Oolite deserves this ship: Hooded Swan

[Wildeblood]

Anime style, amazing what one can find on teh interwebs:-

http://www.elfwood.com/art/a/x/axis2260 ... _queen.jpg

[tonyhippy]

My favourite artists from those books were Jim Burns and Peter Elson, not so much Angus McKie - his over-clean edging, narrow range of tonal values and oversaturated colours diminished the atmosphere or sense of scale in his art.

[Grey Area]

"Staaaar Fleet, Staaar Fleet..."

Something about a rare alignment of the planets? A Monkey-esque story line, protecting a seemingly weak, but prophetic individual? My memories are there, but vague and jumbled (I was only born in 1971!)

I can't remember much about the programme itself, but I do recall that the theme music (on the UK TV version, anyway) was by Brian May.

Yes, that Brian May.

[drew]

I remember Star Fleet. There was a girlie bad-ass alien Commander with an eye-patch. She was cool. Can't remember her name though.

Cheers,

Drew.

Edit. Found her Commander Makara

[DaddyHoggy]

Anime style, amazing what one can find on teh interwebs:-

That image doesn't appear in my browser, I ended up quoting it to get the URL and going to it directly. I'm presuming this ship and the Hooded Swan are different if visually similar ships?

(How big is the Hooded Swan then? Not in real numbers but in comparison to Oolite ships? Too big to dock? How big is that docking bay in her neck for example?)

[Killer Wolf]

"Commander Makara
Name Commander Makara
Sex Biologically Female, Technologically Male"

uh... :-/

[Disembodied]

That image doesn't appear in my browser, I ended up quoting it to get the URL and going to it directly. I'm presuming this ship and the Hooded Swan are different if visually similar ships?

(How big is the Hooded Swan then? Not in real numbers but in comparison to Oolite ships? Too big to dock? How big is that docking bay in her neck for example?)

If you go here the artist says

The Interstellar Queen of the White Nova Lines, a very "High Class" passengership crusing near the Tas'zhen Nebula.
This ship was inspired by the starship design made by Angus McKie and immortalized in Stewart Crowley's "Terran Trade Authority" books. My design is "modernised" , streamlined, and done up in the Anime style.

The anime restyling looks better, I think. More like a starship, and less like a duck. Possibly the duck-effect in Angus McKie's images comes from the Concordesque drop-nose, I don't know ... but it always looked a little broad in the beam, to me.

[Wildeblood]

Anime style, amazing what one can find on teh interwebs

That image doesn't appear in my browser, I ended up quoting it to get the URL and going to it directly. I'm presuming this ship and the Hooded Swan are different if visually similar ships?

(How big is the Hooded Swan then? Not in real numbers but in comparison to Oolite ships? Too big to dock? How big is that docking bay in her neck for example?)

It doesn't appear for me either. That site must have a cookie-spewing server that resists deep-linking their images ("stealing our bandwidth"), and it's not interesting enough for me to copy it elsewhere. (I doubt it's that site's original content, I've seen it on at least three, so don't anyone start the IP moralizing.)

It's actually supposed to be an Interstellar Queen - which is what most younger readers know this ship as. The art book that Killer Wolf mentioned yesterday - Spacecraft 2000-2100 AD - included several of McKie's paintings of the Hooded Swan as illustrations of the first interstellar passenger liner and gave it very different statistics. In Stableford's fiction, starships only needed a crew of two to function: a pilot up front, and an engineer in the back. So the Hooded Swan had a standard crew of five: captain, two pilots and two engineers (because he considered that people need to sleep, something not all authors do) and a cargo bay big enough to carry an armoured ATV. But when Cowley re-used the images as the Interstellar Queen he gave it 747-ish passenger numbers. So younger readers draw it with a row of windows down the side like an airliner.

In Oolite terms the Hooded Swan would be Python-Boa sized, with a 20-30 ton cargo bay and 6-8 passenger berths. An Interstellar Queen would be Anaconda/Strelka sized.

[DaddyHoggy]

Do-able in Oolite then...

[Killer Wolf]

might need to "do a concord" and lower the neck when docking tho?
i always loved the big cruise liner in Wing COmmander Prophecy, that was a gorgeous looking ship.