Ccommission for @pikablob of Imperial State Railway No.39865.
39865 is a steam-electric locomotive from the Empire of Light. Steam is raised with electric resistive heaters in the boiler, powered by overhead catenary cables. A small amount of coal is provided in the tender for the rare occasions these engines must leave the electrified lines.
I know a lot about steam locomotives and nothing about electrical engineering, so please forgive me if the electrical elements are clearly wrong.
This locomotive is based on a JNR 9600 class 2-8-0 freight locomotive, but with the WWII era Swiss electric-fired steam setup.
More information, art process, and alternate images, below the cut:
Photo of a real world JNR Class 9600. 9600s were mostly built to 3'6" gauge, but several were built to standard gauge for export to other countries.
Swiss electric-steam, a bizarre hacky solution brought on by a surplus of electric power and a deficit of coal during WWII.
No explanation is given as to why the Empire of Light uses this setup instead of electric motors, other than that it's really cool.
The initial sketch. The tender was not originally specified in the client's request, but i thought that a cylindrical tender with a small coal bunker would be fitting, since the primary purpose of this tender is water storage.
a few minutes into the line art.
Detailing some of the appliances.
due to the electrical equipment getting in the way, I moved the safety valve and whistle from the back of the boiler to the front.
I had to do delicate surgery a couple of times on this drawing. The first was to lower the running board, since it didn't match up between the outer sides versus the section between the smoke deflectors.
here's that first surgery mostly complete.
more plumbing! So much plumbing! It's hard to keep it all straight, and complicated by the fact that no two 9600s seem to have the same plumbing and appliances.
The wheels, after their construction was finished. And it really is a construction, more so than most of this drawing.
each wheel is made from a circular face-on wheel, with the wheel and axle being generated with essentially a digital compass tool (not a circle tool), and then the spokes being drawn in 5x symmetry. I don't think there should be ten spokes, but i don't think you can tell a difference; i usually cheat the number of spokes on a wheel to be whatever's easy.
The wheel is then stretched into an elliptical shape and resized to fit in its position. The outer rim is copied and slid back a bit for the wheel tread and flange. The spokes and the inner lip of the outer wheel were selected and moved back a few pixels to provide some depth, and then the inside of the wheel and spokes were drawn manually.
my stopping point on Friday afternoon.
The tender, now finished earlier tonight. All that remained was the running gear.
This led to the second delicate surgery. The entire engine was resting too low. There needed to be more space between the pipes and the tops of the wheels, to make room for some of the elements of the valve gear and just to be more accurate.
Do not make my mistake and wait until everything else is done to add the wheels. I knew it was bad practice and i did it anyway.
Anyway. here's the result after that surgery and the construction of the valve gear.
I'm getting to be good enough at valve gear that I can manage to be a little different from my reference if I want to be.
Compare my reference versus my drawing. The combination lever, that vertical bar over the leading wheel is slanted back rather than forward. The reason for this is that I wanted the locomotive to be in forward gear (with the radius rod (the rod connected to the top of the combinatio) at the bottom of the expansion link) rather than reverse as in the reference. I'm pretty sure i got away with it.
After a few more tweaks and additions, I finalized the line art.
threw on some color.
The livery here is quite simple, it didn't give me much to do. And of course that meant that the shading would have to do more work to make sure the details stood out.
After it was done, the finishing touches were to add the electric arcing, headlight, and steam fx.
Been getting back into Underrail lately, made a custom portrait with Olivia. Probably gonna draw more of her in that setting, all geared up in metal armor with LMGs and stuff.
I'm sure that when Karel Havlíček Borovský said "russians call everything russian slavic to call everything slavic russian", he wasn't talking about videogames; but the shoe fits
Dreadnought was already not-quite-like any other engine Kit had ever seen, but the one they'd come to a stop beside was even more so. From smokebox to cab it was mostly familiar; 'conventional', Nellie would probably say, in that way Kit had learned she did when she wanted to seem smart; but below, there were no wheels below the boiler, leaving the thing suspended high above the rail with clear air beneath it.
Instead, the engine had two sets. One sat below and afore of the smokebox, crowned by what looked like a water tank; the other stretched back from the base of the firebox, beneath a tender squished right up against the back of the cab. Both were painted in a neat red, wreathed in steam from their cylinders, while the rest of the engine was turned out in a matte black, lined and decorated in gold.
And in that gold, along her tender, the name Cerritos shone proudly.
