Learning Curve? What Learning Curve?

[ffutures]

Just wanted to say thanks to everyone who recommended Corel Draw and say one thing - this program is in many ways easier to use than Micrografx Windows Draw or Serif, especially for the relatively simple sort of thing I'm doing! For example, subtracting one shape from another is considerably easier and gives better results in Corel, curve editing is MUCH easier. I suspect that it does get a lot hairier if you get deeper into it, and especially into the more artistic side of things, but it looks like the steep part of the learning curve is somewhat above the level I'm working at.

In short, I'm now pretty confident that I know what I'm doing, at least for now, and I'm getting on pretty well. I think that one of the things I may put into the Forgotten Futures Compendium is a deck plan of a Buck Rogers style spaceship, complete with silly antennae etc., as a sampler of things to come. Here's a screen shot of what I've done so far - as usual any mottling etc. is down to jpeg compression and won't be in the final files.



Anyway, many thanks to everyone who commented for persuading me to take the plunge. It's definitely worth it.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

The thingies around the engine nozzles are radiator fins. This was actually not an unreasonable technological prediction; what the model makers failed to take into account was that unless the metal was refractory enough to take the heat directly, radiator fins wouldn't do any good as the nozzle would start to slump and then the heat would be reflected and/or conducted back through the system, probably eventually causing some sort of catastrophic engine failure (*BOOM!*)

Radiator fins of that design would also work poorly in space, because most of the energy would be radiated back into the nozzle or ship. OTOH, they might work in atmosphere, especially dense atmosphere. Flash Gordon / Buck Rogers spaceships seemed to spend a lot of time tooling about the atmosphere in horizontal flight mode, so maybe that's for what they were intended?

(yes, I know, the people who wrote those movies were barely aware that space is a vacuum, or what that implied -- just retconning for you) :)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's what I was thinking of when I designed the engines - I have a BMW motorbike with the big air-cooled opposed twin engine that's covered with the things so it comes naturally to me.

The silly antenna I was thinking of is the thing at the front, a stubby aerial with several rings around it. Maybe a lightning weapon or something, I don't think they have much in the way of spaceship weapons in Weinbaum but it's a fairly common thing in SF as a whole.