I had a sudden idea yesterday for a little police/security runabout for the spaceport. I already had a firefighting vehicle and an ambulance on the content list, but for some reason I hadn’t thought of police or security. Once the idea occurred to me, I spent a little while thinking about how I wanted to approach it.
I wanted something small and hilariously cute, like a golf cart. I also wanted it to look old, like something that had been in use for a couple decades, and I wanted it to look like it’d take 38 seconds to go from 0 to 60 miles per hour and probably rattle apart shortly after topping out at 80 miles an hour. I also visualized it being driven by a rumpled, potbellied old security type with an impressive walrus mustache.
I ended up with something that was essentially a city car, and I made it look a little bit old-fashioned by giving it a mix of contemporary and retro lines.
Work in progress:
Shown by itself, without any additional context, it just looks sort of like a small modern car. Once you see it alongside a more futuristic vehicle, however, it’ll look exactly as old-fashioned as I intended it to be.
I had planned for the fire trucks to be red/silver with yellow/red Battenburg markings on the sides, and the ambulances would be either yellow or bright green with green/yellow Battenburg markings. To keep within that overall visual theme, the police runabout is currently silver with bright green/blue Battenburg markings.
I’m not entirely happy with the light bar being textured into the roof like that, so I might be doing it as a separate piece and raising it off the roof a bit. I haven’t decided yet.
I’m also planning to do a little VW-style van/people carrier sort of vehicle to match the runabout. I mean, you gotta have a way to transport rowdy adventurers when you arrest them for stuffing the customs inspector headfirst into a trash can, and somehow I don’t think the boot of a subcompact city car is the answer. 
Update: In response to Tomas’s feedback, this is one of the alternate schemes I was considering.
Want to support this project?
Visit the project page for more details: Spaceport Set I
Looks cute. I’ll build it. (And I want the van, too.)
Ok, now you’re just spoiling us!
I like this little car, although these aren’t the colors I would have picked for this line. Somehow, the colors you used in all the other releases for the uppity robots are a lot more toned-down. This fluo scheme clashes with that for me.
Carlfishman:
Tomas: It’s a fair point. My plan was to see how the fire truck and ambulance turned out, then look at all of them together in context and see if it still works visually. If not, I’ll pick a different scheme for the final release.
Mainly, I wanted the spaceport police scheme to be different, and I didn’t want to automatically go straight to the stereotypical black/white or blue/white schemes without trying out some different ideas first.
Yeah, I understand about not going the black/white way.
On the other hand, I think you are missing an opportunity here. Uppity robots was your version of Battlestar Galactica. That series (even the new one) used a very nice toned-down, somehow 70’s look on sic-fi. All the things look somehow utilitarian, no-nonsense. The Battenburg scheme addle looks too modern for this kind of sic-fi. So if I were you, I would be going mental on designing my own police/ rescue vehicles schemes.
I can see where you’re coming from with that analysis. I don’t disagree with any of it.
The reason the Battenburg scheme ended up being the first thing I tried was because I liked the idea of tying together the spaceport police/rescue service vehicles together visually with some sort of common unifying element, and I like to draw from the real world wherever possible to help anchor the audience into whatever imaginary reality I’m working on. This is the first analogy to come to mind because I’m about to have my first cup of coffee and I’m still a bit stupid, but the nice thing about Battenburg livery is it’s sort of like how Power Rangers wear the same basic Spandex getup, but the colors differ from character to character. For instance, yellow ambulance with yellow/green checks, red fire truck with yellow/red checks, and so forth.
On the other hand, the Battenburg livery I had in mind for the firefighting truck and the ambulance is a bit more…”subtle” is the wrong word, but they harmonize better with the vehicle paint color. Maybe I ought to do the same thing with the police vehicle. I’m going to redo the pattern to about half its current size and experiment with different color combinations.
I think the small car is cute and I would love to see it in my collection for a meter maid or lightly traffic duty, maybe at a European tourist attraction.
Airport police I would think carries equipment for boarding aircraft, storming terminals, and crowd control, kinda like a SWAT team box truck or a police version of a UPS truck. Might even make it a hover or groung effect version (only cause I hate wheels
)
Well, if I turn the spaceport police into Captain Supercommando McSwatpants And The Crime Exterminators with the kind of gonzo weapons and equipment that make mall ninjas salivate, then it’s hard to have the sort of freewheeling adventures gamers normally get into unless the players’ collective idea of fun is a 30 second firefight followed by ignominious death for the unlucky ones or 25 to life in a spacey Turkish prison for the lucky ones.
What I want is a generally more Wild West attitude towards things like armed player characters and bar fights, and a lot of what I’m doing is putting an emphasis on adventuring potential and dismissing legal/societal realism where it gets in the way of a fun game. Because most of the lower-level gaming potential is out on the frontier, I’m doing this basically as if it were a frontier spaceport with older equipment. So, you’re much more likely to find hardcore SWAT-style spaceport security teams on one of the more heavily developed worlds, but out on the frontier, you’re more likely to meet a grizzled old sheriff type in a golf cart.
As for hover/ground effect vehicles, I would prefer to save them for thematically appropriate environments rather than squandering them or diluting their wow factor by making them too commonplace. Little things like nonstandard propulsion systems have a much more effective visual/storytelling impact on something like a swamp world or a desolate frozen planet, because they can make things feel a bit more exotic.
I like the alternate. Somehow, it looks more spaceport-ey
Dumb question, but why does it have police mirrored on the hood? So the planes/space ships can see it coming in their rear-view mirrors?
Man, I can’t win. Here I was thinking that if I didn’t mirror the text so it would be readable in rearview mirrors, people would be giving me stick about how it needs to be readable in rearview mirrors. Instead, the opposite happens.
The reimagined BSG (and by extension SOTUR) is somewhat technologically regressive in several ways, so cars still use rearview mirrors instead of cameras. Then again, the slope and low height would make it kind of hard to see in a rearview mirror anyway, so maybe I’ll flip it back around the right way after all.
I like the Battenburg. It will look so cute next to my Interceptor in the same livery.
“See? I’m a real cop too.”
“Yeah, sure, whatever.”
My comment was mainly that this car is supposed to be used on a tarmac, Chris. You know, the place where the only other vehicles with rearview mirrors are the firetruck and the ambulance
Although I do see a pretty funny scene in my mind at the moment involving a spaceship taking off, building up speed and seeing this little car driving at full speed along the runway to interrupt them. And the evil super villain spotting the “police” sign in his rearview camera and going “oh no! hurry up! it’s the cops!”
actually the Police cars that are on the runway tend to get used allover the airport, even the firetrucks and ambulance would be used where the public would be.
So the mirrored writing is right, “i’m a cop to and i worked the airport for two years” it was the biggest pain in my ****.
i like the look of this vehicle, though it looks like my old “panda” car (usually a small car like a mini metro) that can’t catch anything unless it breaks down.
Tomas: That would be a funny scene.
Northerheathen: That’s what I was thinking too, they’re street legal vehicles and they’re used off the tarmac frequently. I guess I’ll reverse the text again.
I was hoping somebody would think “Panda car” when they saw it, so I got that part right at least.
Personally, I don’t think the ‘orange’ stripe visually appealling – should be red.