"She's a Brannon-type," Nellie said, in the exact voice that Kit had just been thinking of; the realisation made her cheeks warm, fondly, just a little, "and paid for a Class A an' all; she'll be headed out the same way we are."
One of the more operationally interesting aspects of railroading on the Underrail is the so-called clipper trade; the trade in perishable goods (particularly tea) between the Empire and the Freehold States. It's generally agreed that these trains are the fastest way to get between the two (to the embarassment of the heavyweight expresses), and working them can be found all manner of eclectic locomotives. When steel passenger coaches and 4-6-2 Dignity-types arrived in the Freehold, many older express engines found themselves displaced to this service, while others are custom-built by a variety of foundries.
No. 24 Cerritos is one such example. Built in Summertime Junction in Drow-inspired style, she's what we we would call a Garratt Atlantic and what the Below calls a Brannon Double - the 4-4-2 layout having evolved from the 4-2-2 Singles in this universe. Interestingly, she has redundant safety valves; the lead Ramsbottom type are fitted in a decorative bonnet inspired by Hamilton School steam and sand domes, while her steam dome carries Salter type valves in addition.
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In actuality, this is a Below-version of @whirligig-girl's Gymnomi Garratt - the moment I saw the sketch I had to have a version of the design on the Underrail and she was nice enough to let me commission it. I'm planning to have her show up in Kit's next story, along with a couple of other fun designs :))
Experience Systems, Pacing, and Player Motivation – An Analysis of UnderRail’s Oddity XP system
Rewards and incentive systems motivate action, and the experience system of a game will shape how the player plays that game. This much is obvious, but experience systems also shape the pacing of a game as they determine the pace at which players get stronger. UnderRail is an interesting case study because it is an isometric cRPG with 2 xp systems; Classic and Oddity.
Classic xp works like how most RPGs award experience; killing enemies and completing quests. Oddity xp is unique to UnderRail. You get oddity xp for collecting oddities. Oddities are weird items that you can find in containers or by killing enemies. Some examples are the maps of Core City, a rat-hound ear with an earring, or a human skull with 3 eye sockets (where is your god now). You can also only gain xp from an oddity a fixed amount of times, eg: you can only get xp from the rat-hound ear 3 times.
UnderRail allows the player to choose between oddity xp and classic xp when the player creates a new save file. This creates a very interesting scenario because it means that we can view how the same game works with 2 different xp systems, how the pacing and player motivation changes.
In terms of pacing, classic xp is far smoother. Since you’re constantly killing enemies and completing quests, you’re constantly getting xp. This is unlike oddity xp which is very feast or famine. Since you can only get xp from any given oddity a certain amount of times, when you enter a new area there’ll be a whole host of new oddities for you to collect. But pretty soon you’ll have collected most of them and now the only source of xp is completing quests. There are some areas that oddity xp awards experience smoothly; those are the early game (until the player collects the drill in Depot A), the late game (Deep Caverns), and the Expedition dlc (the Black Sea). So it’s clear that oddity xp can be smooth, but in UnderRail’s mid game, it is not.
So why is UnderRail’s oddity system smooth in some cases but feast or famine in others? And why is the classic system consistently smooth? I believe that the reason for this is a discrepancy between goals of the oddity xp system and the goals of the core gameplay loop. The goals of the oddity xp system are to encourage a more pacifist playstyle and to enable an immersive sim experience. However the core gameplay loop is based around combat. Half of the skills in the game are purely for combat, a further quarter indirectly improve the player’s combat abilities, while only a quarter have no combat utility. This mismatch is the cause of the oddity system’s flaws. While the player is always fighting enemies and doing quests, the player is not always exploring new areas. This means that the xp system which rewards fighting monsters is always granting xp which the system which rewards exploration is only granting xp some of the time.
This brings us onto the discussion of how xp systems impact player motivation. As I mentioned previously, the oddity xp system encourages a more diverse “immersive sim” playstyle while the classic xp system encourages a more combat oriented playstyle. For example, the skills hacking, lockpicking, and pickpocketing are very much optional skills under the classic system (especially pickpocketing, which only leads to a different way to complete a quest exactly once). However under the oddity system, they become practically mandatory to gain a decent amount of xp. Additionally, under the classic system, the player only has to kill enemies and complete quests to gain xp, while under the oddity system, the player also has to comb through the environment looking for loot. This demonstrates how a different xp system can encourage a different play style even in the same game.
This is why I love analysing how systems interact. Teasing out that the oddity xp system leads to a worse paced game that encouraged a more looter style gameplay, while the classic xp system led to a better paced game that was more combat oriented, was a very interesting experience.
