Possible ship mod, need some input

[Decoman]

I am able to model anything really, and I thought it would be fun to at least get started on a possible ship mod (adding ship). And I hope that people have some ideas that they don't mind sharing with me.

What I had in mind here, was to get some ideas for specific ships, and then I would try to gather reference material and start to set up for modeling.

To be honest, I have little knowledge about modding, though I do not see any issue preventing me from starting to think about this.

Possible issues:
• Polygon count
• Special polygon mesh topological requirements, like triangulation and whatnot
• Level of display? I.e several versions of the same ship with different polycounts.
• Limitations and requirement on texturing work

Outside this scope:
• Conversion, animation and anything that is not modeling and texturing.

If anyone has a knowledge about a specific shipname or class/type, I would be happy to try look for reference materials. I just don't like starting off from scratch with no idea at all what ships might be plausible to include.

a) Background ships, used for decoration:
• Ships in harbour, probably non-sinkable ships in friendly harbour
• Possibly some structure located on land
• Tanker?
• Sailing ship?
• Tugboat?
• Yacht?

or

b) Warships and whatnot:
• Any warship really
• Any other ship

It would be important to start of with a specific idea, and not just conjuring some fantasy ship. I hate doing modeling without at least a minimum of reference material.

[Nisgeis]

Poly count, topological requirements, Level of Display? (Level of Detail / LoD?) and Texture limits will all be made clear when we have the game and can look at the in game units.

[cardiff]

Not having the game im not sure, but as the Queen Mary is in the game then i think the Queen Elizabeth should be in there as well, seeing as it was the largest passenger ship in the world at the time (and hence the holy grail of submariners). I think we have been lucky in that quite alot of ships have been included, though an underconstruction Graf Zeppelin would be cool in harbour. I think 2 classes of italian battleships are missing and i would like to see the Repulse (the model in the game is of the Renown refit). Other than that there are quite a few minor adjustments needed for the ships (Nelsons class secondary armaments have double bases, Hood missing rangefinder, looks like Scharnhorst has wrong secondary armament etc).

[Sailor Steve]

I'm always frustrated that people focus on the 'giants', even though there were only one or two of each. Nobody ever talks about the thousands of smaller merchants. There were 'ocean liners' that displaced as little as two thousand tons, and freighters and tankers that were only three or four hundred tons. They were everywhere in the coastal areas, and nobody seems to even care.

[blackhorsecav]

How about the evacuation of Dunkirk in June 1940 when England sent in massive amounts of ships to rescue Allied soldiers from the beaches? Having both English and German fighters along with civilian and military ships would be an interesting mod...