Cliff Spohn's cover art for Star Ship, 1 of 9 launch titles for the Atari VCS released on September 11, 1977. Upscaled and retouched.
Star Ship was programmed by Bob Whitehead and was based on Atari's arcade game Starship 1. It was the first space-themed game developed for the VCS. Also released for the Sears TeleGames system under the title Outer Space.
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I want to talk about / show you the path of a star ship design, told through pen sketches in a book. Heads up in advance for the long post.
So I was asked to design a star ship, I could base it off the original version, or make my own from scratch. So I started with a sketch from memory of the original ship, and a took it and fused it with a few of my own design styles from previous ships I made:
I took elements from my own stuff, ended up with a starfox looking thing, but decided to lean more into SGU and include a pyramid as a central feature.
Next I played around with the silhouette to get something that would be its own ship.
Finding a silhouette I liked, I perfected the design some more.
However this ship felt like it looked too much like the ships in Stargate Universe so I thought I'd try again from scratch not using the original design.
I decided to focus on how the ship travels though space, by tunneling. So i thought why not a big array of satellite dishes with mass accelerators being visible parts of the ships design.
The ship would not have hand waved artificial gravity, but instead use realistic principles like centrifuges, and acceleration/deceleration based gravity.
The above was my experiment with a larger version of the ship, but I went back to perfect the smaller version. Ignore the harpsichord.
However I was reminded this was supposed to be a CITY SHIP so I had to make it big.
I considered the efficiency of a ship this big, and realized in space it would be better to be long for safety reasons.
Eventually I decided to go back to the drawing board again, deciding to move away from hard scifi, and back into more of the science fantasy.
I got some inspiration from a one off Star Gate ship, and thought I'd combine some of its elements with the Citadel from Mass Effect, and then focus on the ship being built around the tunneling engine. Now more scifi and less mass accelerator.
I also tried the Long Hard Scifi version of the mass accelerator ship.
I kept playing with it until I finally got it right. See the designs at the bottom of the page. I took one of the designs and tipped it on its side so it had ore of a star destroyer profile.
And that is how I got from there to here:
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Behold the magnificent SpaceX Starship ready for it's journey beyond Earth's atmosphere. This close up view captures the awe inspiring details of it's sleek design and the strength of the launch tower arms. Join us in celebrating the future of space exploration.
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