I've been playing with spaceships in my head as long as I can remember. Lately, 3D rendering programs have given me the ability to see them beyond my sketches. The following selection of ships were created and rendered in Caligari TrueSpace 2. I'm saving pennies for LightWave, but it seems as unreachable as the Orion Nebula.

USS CONSTELLATION
The Conny is a carrier. The long tubes surrounding her hull are launch tubes for her alert fighters. The rest of her small craft compliment is carried in the central hangar bay amidships. She first sprang from my head as a sketch in high school, circa 1974. Here she sits orbiting Jupiter between deployments.

SS ORION TIDE
Orion Tide is a civilian colony sleeper ship. The forward section houses the cryogenic 'passenger' areas. Amidships is a small hangar for landing shuttle egress. The aft hull is surrounded by cargo pods with independent atmospheric entry capability. The engines, of course, are at the butt end.

USS REMINGTON
Does this look like anything less than a battleship? There's more than a little anime inspiration here. The nose houses a BIG laser cannon a la Yamato.

Rammer
An attempt at a practical interstellar explorer based upon the bussard ramscoop ships that Larry Niven likes to feature in his short stories. A central hull with a sleeve-shaped rotating habitat around it, with more tankage and equipment in the cavity between. The sleeve rotates for gravity and is three levels thick; the inner two are habitable (floors are 'outward'). The outermost level is entirely water tankage which doubles as radiation shielding. At the front is an electromagnetic hydrogen scoop (I'm sure mine is muuuuch too small) for the fusion drive. It's not a very exciting- looking ship, I grant you, but it might work! Imagine the paint job if the mission was sponsered by a soft drink company.

USS WOLFCUB
Yeah, well, so I can't do anything without working Trek into it somehow. Wolfcub is a small escort cruiser designed to tag along with convoys. And, yeah, I really like that Orion Nebula background.

The Good Old Ark
A little tribute to George Pal's "When Worlds Collide."

What the hell is an Amiga?
in 1990 I was doing 3D rendering on an Amiga 2000 with Sculpt/Animate 4D. This is an Excelsior model I created by measuring off a resin casting, in a postulated "2nd Doomsday Machine" scenario. Additonal painting was done using Photon Paint. Resolution was maxed out at 640x480x16-bit (4096 colors).

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