For the second part of  starship design, we’ll be focusing on filling out the living, eating and washing facilities on deck 2. This is the largest deck of the ship and once it’s finished, the rest of it should fall into place with relative ease. The “Big Three” locations all ships need for their crew and passengers are: a place to sleep, a place to eat, and a place to,… clean up, after oneself. To begin, we’ll start with the overall look of deck 2, then move into sleeping, eating and restroom areas.

All Aboard

The one thing I noticed right away about my rough sketch from part 1, was its similarity to a boned fish; while this was unintentional, it illustrates how fluid  designing a starship can be, and because of that,  I decided to change the shape a little.

Deck 2 is the largest and most physically active section of the ship; the focal points on this deck being, the primary ship’s access area and troop living spaces.

I began by selecting the Hull, Sleek Silver mirrored polygon after right clicking on the Draw Hull button, a custom Snap setting of 5 foot, 1 snap square grid was created. Instead of the original, half moon shape, I decided to create a hull that was somewhat triangular in shape,  suggesting forward movement.  The deck was drawn next, by selecting the Deck, Lattice  mirrored polygon. The Snap for it was changed to a custom 5 foot, 5 snap square grid  so there would be a one foot gap between the edge of the hull and the deck. The   Bulkhead, Default 0.5′ was selected for the exterior and interior bulkheads and it followed the same Snap setting as the deck. In the picture to the right, the Deck Sheet has been hidden, as I found it visually easier to place bulkheads and symbols at this scale.

The custom snap settings were created by right- clicking the Grid button in the lower right part CC3s drawing window and selecting New…, then selecting 2d Rectangular and applying the settings needed.

The first render of the carrier was ridiculously over scaled (it was nearly 700 feet/210 meters long), and the drop ship place holders were the size of a small building (they should be closer to a city bus). Once the ship was rescaled to a more manageable size (pictured above, about 300 feet/91 meters long), it was time to decide on a starting point. Since all crew/troop entry happens at the “nose” on deck 2, I decided to start there, and branch off to the troop living spaces; the main corridor needs to accommodate 150+ people coming and going with the ship docked and the width was set  to 10 feet/3 meters.

 You want me to sleep where?

The main corridor and living areas on deck 2  on the working render (above) show a large, dormitory style, bay for troops  to sleep in, and the design of the ship called for marginal crew comfort, since they’d be living on board for weeks or months. This meant a modification was needed. I decided to separate the room with a wall; from a narrative standpoint this also adds to passenger safety: If a portion of the hull is breached the loss of life will be lessened. With the basic room layout complete furniture placement was the next step.

The rooms  numbered 1-4  show the progression of furniture placement:

Room 1 (left). This room had 7 single bunks, each with a gear locker, and 2 small chairs along the wall with a large table for a common area. This was a messy, cramped effort with little efficiency and a poor design.

Room 2 (left). 8 single bunks were placed toe to toe and the large table and two chairs were removed, in their place, 2 desks (for writing home) were added and the lockers were set along one wall. Less cramped, but room to improve.

The first two rooms also had the door exiting to the main hall; during an emergency or troop deployments, the hall would fill  quickly and confusion would run rampant. The doors for rooms 3 and 4 were moved to the side hall that accesses the drop ship dock area.

Room 3 (right).  The single bunks were moved to the outer walls, the lockers split the room and one table and chair for writing home was removed. Getting closer, but still a lot of wasted space.

Room 4 (right). Moved the single bunks to one end  of the room and the lockers to the other. A couch for lounging and 8 small chairs for dressing were added.  Better yet, the chairs suggest a wall that separates the sleeping/dressing areas. I also placed Deck, Plastic Irreg  for a little visual distinction.

The final room design was broken up into three spaces (below).  The sleeping area is separated from the common and dressing area by a wall (inspired by the chairs from room 4) . The single bunks were replaced with double bunks, increasing the occupant count from 8 to 12,  and scaled down to 95% of their original size.  While this room layout is cramped, it is a military ship after all, I feel that it is much improved from the poorly designed first layout. Once I was satisfied with the room layout I simply used the Mirrored Copies command (accessed by right clicking the Copy button) to quickly duplicate the rooms (Mirrored Copies is a great solution if you have symmetrical ships or buildings with rooms that need to be duplicated across a central point).

Using the method described above: creating a room, placing symbols and rearranging them for best use of space I then created:

The dining hall, details include (clockwise from tables and chairs) seating for 129 people, steam tables for serving food, a dishwasher, sinks, stove tops and ovens, a walk-in refrigerator and an elevator to travel to the storage area on deck 4 and the crew mess on deck 1.

Shower and toilet facilities for officers and enlisted personnel. The enlisted shower facility details include (clockwise from upper left) 8 showers, sinks and toilets, lockers and benches (created by stretching the rectangular table) The smaller officer’s bathroom and lounge were combined to conserve space. Drawing bathrooms is about as much fun as cleaning them for me, there’s no way to make showers and toilets interesting!

