WIP/Sneak Peek Friday!

Today, an Empires project!

I have been making very, very slow (but steady) progress on my Empires project, my military science-fiction action-adventure series. It is a reboot of a very, very old project I experimented with in the 1990's. Even though it has been a long time since I originally worked on it, it has actually always been my #1 project that I really wanted to make my signature piece.

One of the things I have been doing is a re-design of one of my spaceships, the Avenger-class gunship, sometimes classed as a "torpedo bomber".

Here is an early version of one. I have been wanting to refine the design for some time, and I took an old drawing I had done by hand back in the 1990's and redid it:

The first thing I did was make a blue-frame skeleton of the drawing:

I then went over it with black wireframe in PhotoShop, and started refining the design. I cleaned it up a bit and got rid of some of the details so I could focus on the line work. One of the first things I changed was to add something new: a set of reverse engines on the engine nacelles. I will get into that more in a future update:

I have been using this drawing for literal decades as part of my Avenger-class artwork, but something about it always struck me as "off". When I cut it in half, I realized that, all those years ago, I had made the nose asymmetrical. I isolated the nose section and warped it over a bit, lining it up more properly:

I also started adding some of the color details I envisioned. I always saw them as rolling off the assembly line in a sort of light grey scheme, somewhat like US Navy warships of the modern era, even though in space, "color" is irrelevant and I could paint it neon pink if I wanted to.

After straightening the nose, I then decided which half I liked better (turned out to be the left half) and I copied it, flipped it, placed it on the other side of the craft, and brought it into symmetry the easy way. I also added some more details.

I put the Central Alliance trefoil insignias on the wings at angles, which is their standard. The "trefoil" does have a meaning I will get into some day and no, it has nothing to do with Girl Scout cookies, which technically should not be called "trefoils" because they do not have three foils on them-- they should be "quatrefoils" because they have four foils. But that's just my OCD flaring up, so I digress. The "1058" would be a squadron (or "raptor") designation.

Finally, I gave it a paint job that more closely resembles the mottled light and dark grey of a lot of US Navy fighter aircraft. Again, yes, paint and mottling/dappling or camouflage is meaningless in space, but these things are also inter-atmospheric craft, so sometimes it can be relevant. The reverse engines on the front of the nacelles have left some scorching on the wings; in my view later versions of the Avenger will have more blast-resistant coating in that area to cut down on maintenance issues as a result of this-- I like the idea of an evolving design, where engineers pick up on things during the ship's operational lifespan and add changes as they learn.

This art will feature in an upcoming article where I will lay out some technical details on the Avenger that will be relevant to the upcoming reboot of the story. It should be coming out next week.

Until later!