Untitled Science Fiction Project features two teams of hero characters. Each character is cool in their own way, and I want to introduce them with a short scene (or two) so that the reader “gets” them and likes them. I was making good progress on this when I hit the wall with the last three characters. Consternation!
I decided to take a break from the writing and work on the designs of some key locations. Just as writing the main characters’ mini autobiographies will inform their choices and dialog, getting the details of the important settings will inform the action that takes place and help to make them believable “characters” in their own right.
Attribute it to failing memory or naïve optimism, but I thought I’d get this done in Campaign Cartographer’s Cosmographer module. Readers of this blog may remember that my previous attempt to enlist the considerable power of this tool in my worldbuilding project ran into its own wall in the form of CC’s steep learning curve and idiosyncratic user interface. Giddy optimist that I am, I thought that by starting with something simple—the floorplan of Blue Team’s mission pod—I could ease into using the tool before tackling the bigger settings. I can be such a sweet summer child…
Mission pod in Campaign Cartographer.
With some difficulty, I got this far before banging my head bloody against my monitor. I wanted to use a premade graphic to represent the fab(ricator). In any other drawing program, I’d select the graphic from the palette and click where I wanted to place it. Then I would be able to move and resize it as desired by dragging it and adjusting the little handles on its borders, respectively. This is not how it’s done in CC. How is it done? Damned if I know. Something about selecting it (can be tricky), then right-clicking on it, then selecting a command from the pop-up menu, then…??? I just didn’t get it. Per the worldbuilding post, amazing things can be accomplished with this program by a skilled operator. That’s not me. Sigh.
Frustrated, I retreated to what I know: ten-to-the-inch graph paper, a mechanical pencil, a ruler, and a compass. Ahhhhhh. The Good Old Days of drawing up maps and deck plans for D&D and Traveller.
Familiar tools enabled me to sketch out the mission pod with more erasing and less frustration. Yay!
It’s crude. It’s sketchy. It is littered with my handwriting. But it is done. Enough for my purposes. I’ve accounted for the space and the key features. The textures, decorations, sounds, and smells will come later, as needed.
The Mahaan Batakh (Hindi: Great Duck. Grif insists on calling it Mighty Duck for…reasons.) is our hero spaceship. The Duck is an independent trader captained by a friend of Grif’s from his days with K-A Interplanetary, one of the larger military-security corporations. I had envisioned it as a decidedly non-sexy cargo ship with a general lifting body design. Scenes and actions I scripted during NaNoWriMo, and others that were still in my head, dictated certain features. The worldbuilding around spaceflight in my imagined future dictated others. So, I built the ship from the inside out. The cargo bay is big enough to hold the mission pod and…other…items. The crew and passenger deck connects to the cargo bay via a companionway just so. Cargo loads and unloads through clamshell doors near the bow. The fusion drive pivots downward in spaceflight mode so that acceleration is perpendicular to the decks. There’s room in the right places for the reactionless gravitic thrusters and their gimbals. Etc. This all involved numerous applications of the eraser. (D’Oh! I put the aft gravs where the yoke for the fusion drive needs to go!) Some of these verges on overthinking the problem. I found that some of the overthinking in the worldbuilding phase has been paying off, so better over than under. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
The net results are also crude.
The larger scale drawings (one small square per 0.5 meters) are things only an author could love. And I’m probably the only one who can interpret them. Let’s hope I remember what all those overlapping lines are about.
My inside-out construction resulted in a spaceship with similar overall dimensions to Serenity, the hero ship from Firefly. This isn’t a coincidence, as Firefly is an important influence on Untitled Science Fiction Project. Mahaan Batakh and Serenity are also products of convergent/parallel evolution. Just enough spaceship for the characters and their adventures, but no more. The Duck is more aerodynamic and can carry more cargo. I like it and look forward to welcoming you aboard for the voyage to Nordlys.