these are the electroid tanks I’m talking about. While the copper trim tanks do tend to have a unique configuration from empire to empire, they still are relatively the same. Instead it’s the unique look and placement of the larger electroid tanks that help to instantly identify an empire as someone looks at an illustration of a ship or a miniature they’ve never seen before and can immediately place it in an empire.

With those visual keys starting to solidify, I went back to Doug to have him hammer on the British some more to make sure that while they might be “vanilla” to the French ship (they are 1910 British after all), they still had their own cool and unique look.

See ya next duty shift!

Randall