I'm starting the 7th and final illustration for a series I'm doing for Cricket Magazine. The last piece will have an image of the ship they're all aboard shown on a display, so I need to design the bad boy. The ship's name is the Boreas and she's a generational ship headed for a distant star.
Here's the design I've got so far.
We're looking at the aft end of the ship headed away from us. We're seeing a bit of the underside as the ship is pitching away. The far aft section is a massive engine array. The area directly fore is the living area and hydroponics bays. The spherical section is the command area.
The layout of the ship really doesn't make any sense according to what is going on in the story, but it's not my layout. The crew in the forward section has control of the ship, and the crew in the aft section is cut off from everything, but engineering would be in the aft of the ship... anyway.
Thoughts on the design? I know I'm going to have to make the portholes alot smaller to convey the massiveness of a generational ship. The ship will only appear about 3 or 4 inches long on the page, so I'm not overly concerned with minute detail.
Posted by MarianLH (Member # 1102) on :
My number-one thought is, what does the ship use for propulsion, and where do they keep the fuel?
Nice work, BTW. Is that grill on the ring section supposed to be a heat radiator? Real spaceships have a problem getting rid of heat, since vacuum is a pretty good insulater.
Marian
Posted by MarianLH (Member # 1102) on :
PS: What is Cricket Magazine?
Marian
Posted by Aban Rune (Member # 226) on :
Cricket is a children's magazine.
The knobs on the side of the column right before the ring were meant to be fuel containers. There would have to be some kind of fuel manufacturing facility on board to accomodate a 2 or three generation long venture. But then... if they just set a course, would they really need continual thrust? Once they got up to speed, inertia would do the rest, yes? They'd need fuel for course corrections and emergencies, but they're not exploring or anything. They're just going straight to the new planet.
The ring section is living areas and hydroponics bays, so there probably wouldn't be any engine support functions that far forward. I will add a heat dissipation vent to the main body closer to the engine array.
Posted by Cartman (Member # 256) on :
That's a rather large command area for a generational ship. I'd downsize it and scale up the midsection instead (or maybe migrate the living quarters there and move the bridge backward so the civvies are placed as far away from the engines/reactor as possible) and I'd turn those four forward knobs into hydroponics domes a la Valley Forge, but otherwise, neat design.
Does the habitat ring spin to generate artificial gravity, BTW?
Posted by Aban Rune (Member # 226) on :
The details of where everything is isn't *too* important as it's not spelled out in the text at all. Basically, it used to be one crew. Half the crew got locked in the back of the ship and the other half stayed up front. Two cultures developed in the two isolated parts of the ship over the course of a couple of centuries.
So, wherever things were originally, the aft crew would have to have made changes as would the forward crew. So, when I say command area, I mostly mean that the bridge is up there in the sphere. I envision the large windows near the bottom of the sphere (which are about three decks tall) as being an observation gallery and part of the recreation area. I've added another set of identical windows on the starboard side to make it seem as though that area covers the entire bottom area of the sphere. It would be like a huge mall area.
There's nothing in the story about the midsection spinning, so I'm assuming they have artifical gravity of some kind. In fact, they'd almost have to, because there's gravity all over the ship, not just in the ring area (if there is a ring area... I'm making the design up based on the brief description I got).
Remember too... these are, like, 10 year olds reading this. I'm mostly interested in making sure the design is somewhat cool and not glaringly incorrect... because there are alot of 10 year olds out there who are smarter than me.
Posted by Masao (Member # 232) on :
Those big typewriter keys look a bit strange! Other than that I'd bulk up the engine area with a large thrust bell, perhaps, and some fuel tanks. That ring looks a bit unfunctional. I'd remove it to make the section it covers very thin to serve as an interesting contrasting bridge between the engine section and the command section.
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
I like the twist on the generational ship story, which combines elements of two other stories I know:
-In the 50s, there were a couple radio pulp sci-fi stories about generational ships whose crews were travelling so long that they forgot where they were going, and that the ship was the entire universe to them - there was nothing outside the ship. The original crew had mutineed against the captain and failed, causing the ship to become lost in space. The captain was deified, and only the radiation-mutated outcasts still knew the truth. Oddly, the massive ship had no windows, and only when one of the religious elite is shown the stars outside by a mutant does he try to change the institution. Great story.
-Then there's a Doctor Who story from the seventies, one of the Tom Baker years. A ship crashed on an uncharted world comes under the control of its schizophrenic computer, which isolates the ship's survey team out in the wild, leaving the techs to take care of the derelict. Over centuries, the savage "Sevateem" and telepathic "Tesh" tribes evolved to fight each other over, among things, their god-computer. Well, at least until the Doctor shows up, saves the day, and takes the Sevateem babe with him.
As for your ship, the general deisgn is spiffy, though I agree that it should have smaller (or even too-tiny-to-see) windows to better convey the size. As for fuel, well - if it's going to spend a lot of fuel speeding up, it's also got to spend almost as much slowing down when it gets there.
Mark
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
The perspective on the aft area and the cylinders on the sides seems a bit off. Also, the "keyboard" fuel-cell thingie just aft of the spahere (the one on the ventral side facing away) is far taller than the other two visible. Not a big deal -if the ship is not symetrical *and in space, there's no real need for it to be).
Some solar cells and antenna array might be nice to give it a sense of scale.
Just because this is a Trek forum, I must ask where the nacelles, impulse engines and transpoter emitters are.
You dont happen to own a wireless microphone ydo you, Aban?
Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
How is gravity generated/simulated?
Posted by Aban Rune (Member # 226) on :
LOL... no, I don't own a wireless microphone. But I'll tell you where the design originated and why there are, in fact, ginat keyboard keys on the thing. I'm in a rush to get this job done and I needed a quick way to get some photo reference of a ship design. Using a photo is always faster than making the thing up from scratch. So I was walking out of my office the other day and noticed a lightsaber hilt that I had made and said... "Hey... that could work." So I grabbed it, took it home and shot a digital pic of it. Put it into Photoshop and basically used the same part of it at two different scales to and butted them together. So yah, there are going to be a couple of small perspective issues, but I'll clean them up on the finished piece.
The art director had some changes to the ring area and wanted the sphere smaller. So I have made it so.
As far as I know, there's no mention in the story of how gravity is generated. The art director seems to think the ring spins, so I might have missed something in the text, but that wouldn't explain how the forward section generates gravity.
I had thought about adding some solar fins ala Babylon 5, and I still might. But I am completly friggin stressed by this job and just want it to be done. Also, the ship will only be about 4 inches long on the finished pic. Not alot of room for tons of detail.
Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :
I think some 'tiny' details like antennae, solar panels and assorted greebles might help define the scale better.
Posted by Aban Rune (Member # 226) on :
Good point. There will definitely be pin-prick windows... and alot of them. A couple of antenna arrays would be cool too.
Posted by Ritten (Member # 417) on :
A dish type antenna every 90 degrees on the ring, maybe a rectangular type.
Maybe some conduits lining the hull.
Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
Is that a gash along the side of the hull?
On the side of the sphere looks to be a docking port... it looks rather large. Maybe if that is made smaller?
Posted by Aban Rune (Member # 226) on :
Yah, there's a huge gash along the side of the hull. Damage from space debris. The art director actually asked me to make the damage bigger.
And yes, there's a docking port up there. I made it smaller on the final along with the windows to give it a greater scale.
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