Scorpious, your so right, the biggest problem currently with ship art is that they are never compaired next to each other for scale purposes, and are never compaired against stations. I only say this because if they had done this they would clearly see that everything is extremely out of proportion. But since the artist has moved on, any such changes will take a while to get fixed, if ever. And IMO, makes everything a bit to thrown together looking.

Yeah, I wouldn't complain if the stations were all bumped up by 150% scale.

why not shrink all the ships so that all there pilot enclosures were ruffly the same size and go from there, I believe the devs have said the statinos are as big as they can get.

the station are ok, i think (even though they are horribly out of scale). my main concern is that the ships be roughly to scale. The only ships i hve seen that seem out of scale with the rest are the valk and the maud (the valk seems too big for a light fighter, and the maud seems too small for the cargo capacity it has). everythinjg else seems ok (as far as i can tell anyway).

 johnhawl218,
the problem with shrinking all the ships till their cockpits are the same size is, the cockpits wouldn't nesisarily bee the same size. also some ships like the wraith and maud have vastly different desines of cockpits and therefore would be diffucult to scale.

As for the mini frig:

i like it. i think the desine is cool, and a good start for a series of corvet and light frigate classes. It obviously needs better defences than it had when it was debued (some weapons would help a LOT) but if i'm correct the devs esentialy threw together something that they could fly, and that would use the art for the mini frig (not intending it to be a combat worthy vessil at this time). i expect the actual npc and/or player version to be drasticly different.

it's design not desine… anyway =)

Cockpits can be differently designed and still be proportionally the same. Image what (1) person would look like sitting in the cockpit, then scale the ship accordingly, then take the next ship, figure what one person sitting in it would look like, and scale it to match the one next to it, it's THAT SIMPLE.

It's really not quite that simple, at least from my perspective. I say, if we're going to scale the ships, let's do it right the first time, and get rid off the cartoony nature of the VO ships. I think that they DO need to be scaled at least a little differently, but I'd much rather see improved designs at the same time.

I'll stop now, since I've probably been going off about this particular aspect too much.

A thing about the Trident: a quick fix, ie something that wouldnt require too much effort, would be to put at least a dozen of thick dividers along that huge-one-piece bridge window. As this seems to be the only trait of the ship that allows you to identify its size, without compairing it directly to another ship. Making the dividers thick and concave will make the ship look more robust and speedy. Now add a realatvely large middle section window (with half-circled ends) and you got yourself a flashy bridge-deck!
A few more ideas:
1 Sparsly adding clusters of windows -perhaps 20-30(windows) in clusters of 5- to the hull would give the feel (at least it does to me) of it having a lot of armor and punch for its size.
2 If the front portion of the bridge were sloped upward and included more curves(perhaps no edges at all), the already sleek design of the ship would only be amplified.

My thoughts.

OH yeah, at the level and/or for the amount of money required to buy the Trident, i believe one should be allowed to color the entire ship black.