Welcome to our Creator spotlight!
Continuing our series of Space Engineers Creator Spotlights with Colonial Republic Navy – Talyn, CatalysmUnabridged and Mecklord!
Talyn
Hey there, I’m Talyn. My journey in Space Engineers began back in 2016 when I bought the game after watching the “Group Survival” series made by Shack, W4sted and Morph. I remember being mesmerised by the game and immediately buying it as soon as I could. I started hanging out with CatalysmUnabridged and Mecklord and we started building our first line of ships, the “New Caledonian Federation” line. It was around this time I also began experimenting with Digital Photography in SE, setting up entire scenes with the builds we made together to try and best capture the idea in my head.
I was later contacted by AryxCamina, who wanted to use our builds in a trailer for her weapon mod beta, which would eventually come to be the well known “Aryx Weapons Enterprises” mod. From this came one of my biggest friendships outside of Cat and Meck. We helped to beta-test the mod before it was publicly released and as a bonus I got to use the mod to improve my digital photography. To this day me and Cami are good friends, and I help to moderate the discord for her mods, as a small thank you for all the consideration she gave us while initially building her mods. Unfortunately I became disillusioned with our first line of builds, the “New Caledonian Federation” ships, taking a break from Space Engineers for about a year. But after I came back, the three of us got together and I suggested moving towards a more hard sci-fi style than we had previously been used to, which the others were happy to try out. From this came our current builds, the “Interstellar Colonial Republic” line of ships. I’m a little busier than I used to be with work these days, but I love Space Engineers too much to give it up, and I can’t wait to see
where both SE1 and SE2 go in the future!
CatalysmUnabridged
My experience with Space Engineers started soon after Talyn’s after he and our friend group convinced me to purchase a copy. I’d always enjoyed sandbox style games, and maintain a passion for anything in the sci-fi genre, so SE was the perfect fit for me. I’ve always been a creative person, online and offline as well. While I will be the first to admit that many of my early ships were very prickly, gun-laden bricks, I quickly found myself enjoying the game more and more as I discovered new techniques, ideas, and styles. While time and many updates have changed the ways in which I build, (I apologize to my fellow builders for my unyielding color OCD) my fervent interest in the game has never waned.
Talyn mentioned above our line of “New Caledonian Federation” craft, which for a number of years took up the bulk of my time on SE. Nowadays though, we’ve begun exploring our newest style of ships with the “Interstellar Colonial Republic”. Personally, this line flipped almost everything I knew about SE on it’s head, or rather it’s side. The building style has challenged me to change my way of thinking about ships, and to incorporate clever workarounds, especially when working in some of the more compact spaces. It’s also the first line that leaned into using hinges, rotors, and custom turrets to achieve their signature style. Overall, this game will without doubt continue to challenge me, and keep me entertained for thousands of hours more.
Mecklord
My own experience with Space Engineers began in the early days of survival back in 2015, unfortunately I didn’t get to play much back then due to the absolutely ancient computer I owned at the time. It wasn’t until I made some friends online in 2019, and after the Minecraft Server we all met on collapsed that I started playing again. I landed on a survival server hosted by a friend, still having a potato but wanting to hang with my new friends. I started overhauling and designing ships for the group, and never really stopped. I first got with Talyn and Catalysm, back during the old NCF days when they reached out for help building ground vehicles, and while those rovers never got released it opened the door, and gave me an idea of what was possible design wise, and I quickly began to build my own ships and rovers, for both survival and creative.
For the last little while, I’ve been the wiring and Klang guy working on the wiring as well as anything that moves, such as ramps and custom turrets. I also work a bit on the interiors under Catalysm’s draconian color control.
ICR
The overall idea with the ICR ships was to create a more hard sci-fi style out of our old building styles, taking inspiration from “The Expanse” TV show and books, as well as a LOT of concept art scrolling to get ideas. We settled for ships that had a vertical deck layout like in The Expanse and went for no FTL drives or directed energy weapons. Each ship has a ring, which has no survival function, but in-universe is meant to be an advanced piece of engineering capable of allowing human ships to travel at near-lightspeed with no relativistic effects. Inter-system travel is accomplished via naturally occurring wormholes.This allows us to create interesting stories out of the limitations imposed by these rules.
Looking forward into the future, we have no intentions of slowing down, with many more craft, orbital stations, and facilities that we’re excited to build and share with the workshop! We appreciate the opportunity to share our stories here, especially for a game that has been a huge part of our lives! With any luck, we’re looking forward to continuing our fun with Space Engineers 2!
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[ICR] ‘Hydra’ Class CorvetteThe “Hydra” Class Corvette was one of the first smaller ship designs to be incorporated with an onboard particle accelerator, used to open and traverse natural wormholes between star systems. This upgrade allowed the Navy to massively increase it’s presence in newly colonised star systems without having to build corvette grade vessels in-situ. |
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[ICR] ‘Kelpie’ Class DestroyerThe Kelpie Class is one of the newest designs to join the Republic Navy, originally conceived as a testbed for experimental plasma-based weaponry, the design quickly proved itself and has gone on to incorporate the new SPARTAN plasma turrets, and has distinguished itself in combat against The Swarm. |
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[ICR] ‘Phoenix’ Class Missile CruiserThe “Phoenix” Class Guided Missile Cruiser is the main backbone of the Colonial Republic Navy. The design is relatively new but has some mileage on it. The class has seen heavy action in both skirmishes with the Centauran Alliance and more recently, the ever more dangerous “Swarm” threat. With the future of humanity appearing uncertain, it remains to be seen if the Phoenix Class can once more rise from the ashes. |
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