WIP Wednesday: Empires Development

I have been cleaning out a lot of old development art and trying to make room for more stuff. Some of the more interesting stuff I found was some development shots of some of my larger starships. I kind of bounced around with what I wanted-- a story of exploration, like Star Trek? Or a story of conflict, like Star Wars?

One of the ships I designed was originally called an "Aurora-class cruiser", and for a long time the name of the ship was going to be the Magellan. I was leaning towards a Star-Trek like setting with exploration and the occasional combat, and so the name "Magellan" was, of course, a connection to that sense of exploration and wandering around discovering things.

The original idea for the ship had the massive engines in long pods at the end of wings, with lots of little details, doo-dads, and unidentified things that the Star Wars development team called "greeblies". The front of the long pods were going to be massive forward-facing weapons of some sort, or something to do with the drives-- opening wormholes or some such, I had not yet worked on the details of it.

I started drawing the cruiser without the long engine pods for simplicity, and so I could concentrate on details, but I grew to like the look. It appeared leaner and better, more maneuverable, and in all honesty it was also less to draw, thus making my job easier. I began to notice more and more weapons systems (including "nova bombs", not entirely sure where I was going with that). As the design of the ship became more combat-oriented, I began to rethink where I wanted to take the setting. Conflict of a political sort (ie, war being "politics by other means") seemed to be caused me to bring more changes.

In keeping with my original idea for an exploration-based adventure, I contemplated making the ship a "Starcutter", ie, like a Coast Guard Cutter, with a mixture of missions that included combat but was not limited to that. I wanted to explore piracy interdiction, law in deep space, search and rescue, and so on. I refined some of the design but from the start the wedge-shaped design elements that make up the Central Alliance navy were evident and deeply baked in.

This was kind of a final version of the developmental design before I settled on what I went with in the first comics.

I used this version in the 1990's comic, with relatively clean lines but still with the overall shape intact. Still, I had no solid plans for the dome of "bubble" on the top and left it blank, and with large side-bay windows that still kind of hearkened back to the "exploratory" ideas of my earlier designs.

Here I've cleaned things up a bit-- this was several chapters in and towards the end of the original comic. By that time I had determined that the top "bubble" was going to be a weapons bank of some sort, but like the phasers on the original TOS Enterprise of "Star Trek", it was just going to be a glowing ball from which beams emerged, slicing into anything that needed slicing.

This is a view from my original attempt at an Empires reboot, from the 2000's. Here, the ship is more militarized, windows are lessened (but still present), and the dorsal energy beam weapons are drawn instead of left as a vague bubble. The ship is a bit less glamorous and has a bit more of a worn appearance. I have experimented with making my own alphabet, and the ship is now called the "Citadel-class Cruiser", since I decided that the setting takes place at a sufficiently advanced era in the future that the exploits of Magellan are long since lost to history, and the name would be forgotten and meaningless.
The naval ships are named in order of increasingly more complex defensive structures: small corvettes are named "Bunker"-class, then "Fortress"-class frigates, "Castle"-class cruisers, and "Citadel"-class heavy cruisers.

The final version of the ship as it gets ready for rebirth in the upcoming reboot. This is a dedicated warship, however, I reconciled the "exploration" mission design elements and the "warfighting" design elements: in-story the original design of the ship was for a very combat-oriented vessel, but it was developed during a time of relative peace. Politically, it was hard to justify the cost of a fleet of warships when there was no war to fight. The design team made a "block-1" version which was very lightly armed but could be up-armored and up-gunned if the need arose, and it was sold as a patrol and exploration vessel.
That easily explained the smooth-skinned, lightly-armed versions seen in earlier versions. As the cold war with the Irrykanoi Republic heated up, more aggressive designs got funded, so we see "block-2" and "block-3" versions, and so on, with the appearance becoming more menacing as time went on.
One of the things I like about doing military science fiction is using the opportunity to show design evolution, with ships and vehicles getting modified over and over again, with more add-ons and bolt-on and other changes... until a platform plateaus its potential and a new design is forced to be considered by needs.

Anyhow, that is the slow evolution of the Aurora/Starcutter/Magellan/Citdel-class.

Until next time!