lightmage

Slimmer engine arms for a more distinctive silhouette  More detail and a sudden realisation...this could land like a rocket? Say what you will about Deep Indigo, she's a standup girl.  

  The oversized core of the Deep Indigo is its Zero-Tau Engine Countless cryogenic pipes extend from the Z-TE's central globe, leading to the front, port, and starboard emitter disks.

 USS Hope. Start to nearly finish.

  These designs ended up more "Cruise liner" although I think they are beginning to sell the scape and their shape seems more plausible than a very long ship. Do you have a preference? Or direction in term of "less boat" or more "Noah's Ark" or more "Star Wars" or more "NASA 2.0", etc.

Old-school roughs using marker pens. Big simple forms. Playing with overhangs. Ending up with a old boat shape rather than a tanker. I think I prefer the tanker. I don't want USS hope to look like a "ocean vessel from space". Last think last night I worked up something that is tall, but not too ship-like. Lots of mechanical detail to create a sense of complexity. Breaking up those smooth lines, giving the girl some sense of scale.  

The most plausible method for getting the Hope back on the "ground" would be for some kind of hot re-entry, followed by an ocean splashdown. It got me thinking about how the ship's payload was maybe designed to separate from the main ship or at least the propulsion element. Obviously, the separation never occurred due to the ship's temporal rendition. On this design, the main ark section is mounted "belly down" so the top of the saucer is the floor. The ship would be embedded "upwards" to normalise deck orientation for the maps, which would place the engines at the top.  Here the design is reversed. The top is the roof, nuclear thrusters protrude from the skirt -- they bring Hope to a safe speed for splashdown.