Upgrades Sol Alliance Flags (Joint LCA with The Ill-Fated)

[Pope Dave The 3th]

Lore Impact (Small/Medium/Large): Small

Species: Human

Short Description: Updates every Sol Alliance flag with a swanky new canton, and upscales many of the older flags to a higher resolution. Incorporates several excellent flags made by the Ill-Fated, with her permission.

How will this be reflected on-station?: Flag. (I'll make a PR for this if needed.)

Does this addition do anything not achieved by what already exists?: Yep. It makes the crusty flags better-er, and adds new ones.

Do you understand that the project may change over time in ways you may not foresee once it is handed over to the Lore Team?: Yep.

Long Description: Thanks to the Canton Standardization Act of 2467, the often messy and questionably sized cantons of Solarian member states have been standardized into a vertical canton for all flags. Praise be to Prime Minister Strom.

UNITY STATION


CALLISTO

 

EUROPA

 

ENCELADUS

 

LUNA

 

PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF MARS

 

NEW HAI PHONG

 

PLUTO

 

PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF LYCORIS

SAN COLETTE

 

SILVERSUN

 

VENUS

 

VISEGRAD

 

SANKT FREDERICK
 

 

NEW PEORIA

 

NOVO IGMAN

 

LHOKGON

 

MICTLAN

KONYANG

 

SOLARIAN NAVY

 

SOLARIAN MARINE CORPS

 

SOLARIAN ARMY

Edited March 2 by Pope Dave The 3th
more flags

[Shimmer]

BIG improvement over the cantons (on which my opinion is VEEEEERY outspoken), there are a couple of things that I feel should be tweaked? At least as far as my understanding of Sol's theme goes. 

 

I'll start with the pettiest going to the least petty; Sol Army and Sol Marines. The colors should be swapped, in my opinion, as it would be more thematically appropriate for the army - which has sided with the government over the navy on every occasion - to bear the color of the Alliance, as opposed to the marines.

The blue should be changed. Deep ocean blues feel very Biesellite, given it is TC's primary color and what they boast on their flag. Sol generally uses sky / UN blue, a lighter color that is more in line with their flag. The current blue is almost reminiscent of the flag of the Separatists from star wars LMAO.

The same argument applies to the flag of Mars - they used sky blue because it's a provisional Solarian government, thus the color on Sol's flag was used. Right now the Martian flag feels very dutch...

Visegrad's flag looks weird without the triangle, and I can't take it.

[FlamingLily]

Hard agree with everything shimmer adds but wanted to also raise: The red in the Sol Army flag feels pretty out of place imho. Sol rarely uses red in its colour scheme, and with such a big flag like this it almost feels a little Martian. Potentially might be interesting to try a gold? Or maybe a green? Unsure.

[Arbiter_Ambrose]

I agree about the Visegrad comment, the one where you saw the triangle jutting out was great in my opinion though idk about the colours tbh.

[Mr.Popper]

I have huge respect for anyone tackling the cantons. It's almost impossible to make a canton fit universally, like look at the current one: it fits like a glove on Castillo and Pluto, Visegrad or Europa not so much. This one comes close, but I think the end results look less like flags you'd see flying in real life and more like logos in a government building. I'm having trouble articulating why exactly so I'll boil it down to a few observations:

• Most real flags don't put a band along the hoist, I assume because it distracts from the overall design when the flag's being flown and it's parallel to the flag pole; you'll see in my example below it almost looks like there's two flags.
• The canton pushes the main design to the side. I'm glad all the redesigns seem to be the same aspect ratio (an element of the British flags lost in translation with the OG flags), but the way the canton is tacked on at the hoist unbalances designs like Silversun, Luna, Colette, etc. and would look really weird in-game unless the canton was moved to cover up part of the flag. With some like Luna that's harmless, but others like Colette will have major features covered up unless they're more dramatically redesigned (see example attached, which actually looks pretty good).
• It looks better on horizontally oriented designs (Enceladus, Frederick) and distracting on vertical ones (Lhokgon, Luna). Like I said it's hard to make a canton that fits every design so this is understandable.
• Ignoring how well the vertical band weaves into the existing flags, the design of the canton itself is sterile. The weakest part of the Solarian flag IMO is the generic clipart sun; it's not stylistic or based on any real design like the Vergina (Macedonian) sun or the Kuomintang white sun, so making it the focal point with nothing to fill the rest of the white void contributes to that artificially constructed vibe. I would suggest either filling the white space with something (Chinese characters maybe?) or shrinking the band to fit only the sun. I'll include examples of both. What I'd really like is a new sun design, but that goes beyond the scope of this post.

As for the military flags, they're too samey. They feel neat and corporate, when most real countries have wildly different flags across branches owing to their unique and flavored histories. In general, my opinion on fictional flags is I don't want to see the OOC designer's hand in making them aesthetically pleasing; it's stronger worldbuilding when you can imagine how they were put together by different people in-universe. The provisional Mars flag nails this and it's the ugliest flag in the lore. I do really like the seals you made before, so I'd suggest incorporating them into the flags while drawing inspiration from IRL military flags. Here's a mockup I made by pasting your seal over the US navy's flag:

Sorry if any of my suggestions are things you already considered but were shot down by human lore for one reason or another. I imagine trying to please so many people and also make good designs is really stressful so again, you have my upmost respect for dedicating your time and effort to this. Also I probably said it on Discord already, but I like the new flags by Ill-Fated, especially Lhokgon!

Edit: Here's the link to the flag waver site I used. It's really nice for gauging how a flag looks in the wild: https://krikienoid.github.io/flagwaver/

Edited February 26 by Mr.Popper
Added link to flag wave site

[NewOriginalSchwann]

The human lore team is pleased to report this application is accepted pending the final sprites so we can get it all onto the wiki and into the game in one, relatively smooth, go. Congratulations, and thank you for submitting this to the human lore team!