Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/02/06/kadar-class-spaceship-design/

I’m back into drawing and designing spaceships.

This spaceship design is mid sized, large enough to be imposing without being too big like a star destroyer. I tend to have the science fiction role-playing genre in mind when I am designing spaceships and I produce workaday designs – for a fantasy future – with definite rolls to play. Game masters need an awful lot of designs like these to throw at their player characters as they go through the science fiction role-playing game universe – usually with the poor game master just a couple of steps ahead inventing it all.

This spaceship design is unusual because it has a secondary tactical bridge where the ship is flown and defended. And a larger bridge below where strategy for fleet actions is decided upon. Here is a detail drawing of the secondary bridge.

The suggestion of a skull in its bulkhead is a nice touch I think. The Kadar has heavy weapons but relies on fighters from the fleet it is designed to support for close in protection. With a concentration of high-value staff – the bad guys who are planning the heroes downfall – the spaceship is designed with a lot of internal security. A large contingent of robots looking out for player characters who shouldn’t be there.

I like this design so much that I’m going to work it up into a more finished illustration, suitable for a role-playing game rules book.

Here is stage one where I have duplicated the image in Photoshop interposed a green layer to provide a working background with a high contrast and started using the background eraser to remove the white areas of the main spaceship layer of the image.