You want this to fly around ot to be a base



I WILL CRUSH YOU

Erp! it has to fly around, the current design can be seen at www.cyberscribe.ws/designs.htm. The ship name is the PSS Dominion and it is a ship in a novel I'm writing. The selected design will recieve royalties should the book be published. The designer will recieve credit of course and may be given the opportunity to collaborate if they choose. I am not an artist, I'm an engineer who is aspiring to writing, so the design is pretty lame. But it does contain all the elements in noted in the manuscript currently.

If you'd like I can send you the chapter that introduces the ship and the details of the associated science.

Thrust! Parry! Duck!

sounds cool...so do you want a picture, model or what?

I'd like an illustration for either the cover or interior art and for use in keeping the action straight. If you look at the design I've posted at www.cyberscribe.ws/designs.htm, that shows the elements that are already written. If something else makes more sense or just looks really cool, I'll rearrange the text to accommodate it.

Thrust! Parry! Duck!

Lots of ideas.... but I am a terrible artist... I am no good a drawing that thing.

But I will see, what I can do....

Sterling

Loved Elite, loved Escape Velocity (got an old Mac just to play it) and love Freelancer...

You need this for this "crusader"-thingie of yours? Idea is good, I think, but what I read so far seems to be just an outline of a story.

Orson Scott Card said once (I think it was him) "Show, not tell".

And somewhere else he said, that you do not have to be able to explain all the gadgets and tricks and new technology in the books (unless the story is about the changes in them), as long as you use them consistently.
For example, it is not recomendable at one point to explain, why somebody has to take the long way around something and in the next paragraph let someone just zip through it, if you get my point.

Sterling

([email protected])


Loved Elite, loved Escape Velocity (got an old Mac just to play it) and love Freelancer...

You know that is something that I've been struggling with alot. I don't know if it was Card or someone else who said it though. Ironically who is posted there is in the beginning of the book and I will undoubtedly rework that in the first edit, right now I'm just struggling to get the stuff I've already written down so I can review and align the plot and subplots correctly.

The Dominion is in the second part of the book that starts on page 196. So far I've got 130 pages of the second part done and I need the ship for the plots there. The second part is very different and if you want to read some of that let me know.

I would be very interested to read what you wrote so far, so I can get an idea what this ship is supposed to be and supposed to be doing, in order to make suggestions or just produce some ideas for you to think about.

Within Freelancer, there was one aspect I liked very much. If you look at the designs of the different starships from the different factions they are all diferent of course, but within the faction all have some of the same designs.
The Kusari, for example, all have these "wings".
So if you are thinking about a specific race and/or culture in your story, the design of the ship should, in my opinion, reflect some of that culture.
If its a purely technocratic culture, for example, the ship might not be pretty in any sense of the word, but might be practical as hell.

Also a thing to think about, when talking about spaceship designs (this is of course all pure theory, if you even want to call it that, but for SF-Fans and SF-Writers even more this is no theory, but real, as I very well know), it depends on what technology you are using. For example, if the universe you use has artificial gravity, then you can build your ship from the floor up, so to speak. If you do not use that, you might have to think about rotating parts of the ship, or the ship itself rotates or (as used by R.A.Heinlein in quite a few books) tumbles "head over heel" (not practical, I think, but an idea) in order to get some gravity.
Then the question of acceleration.
Like the design you put on your page, if you do not use or want to use artificial gravity, then you have to think about structural limits of the ship. With your ship - streamlined, that is - the axis is basically the axis of thrust. If you use artificial gravity on the other hand, you could give it any shape you want, because you could always compensate structural problems with that.

But a side remark on that maybe.
While writing the story, you never have to mention these "backgrounds" in any way. But you yourself have to know them.
I did not read all of the story you posted on your page but what I read so far seems to be just expose, like you said in your foreword. Of course, thats just the beginning and at that just the first edit.
But I found it usually to be a bad idea to let some expert (the narrator or whatever) explain somethings in the story to get the expose across.

There are basically three types of SF-Stories.
(Sorry if I write too much, but I did not get enough sleep and have to go on for at least ten hours more to get myself back on track)
One: About worlds, about the beauty of them, or just the exploring of them.
In these stories, the "story" part usually just is to get the world across. Not much of those in SF, though, but some.
Whithin this fall future societies and their describtion. Like "Atlantis" by Plato, I think.
Two: About a person that goes through some develpment.
These usually start out at the beginning of the change with the person and end, when the change is complete.
Three: About an event.
May that be an event within a society, or some mayor event (like the destruction of earth) or whatever.

This has nothing to do how you write them. First person, third person, omnipotent narrator or whatever.
And of course, these can be mixed, but I think one should not overdo it.
(read all that stuff in some books about writing in general, so it's not something I came up with myself)
(can't find these books right now, I am afraid)

Enough of that. Too long already for a forum, I am afraid.

Sterling


Loved Elite, loved Escape Velocity (got an old Mac just to play it) and love Freelancer...

Thanks for you post and your ideas, I sent you an email with an excerpt from page 202. This is the second chapter in which the protagonist appears. There is some missing background however. There are two interfertile races represented here, the dominant Pao are non-technical tool-users with extraordinary skills. The subject race, the Aidani, are a caste-based highly technical servant-warrior group which dominate the region as agents of the Pao. These people are all in the Andromeda Galaxy. There are both other factions and other races, but the other races play a minor role in this story.

The Aidani are broken into High Aidani (mostly Pao-Aidani hybrids) who have some of the skills that the Pao do
The Meso-Aidani who are simply very intelligent humans with few non-human skills but all the human ingenuity.
And the Cro-Aidani or Low Aidani, these are the simpletons and misformed members of the Aidani since physical beauty is VERY important to this culture, any one or thing that is not physically appealing is not permitted to breed.

This reverence for physical attractiveness is crucial to both the plot and the environment.

Fantastic abilities are not much used though they are possessed and I have no plot centric reason for this devised yet -- so I could use ideas in that area. Also the ships are not designed to exploit or discourage the use of these abilities. Research in life sciences has been suppressed routinely since the inception of the culture nearly 8,000 years ago. Other plot critical facts that may not appear in the excerpt:

lifespan == Pao = 600- 800 years, High Aidani = 95 -180 years, Meso-Aidani = 60 - 130 years, Cro-Aidani = 50 - 80 years

Fertility == Pao from age 90 to 500 no more than 1 Pao child every 40 years, Hybrids are not limited males may father and females may contribute eggs on the normal human cycle (1 time per month). However the females can not carry the children more than 2 months.

Special Skills == Pao: Limited Dimensional Shifting, Bespeaking, Clairaudience, Metamorphosis, Perfect Pitch, Singing, Flight, Ability to survive Vacuum Exposure, Night-Vision, proof againstmost physical threat, and Bioluminescense
High Aidani:Bespeaking, Domination, Shielding, Sensitivity (emotions mostly but sometimes reading the thoughts of others), Night-Vision, and Singing.