Have briefly scanned the forums and forgive me if this suggestion has been made already...

How about running a Ship design competition?

If needs be, you could offer a few months free subscription as prize and maybe a prize for building the model (LOD meshes, textures etc).

I understand a lot of effort is required to integrate a new ships into VO, but I bet you'd get some wicked design ideas for future updates.

I see Waylon is working on a new ship, but it couldn't hurt to see what crazy ideas the community can come up with.

I don't think enough players know how to design a ship. I mean if I had the programs I would mess around with them to figure it out if that was possible. But I have no know-how.

Question: For the Devs
What would we need exactly?

/givemoney Devs 2c

I was thinking initially drawn submissions then a competition to build the chosen design(s)...

We already had one of these.

oo - where can i see the designs and winners?

There were no winners. Only losers.

Kinda like life, eh genka?

There is a rather good program called Wings 3d, which can be used to create 3d models of ships.

It is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. And here is some linkage for lazy people
http://www.wings3d.com

...although for the models to be of any use to Waylon, they really ought to be in 3ds max format. Unfortunately, most of us are too poor to afford that. I used blender. *shrug*

Also note that if you're try to use Wings3d on linux, get the binary from the site. It's really, really, really hard to compile from source. At least, it was last time I tried...

PS: If you guys wanna see some old shots of my entry (before I finished texturing it, and when the model still had some...kinks), check it out here-> http://roguelazer.com/bigship/