So, since these are sailing ships, naturally everything is run by grog - more grog makes the crew happier so they work better. Basically that's what power bars are. With that in mind, here's the rough outline for the crews - all humans, with different jobs. Some variation in their visuals would be nice e.g. engineer can have a hardhat etc. Feel free to be creative ;) but this is the basic outline.
Going to leave crystals out of it as I can't think of a good way to make their lockdown power work in this context. Was thinking some kind of netting but the graphics wouldn't work well for it.
So, you can also use the human/rock/engi/zoltan animation sheets to give a basic set of reference for all of them in terms of shape and movement, since they're all humanoid apart from the drones. Though a bit of colour variation would be nice to have as well.
Just keep in mind, this is your part of the mod, so don't be shy to express artistic freedom and all that.
Human = officer (regular person)
Mantis = fighter (guy with cutlass)
Engi = engineer (guy with wrench)
Zoltan = drunkard (guy with stein/tankard)
Rock = guy in armored suit
Slug = guy with telescope
Repair drone = monkey with wrench
Combat drone = automated cannon (if that makes sense)
A few other notes on animations: some kind of fan or something instead of fire extinguisher for that section,
for the console animation, I think we're mostly going to have it as a series of cranks, since ships are controlled by ropes. I mean one of these:
though piloting will obviously be just a big steering wheel, etc.
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Oh and before anyone asks, there won't be any shields on any of these ships. We're going to be using a completely different defense system, which wouldn't have been previously very feasible, except because we're going to have custom shops, it is now a possibility (lots of guns that shoot a lot of times, lots of damage, lots of HP, cheap cheap cheap repairs).
Basically there's going to be 3 distinct classes of ship - cutters, which are small and quick, submersibles, which can submerge (cloak), and line ships, which are big and properly heavy. We'll initially start with 3 of each. Looking at giving them 30, 90 and 150 HP respectively - the cutter will however be getting rockplating/systemcasing at ~80-90% value (change "resisted" to "missed") so it's basically got the same kind of effective HP, just that it exhibits it by being smaller and harder to hit, instead of by being heavy and sponging lots of damage. This does however mean that to keep your survivability, you lose 2 augment slots, which will feed into the overall balance of the ship. The sub will be the least directly-defensive ship in that sense, but with cloaking to compensate. And yes that means no damaging beam weapons, though some kind of flamethrower (read: fire beam) will likely make an appearance.
Not entirely sure how we're going to handle drones yet - attack drone = seagull? some type of da vinci style flying machine?