So I’ve been experimenting with space art again. It’s a lot of fun, which honestly is enough in and of itself. But when I start digging into rendering spaceships, it’s not just for fun. When I create science fiction cover art, I want to use ships. The distant views of nebula or galaxy are amazing, but even adding planets for scale just throws the enormity of deep space into perspective. What I really need for the human touch are those emblems of our far-reaching hubris: space ships and space stations.
Not to mention that exploding space ships on book covers are like candy to readers.
However, the big problem I was having when I was reliant on stock art was that there are very few stock spaceships available, relatively speaking. It’s not like beautiful women, who exist in multitudes right here on earth to be photographed easily enough. No, space ships have to be drafted, rendered on the computer, and there are artists who do it very well, but not nearly enough of them. Teaching myself how to create scenes of space, and planets, even adding rings to planets, simple enough. Spaceships? Whew.
Then I started seeing the stock ships I’d invested in to use on my covers, and client’s covers, popping up all over the place. I try very hard to create original work for my cover art. The stock ships needed to be retired, and I needed to be able to create my own so that no-one else could have them. Which led to an interesting train of thought.
What did I want my ships to look like? Many space ships look like, well, a pilot got a wild hair and zipped up out of the atmosphere into space. Which is great for near-future SF, or SF where the Earth is the only hegemony. Not so much for space opera set well into the future, or aliens, or the ability space’s unique challenges give us to loose the bounds of gravity and atmosphere and get really creative.
I do want to keep practicality in mind, though. It’s one thing to envision the kinds of airy, ethereal ships made possible by the lack of gravity. Like the space dock in the header image, that is simply s structure to hang off of while building a ship. You can have vast constructs out in space high above orbital range. They will still have inertia, though, if they are going to travel at all. Tethered to a solar sail? That might be negligible. Passing through some warped space gravity well to fold and mutilate the laws of physics and speed of light? That ship is going to have serious pressures on it. Not to mention that a ship or station is essentially a giant tin (insert metal of choice here. Or mother of pearl as I referenced earlier this week. Or, heck, while we’re dreaming big, sheets of diamond and sapphire clear as glass) can full of air drifting through an inimicable wasteland fraught with radiation and micrometeorites.
All of this goes through my head when I start dreaming up spaceships. I might not do it from the blueprints out, but I have the advantage of being an artist. I want something that looks good, or practical, or real, or all of the above. At least until I blow it into pixelated smithereens on the screen.
Take this Arrowhead (yeah, yeah, real original naming convention, I was tired) ship for example. I like the wedge shape because it implies fast. I like the cracks and cornices that allow for more surface area that could be used for windows. Or weapons emplacements. Or… use your own imagination. I like the divots for engines. Or perhaps those are the emplacements for energy weapons. I’ll have to play around with the base design for a while and see what I like. Unless I sell the concept to a client, in which case I’ll let them pick.
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10 responses to “Spaceship Design”
That is an interesting design. But my first thought was, that would be a bear to keep warm…the more surface area you have, the higher the heat loss. Considering how cold space is, that could be a problem (unless your crew was all androids or robots and did better in the cold?). Or it could be practical if the ship was working in some part of space that was hot (gases of a near-star, perhaps?).
Getting rid of waste heat from electronics, lighting, power sources, people, etc. in space can be an even greater problem than retaining heat, since the approximate vacuum of space makes it difficult to transfer heat.
I think someone touched on this on Facebook, but my understanding is that dissipation of heat is more of a concern. Vanes like my thin sections would aid in that process for living and working quarters.
A more stringent limitation than any considerations of reality may be that the potential reader has to recognize the image as a spaceship. Interesting and original are good but recognition is vital! It’s not like you can attach a text tag: “Ceci est un vaisseau spatial.”
Absolutely. I can usually convey a lot from context – engine glows, laser beam weapons (I know it’s not actually visible, but reality is very boring sometimes), and so on. And if we tunnel into lumpy asteroids and redneck engineer a bigass engine out back, well, that’s a whole ‘nother can of beans.
A looong time ago i took a two hour industrial design course from Andrew Probert at a con. We were supposed to be designing *something* but no one told us that, and i ended up doing a redesign of the Miranda class for TNG. (Andrew designed most of the Enterprise-D and a bunch of the details of the movie Enterprise refit) He went over the Star Trek ship design rules then allowed me to break them…. Anyway, he said that Gene told him the reason that the bridge was on the top center pf the primary hull was so Missus Magillicudy in Kansas could point at it and say ‘That’s the Bridge.”
23 skidoo
As an alien spaceship with unknown drive, weapons etc. the arrowhead ship is nice.
Clearly a human wouldn’t make something that looked like that. We want a front, back, top, bottom etc. Or else the thing will be dictated entirely by the engineering and materials, like the International Space Station. Cans tied together with ladders.
Given radiation and cosmic rays, I think large spaceships with no magic shielding will incorporate a lot of ice. Packing half a mile of ice around the life system of your Bussard ramjet would be a cheap way of combining fuel and air storage, plus radiation and impact protection.
But, as a cover that’s going to be boring. Big snowball, low visual interest.
My brain instantly pegs Arrowhead Ship as a weapon. And seen from below… oh dear. This thing can peel apart into a couple dozen thinner but complete ships, each of which is also a weapon… good design if one expects to take damage and defend against multiple holes in the hull.
See, this is why I design for visual and let someone else tell the story. Awesome!