Warships modeled on the real thing

June 28, 2026 · naval combat

The naval hulls were blocky in the good way and blocky in the bad way. This pass keeps the chunky look but multiplies the detail roughly tenfold, and gives each class the silhouette of a real warship it's based on.

The Tempest heavy cruiser in close-up: a long planked deck with edge railings, a tiered tower, two funnels, masts with radar yards, and rows of secondary and AA mounts — The Tempest up close — planked deck, deck-edge railings, a tiered tower, secondary and AA mounts down both beams.

The reference ships

Every hull now nods to a specific class, so the roster reads as a real line of battle:

The Tachi destroyer is a Fubuki/Kagerō-class Japanese destroyer — lean, two raked funnels, twin 5-inch gun houses, and the heavy centreline triple torpedo tube banks those ships were built around.
The Bastion cruiser is a County-class Royal Navy heavy cruiser — high freeboard, three tall thin funnels, twin 8-inch turrets fore and aft, and an amidships catapult with a floatplane.
The Dreadnought battleship is a Yamato-class — a towering pagoda superstructure, a single great raked funnel, three triple main turrets, and a forest of light AA.
The premium Tempest stays a USS Des Moines: a flush-deck heavy cruiser with three triple autoloading 8-inch turrets and a boxy American tower.

Blocky, but a lot more of it

Hand-placing ten times the boxes would have been a slog, so the hulls are now parametric. A tapered, stepped keel is generated from a couple dozen segments whose beam narrows toward the bow and stern, each carrying a waterline boot-topping and a planked deck. Loops scatter the repetitive detail — a row of portholes down the side, railing stanchions around the deck edge, batteries of secondary and anti-air mounts — and small helpers stamp the funnels (with caps and team bands), the masts with their yards, and the gun houses with sloped faces and muzzles. A few hand-built tiers give each ship its distinctive bridge or pagoda.

It's all still merged into a single mesh per ship class and cached, so a battleship made of hundreds of blocks is one draw call and costs nothing at runtime — and it's purely cosmetic: the hitboxes, armor, and handling are untouched. Same game, much better-looking fleet.