ODB Part 1: The Beginning.
Not too long after the OBS thread made its mark on Spacebattles, a spinoff was created with a new target: Deathbringer. Deathbringer has always been a loud advocate of the Shadows, going as far to say that they're superior to all others. Such bold statements don't go unpunished. Cool Guy started the ODB thread and unleashed the shuttle; a spacecraft that defies rationality. In his opening move, Cool Guy demonstrated the superiority of the shuttlecraft over the Shadow Battlecrab by launching a surprise attack. The OBSverse was at war once again.
Entering the war in support of the shadows, Dark Lord ramps up production of Mechs in order to launch a ground attack.
Unfortunately, nothing is safe from Cool Guy's shuttles. One of the most successful strategies used in the ODB war was the use of superimposing. As more members began to use custom-made models, it became more difficult to render successful attack pictures (successful = one where the enemy's ship is visibly destroyed). Since no one had access to each other's models, superimposing became the perfect counter-strategy. The other possibility would be to remodel the enemy's ship from scratch, but no one had time for that in the midst of a rendering war. The way superimposing works is very simple. The image below uses an image of Dark Lord's mech that was mapped as a flat texture to the background; this means that the mech is not actually there and everything else in the image is in front of it (no matter how far into the background you would move a model, it would still be in front of the background image). The shuttle had to be scaled and angled to appear as if it is attacking the mech from behind, and two phaser beams had to be used to give the illusion that it was piercing through Dark Lord's model. In order to make it all blend together, a lensflare and particle emitter was used to cover up where the phaser is supposed to pierce through. This technique was used on the majority of Cool Guy's pictures, as it was fast and easy (not to mention quick to render).
During this war, shadow enhanced ships became all the rage. Several members posted pictures of their ships decked out with the latest in shadow technology.
The only problem is that it doesn't matter what your ship looks like or how advanced it is, there's nothing stopping a shuttlecraft from destroying it in the OBSverse.
