Found a whole stash (they were hidden in the back of my sock drawer where mom couldn't find them) of 20+ year old WIP pics documenting the 'Columbia Class' a carrier/battleship of sorts.
Its a further refinement of the style I've come to call 'Modernist War-rocket' (but call it whatever you like) - basically a very monolithic somewhat pointed hull with layout and details inspired by real world naval warships, the space battleship Yamato is an early notable example, but leaning far into the naval influence.
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Anyway, on with the show and tell....
Yep not much to see here, but its important to try and block out the shapes before diving into more detail, take everything in stages and its much easier. I did not begin with a sketch or anything, just throwing shapes around.
I'll admit this straight away; its not my favorite vessel but it represents a step along the road to what I'd consider to be the only really acceptable model in the entire 2 fleets and 5 years of work - the Akula. More on that one some other time.
I always started topside with detailing, these ships obviously had artificial gravity, inertia dampening, all the accoutrement required for actors to act, because in my head these ships would be for a TV show format - we'd see characters wandering the decks which would have been built in a disused hot-tub factory in Seal Beach.
These vessels depicted large fusion/ion hybrid engines, which were hugely powerful, this may add some extra hazard to landing ops, yes that warm glow in there is the main flight-deck.
Just heap detail on, cut panels, add more bits and pieces. Remember we were building these on single-core machines, this may well have been made on a Pentium processor machine, and these renderings took a long time, RAM was a particular problem.
This is not the first appearance of these main turrets, they date back to a design from 2002 called the Sheffield class, if you're wondering why they resemble the main guns on the Battlestar Galactica from the 2003 miniseries, well I hate to say it but I did it first, and my work being popular at SFM almost certainly would have been reviewed by the production designers working on the models for that show. So there.
Every decent spacecraft for a TV show needs some kind of 'emergency vents' for a spectacular dramatic FX sequence, all of these designs feature this exact feature, they have just been added behind the super-structure here.
And this full-frontal overview seems like a nice place to leave things for today, of course if you are reading this in the future (hi!) you can just skip ahead to the following parts, assuming I actually do that and we aren't struck by an asteroid in the mean time. Good luck and thanks to you all and see you in Columbia Class Part 2, coming soon!
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