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Description

Don't forget the high-res Download!

"2130, Day 547... Unscheduled course correction due at 2200. Pre-correction check, rotation axis plus three degrees. Nitrous-oxide pressure forty one hundred, rising to five thousand. Quad jets C and D on Pre-Select. Rotor ignition sequence beginning in three-zero. Thruster line reactors on standby."

USS Palomino, one of the United States' Deep Space Exploration Vessels, cruises through the void on the slow return leg of its two year mission to discover life beyond the Solar System. Their careful calculations and alignments for their Space-Time Catapult drive have proven for naught, as their trajectory has taken them off their projected course. Only a great disturbance in the local space-time could have caused such a thing, but even the highly trained crew are not prepared for what they are about to discover.

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The model is 99% complete. I would like to lard it up with some posable gadgets and such, maybe a stab at an interior you could glimpse through the viewports even, but like many of my 99% complete projects, this may never come to pass. This ship is a fond childhood memory even if it was from a movie Disney might like to forget. When I first started on the project I was disappointed at how plain the studio model was, even a little sketchy, compared to the vividly unique USS Cygnus model. You can see where they spent all their modeling budget for sure. I wanted to make my Palomino more detailed, in my own style of course, and also to try to address some things about the ship that it was lacking (radiators being an obvious area of concern, but that's true of almost all sci-fi spacecraft. Even The Expanse chickened out there.) For one thing, it is such a tiny ship compared to the behemoth Cygnus with a tiny crew (one of whom isn't even a spacer or a scientist, but a journalist!) How do those big engines get fed? There isn't any visible tankage for propellent, so those engines must be very efficient ion drives, and the ship must have some sort of "wilderness refueling" capability, but I will get into details about my design in a future post. I also need a good black hole image for a background that doesn't immediately scream Gargantua from the movie Interstellar. Don't get me wrong, it's an amazing image, but Gargantua was at the bleeding edge of the possibility curve in size and spin for a black hole, and could not simply have been 'lurking' in space anywhere within a thousand light-years of Earth for the Cygnus to discover and the Palomino to stumble upon unawares.

Modeled with Trimble SketchUp. Rendered with Kerkythea. Palomino concept from Walt Disney Pictures.

Description

Don't forget the high-res Download!

"2130, Day 547... Unscheduled course correction due at 2200. Pre-correction check, rotation axis plus three degrees. Nitrous-oxide pressure forty one hundred, rising to five thousand. Quad jets C and D on Pre-Select. Rotor ignition sequence beginning in three-zero. Thruster line reactors on standby."

USS Palomino, one of the United States' Deep Space Exploration Vessels, cruises through the void on the slow return leg of its two year mission to discover life beyond the Solar System. Their careful calculations and alignments for their Space-Time Catapult drive have proven for naught, as their trajectory has taken them off their projected course. Only a great disturbance in the local space-time could have caused such a thing, but even the highly trained crew are not prepared for what they are about to discover.

------

The model is 99% complete. I would like to lard it up with some posable gadgets and such, maybe a stab at an interior you could glimpse through the viewports even, but like many of my 99% complete projects, this may never come to pass. This ship is a fond childhood memory even if it was from a movie Disney might like to forget. When I first started on the project I was disappointed at how plain the studio model was, even a little sketchy, compared to the vividly unique USS Cygnus model. You can see where they spent all their modeling budget for sure. I wanted to make my Palomino more detailed, in my own style of course, and also to try to address some things about the ship that it was lacking (radiators being an obvious area of concern, but that's true of almost all sci-fi spacecraft. Even The Expanse chickened out there.) For one thing, it is such a tiny ship compared to the behemoth Cygnus with a tiny crew (one of whom isn't even a spacer or a scientist, but a journalist!) How do those big engines get fed? There isn't any visible tankage for propellent, so those engines must be very efficient ion drives, and the ship must have some sort of "wilderness refueling" capability, but I will get into details about my design in a future post. I also need a good black hole image for a background that doesn't immediately scream Gargantua from the movie Interstellar. Don't get me wrong, it's an amazing image, but Gargantua was at the bleeding edge of the possibility curve in size and spin for a black hole, and could not simply have been 'lurking' in space anywhere within a thousand light-years of Earth for the Cygnus to discover and the Palomino to stumble upon unawares.

Modeled with Trimble SketchUp. Rendered with Kerkythea. Palomino concept from Walt Disney Pictures.