By now, a good many of you have made it all the way through my little adventure in space.

As I stated to  jo_renard who commented upon the design of the ship, I planned on dipping into more detail on just that subject, and so here we are.

Welcome to STARSHIP AWESOME, a testament to my madness.

Let's start with the overall look of the thing. I wanted it to look like something that wouldn't have been out of place if it had been dropped into any period genre sci-fi: Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, Star Wars, or even Star Trek The Next Generation. So I sat down and I began analyzing the design of ships from all those franchises. And eventually something struck me.

Your typical hero spaceships mostly tended to have the same thing in common, and I believe it can be traced all the way back to the Galileo shuttlecraft from the original 60's star trek: They tended to be white, with a red stripe.

The Gallileo, the vipers from BSG, Luke's x-wing... so that was my first bullet point.

Well, okay.. no, actually it was my second. The first was that it had to be boxy and geometric. In my head, I was thinking of how this would be built out of real world materials. The original Galileo prop had recently been rescued from rotting away in a field, and was being restored, and in the restoration photos on the internet, it became obvious just how much of the ship had been made from sheets of plywood.

So, boxy and geometric, as if it had been built out of plywood sheets. A boxy shuttle type shape was roughed out, with little design cues inspired by little pieces of various spacecraft, including BSG's vipers, BSG's LANDRAM vehicle, the various Trek shuttles, the 60's Enterprise, Luke's X-wing, Luke's snowspeeder, and NASA's space shuttle orbiter. (Yes, this very nearly had a space shuttle style tailfin.)

And if it's going to be boxy, I might as well think about the design in the sense of a custom 70's van. So, with that thought, that this would be my "scooby van to the stars" I started looking around at the way stripes were applied to that style of van. Unfortunately, I didn't really find what I was looking for.

The stripe I ended up with was actually lifted almost whole off of a 60's MOPAR musclecar. The Starship Awesome text under the cabin windows was also done in a swoopy typeface chosen to mimic the look of the logos they used on those old musclecars, too. And of curse, if it's going to be mopar inspired, it needed a little cartoon mascot, so I stuck a small 40's era style buck-rogers rocket on the point of the stripe. I also decided to black out the "hood" of the vehicle in a direct nod to the way the hood of those old musclecars did.

With my design finalized, it was time to get onto the construction, a job that would end up taking an entire year.

Follow me along to part II where I go completely insane.
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