One of the things that I've noticed, in science fiction franchises from Star Wars to Heavy Metal is that when you make spaceships they can look like anything you want because there isn't any drag in space from air friction, and second that scale is important through a simple visual trick which is to make an enormous ship, and then display it as small next to an even larger ship (the big ships are on the left and the even bigger ships are on the right). The other thing is that if you're going to have galaxy or universe spanning civilization you have to come up with warp drives to explain how they get around the faster than light problem. So I came up with different ships that had different solutions to the problem and then from there the story came together.

So the first thing is that all the ships have a drive that is made with lasers that all intersect at a single point and shoot off particles in order to move using light fusion (this is a thing currently I believe). In this way they move forward under propulsion. The larger ships can even use enough power to create singularities and then fall *towards* the engine as opposed to being propelled away from it. Because of this there is gravity on board the ship opposite the direction of thrust, so most of the time ships will fall towards their destination at speeds close to one gravity. I believe that is a difficult but possible propulsion system to make in real life, but I have to explain my philosophy in detail and also write out maegradosha first. As unbelievable as that may sound.

Everyone in this setting has these thrusters to some extent but there's a group called the Engineers that are particularly good at making the engines. They're responsible for making large ships that travel through solar systems using enormous singularity drives. Commercial freighters then follow in the wake of the ships so that goods can be transported between planets. Instead of terraforming this is changing the gravitational pull of entire solar systems in order to make shipping feasible and economical.

That's about the hard limit of what can be said to be "hard" scifi. The rest of the science fiction is "soft" in that all of the jump drives that the remaining civilizations have more or less work by "technomagic". Some of these have elements that are admittedly pulled from a variety of settings, but the cool part is that when you put them all together they end up being quite interesting from a sociological perspective. Each of the three ships on the left is from one of the three main cultures that are all humanoid (or come from humans), but developed different jump drives.

The one that looks a bit like a light bulb is in fact a centrifugal ring which also uses the engine for warmth as a sort of sun (which I pulled from a Ray Bradbury story from his book Illustrated man). This culture are a bunch of people that look like 1950s pin up demons because they're human beings that colonized planets that orbit red giant sons. Because of this they have a high mutation rate and their skin is red to reflect the sunlight. Their ships are able to jump just by having them calculate the correct coordinates as precisely as possible. I believe that this is a bit of a take off on wing commander, which itself was a take off on the man kzin wars. (Space cats!). On the right is an even larger ring habitat. These guys are good at making centrifugal orbitals so they specialize in making space stations.

The one that has a bunch of hexagons on it is a ship that has terrarium habitats and the people manage to warp space by doing drugs in the right way. One of the things that I've been doing with the setting is experimenting with writing sections where the reader experiences the ship jumping and then you can reference psychedelic authors that played with language like Clarice Lispector or Jeff Vandermeer. There are these warp gates (I'll get to that in a minute) that imply that there was an advanced alien race at some point. So the way the jump works for these guys is that they've researched alien encounters from a bunch of people on "old earth" and then attempt to recreate the same conditions through hypnosis and drugs. The 'freak out' is enough to warp entire space ships and from a setting perspective means that you'll be able to have omniscient perspective into some of the characters personality. All of their planets have to be terraformed to have the right drugs so there are dinosaurs and giant insect monsters. On the right is a ship that looks like a giant psilocybin mushroom! One of the cool things about having space ships that can look like anything is that the design can be incredibly weird.

The one that looks like a bunch of crystals around a mouth are the "dreamers", which are people that are all wired together in a collective dream. They have a small population of care takers and then most of them are alseep in pods. A bit like "The Matrix", but by choice. The way their warp drive works is that the ship warps from the unconscious desire of the crew and from a dream where they shape the reality of the system they want to arrive in. All of the crystals on the ship are people in the computer simulation and the domes are small caretaker towns. Their planets are often indistinguishable from just millions of these crystal shards filled with people.

Each of the spaceships has some basic necessities that they're all build around - engines, habitats of various kinds including "tubes" which are where people live if they don't live in bubble terrariums, centrifugal rings, or vr pods, radar arrays, and hangars for both fighters and smaller ships, and a bridge of some sort. So those are all the parts of the ship I had to place and then the rest of any ship was unique to its' culture so there was a system to make each of the designs.

Each of the civilizations is made of human beings that colonized different star systems and have slightly divergent genetics but are all within some approximation of human (subspecies). The reason being is that "schismatics" tend not to have genetics that work out and then they turn into space cannibals that attack a bunch of people - or are cannibals! These guys end up often being space pirates that have ships with drives that aren't that powerful but follow in the wake of the engineering ships to attack the commercial freighters. So you can have space battles wherein the spaceships are surfing gravitational waves and then have ship to ship combat such as boarding parties.

Finally you have the gates, which are these alien warp terminals that are found that allow ships to pass between them (like Stargate) that are circling neutron stars. And there's a group called the archaelogists that protect the gates so none of them blow up and decipher all the symbols.

And then the setting kicks off when there's an explosion at a space station near an alien warp gate and it starts spewing debris all over the universe and causing all kinds of havoc. Here's some more space ship designs.

Quite good no? I grew up on Starcraft and Warhammer 40k and other stuff like that (although I was never particularly good at them). So you have various factions and a setting that has areas for space battles, planetary exploration, dream sequences in the VR simulation/with demons/stoned, and a quest type story to resolve a conflict. I was thinking of wrapping the whole thing in a frame story where there would be three books which would all describe the setting from different perspectives and then characters in the "real world" (or some approximation) would read the books and have their own worldview affect what they were reading - trade the books, skip around in pages, and so on. Again, quite complicated to do considering I'm homeless, but that's what I've been working on between having to contact the FBI about chemical weapons being used in a homeless shelter and debugging schizophrenics in the library.

It's there for the taking if anyone wants to work on it. I had sort of daydreamed that it could be a round robin situation of writing bits of scenes and then seeing if a classroom or group of friends could make a cohesive narrative. I might post a couple later.