How do I build a hull around a curved shell?

[Canyon]

Or place backgrounds so they don't stick out. I'm trying to make a nice nav window but I'm having two issues here. How do I curve the hull feature and the background decorations? I need more sides on one of the edges to crop it or something. How do you guys get around this?

[Humphred]

For this you usually need multiple linked hulls with gaps in between. Usually you want these gaps to be taller instead of longer with the hulls in a horizontal layout (instead of on top of one another) to avoid buggy water movements. Look at the Dugong's engine room for a pretty good example. For background walls it can be trickier. I usually fiddle with the texture offset (y) to line them up, but depending on the texture you might be able to get away with sticking a pipe or something in between and still have it look fine.

[Isaac Hipkiss]

Yeah only this doesn't work. water does NOT flow between gaps correctly!

[Scourge]

It does flow correctly, but a gap can only link two hull sections, not more than 2.

So if, for example, you have one large hull section (hull section A), and along one side of it there are 3 additional hulls (hull section B, C, and D), each separate hull section will require its own gap with the large one.

A gap will need to be made exclusively for hull section A and B.
A second gap will need to be made between hull section A and C.
A third gap will need to be made between hull section A and D.

This is true even if, for example, hull sections B and C are on the same side of hull section A. Even if no walls separate hull sections B and C.

If a single gap has more than two hull sections within it, it will only link two of the three hull sections with a gap.

When you're making a round room the hull sections and gaps end up becoming a huge mess because hull sections can only ever be rectangular or square. You can make a series of long vertical hulls and gap between each one, but to match the curves and not have strange water sections floating around within the room itself you'll need to make a lot of them if you're using gentle curves and not sharp curves.

The big issue is mostly aesthetics - you can make it so the gaps are all functional and work as intended, but water will rest on the "gaps" momentarily while it figures out where to go from there. This can make it so there is strange spots of water scattered about during flooding, although it smooths out as the water starts to drain.

How most vanilla ships handled having curved shells was by putting a square room within the curved shell, so they do not actually make a circular or curved room at all. If you look at any of the vanilla subs you'll see all the hulls within them are generally rectangular, and that there are sometimes large unused parts of the sub near the hull to avoid rounded rooms and hulls.

You can use the dugong as an example, look at how they placed the square rooms (and hulls) within the round body of the sub. This means the shell of the ship you design can be curved, but you'll need to make the shell larger than the actual interior of the ship so the hulls can work as intended while also looking pretty.

If you don't care about some visual glitches than you can make a functional round room.