Time for a bit of an update. Been quite busy RL so not had much time to devote to playing. And my main PC monitor is off to repair so playing on an old crappy screen which kinda kills the mood a bit. But have gotten a bit done.
First of a nice surprise. Soartex Fanver was updated and to my great pleasure I noticed these during a stroll through my building materials gallery:
These are Chisel Factory blocks. These 5(and one other I think) are so far the only ones of that category that have been converted but man which great 5! Can really see some opportunity in these. Hoping to see more of the Factory and Futuristic Armor blocks converted in the near future.
The cobble colossus is no more.. cobble. I Simply could not find any other material in the right colour and shade with a smooth enough texture, so ended up settling on simple "Stone". Its a bit bright but I plan on adding darker coloured details on it later and hope that will help.
I also put real glass in the power conduit/walkway walls and it helped a lot. Need to later decorate these tunnels with some kind of power conduits and all kinds of wires, cables and pipes etc. Plan on building the fake power conduits out of some sort of lamps and then controlling it via Rednet cables so I could animate it to pulse or "wave" along the length of it. That and liquiducts with some kind of cool looking "cooling fluid" liquid in them should make it looks rather nice.
I am also experimenting a bit with a (so far) fake reactor housing. I kinda wanted it to be situated inside the main tower, but think it would take up too much room. So decided to try and place it just behind it instead. But the size I wanted didn't fit inside the structure and sticks out a bit underneath and a lot on top.
But I don't think it protruding like that will be a problem as I think the tower could some extra support fixing it to the main structure. So will probably put a shallow "wedge" from the tower and down onto the horizontal surface. Something not unlike what I seem to remember from a SW star destroyers back end.
I did think about making 2 reactors and just leaving the spheres exposed on the outside sort of like the SW Interdictors, but then again it would be a daft engineering aspect to leave your main reactors so exposed
EDIT: Inner reactor sphere in bright white quartz: