LE A remodeled Katariah for a modder's resource.

[Armada6136]

Hello all! So, one thing that I think most modders can agree on is that Skyrim has a lack of well-designed ships. The vanilla Viking longship style is fine to a point, but for mods dealing with other provinces it starts to become a bit of a problem. We do have some resources for this, like Markus Liberty's Imperial ships and DeviantKaled's Lore Friendly Ships, but both of these have issues that make them slightly less viable. Markus' ships lack interiors and are a bit of a problem to actually board, and DeviantKaled's are well modeled but untextured and not in .nif format.

 

Vanilla has one other form of ship: the Imperial style Katariah. The problem is that the base Katariah in game is obscenely huge, and rather specialized. However, there is also an unused model that is both significantly more usable and has a ready-made interior already present in the CK. However, this ship has the disadvantage of being...well, kinda terrible looking above the rail. Like, this isn't exactly a believable seagoing vessel.

 

 

 

See? Not great. However, I am aware that there are those out there with a degree of a skill at manipulating existing .nif files. And this ship, while not exactly great, is salvageable. Mainly, I'm suggesting tweaking the model in a couple of ways that would make this prototype into a more versatile. A proper galleon, really.

 

This is just a quick and crappy mockup I made in MS Paint:

 

 

 

Relocate and copy a few masts, get rid of the weird dragon things, the banners, and the figurehead, add a bowsprit, slim the front of the keel, and put some stairs at the back and this model becomes much more believable and useful. Retexturing it and the interior with the normal ship textures would just finish the job. Someone could even make an open sails edit or a wrecked version to make it even more versatile.

 

Now, I'm not a modeler. I've tried using Nifskope and Blender, and both are pretty beyond me. But I know there are modders out there with experience at this sort of thing, and I hope that this idea seems feasible. I feel like this would make a really good resource and allow for a lot of good mods in the future.

 

Just a thought.