With the “big three” completed for deck 2 (pictured below), Deck, Plastic Irreg was added for all sleeping/common areas, by right clicking the Deck Plan button, to create visual interest and  to assist viewers with identifying different areas easily. Next time, we’ll be completing the remainder of deck 2’s amenities, including enlisted lounges, armory and firing range, officer quarters and ships operating systems, creating deck1, reviewing how to mirror copies, and the creative mixing of Cosmographer 3s symbols.

Created by Jonasgreenfeather on the ProFantasy Forum.

He says of this ship, created with Cosmographer 3:

Like many forum members, I’ve been drawing maps (both fantasy and sci-fi since I was a kid of 9 or 10 years old). I’ve had CC3 since February-ish of last year, but took a really long break from it while I was looking for work. I think that my tenacity and OCD makes up for my lack of initial planning and can’t keep things well enough alone 🙂 I often only have a faint image of how a landscape, ship or city is going to end up and each often goes through several revisions before I’m satisfied with the result. I find it’s a very organic (and sometimes frustrating) process: the land shapes the features shapes the cities and roads shapes the land…

The ship in this thread grew from the idea of an engine and a bridge connected by a spine, different modules could be plugged into the spine depending on the mission requirements (living spaces, labs, hanger bays, cargo, etc.) BUT… when I started drawing the modules I drew the rooms to small and nothing fit in the “slots”, so I took what I liked (the bridge) and then built the captian’s cabin, first starting with the furniture and then building the walls. Once that was done it was time to think about the “why” of the ship, it made sense to me that the captain and first officer would have cabins on different sides of the ship (in case of attack one hit wouldn’t take them both out). So I coppied the bulkheads of the captain’s room and turned it into the XO’s and NCO’s quarters (as they would have less room than the CO)! the rest of the ship just sort of grew from there.

Well, that was a bit a tangent but gives you an idea of how I Cartograph (is that a word?)! To summarize, I’m playing, learning and expermenting all the time to share what I see in my head with others.

Originally posted on Mapsandmore.com.

Ashen Stars is a wonderful space opera rpg by Pelgrane Press, based on the GUMSHOE system. I had the pleasure to create the game’s published setting map (a part of the Galaxy called “The Bleed”) based on a sketch by Robin D. Laws.

Lately I got to revisit the setting when, after play-testing the upcoming Terra Nova adventure, Simon asked me to create a simple black and white diagram of the adventure’s featured luxury liner. You can see the result below (the color background was added for web display). While the exact layout of the ship isn’t important for the story, the relative position of the important locations is, and the map shows those.

Joe Sweeney, the avid mapper behind the Battle Maps Tiles from the 2010 Annual, is working on a new sci-fi battle map tiles pack. We will be making this available through the Annual later in the year. The set he is building already contains well over 100 new textures and scores of signage overlays for floors: access zones, radiation danger, chemical areas, shuttle landing zones, overhead automated cranes, etc.

Before he completes all the graphics work and begins developing the battle map tiles, Joe would like to know what sort of signage you’d like to see. How about a “no aliens” floor zone sign? Or perhaps “white, red, green zone” signs for those Paranoia games? Get creative. Get practical. Think of all the signs (and textures) you would love to see in your next sci-fi mapping project and email your ideas to jsweeney@storyweaver.com or post them in the comments below.

[NLP138 from the ProFantasy forum produced this excellent floorplan using Cosmographer. This is how he did it:]

Well, I knew I wanted to do a floorplan and so my first thought was to fire up DD3 but I’m really lazy so loading the other textures and symbols sounded like a drag and I knew I wanted to use symbols and textures from Cosmo3.  So instead of using Dungeon Designer I started off with a Cosmographer bitmap deckplan.  I’d already spoken with my friend who was running the game to get the specifics on the size of the pods and the central hub so picking my dimensions was more or less already done for me.

The first thing I did was I drew out the pod you see in the upper-right. The walls surrounding it are actually two arcs because I was having a hard time trimming the wall to insert the door symbol – at first I drew the walls as a circle (there may be an easier way to do this but I’m still not that savvy).  Once the pod was completely built (to include furniture) I copied it once and moved it down.  Then I did a mirror copy of the pod to give me the same layout on the other side – originally I was just going to make 3 copies and then rotate them but I didn’t like the way that would end up looking furniture-wise so I was happy to see there was a mirror function (this was a bit of a learning experience for me).  The last smaller pod was made in the same fashion but made deliberately more cramped in with a dingier looking floor texture to reflect the lower social and economical status of the inhabitant.

The central node was then drawn – I wanted to use a different deck texture from the pods since according to the gamemaster the pods were modular and could be swapped out and exchanged.  I figured the central hub then would be very neutral then regardless of the other occupants wealth level.  Adding the symbols was a lot of fun – but slightly tedious at times trying to get them just right and I’m sure I could zoom in to some of the sections and find tiny mistakes.

Once all of the embellishments were in place it was just a matter of tweaking the sheet effects.  I used the default ones and then altered them slightly – I think I added a wall shadow to the “bulkheads” sheet and I know I played with the different symbols effects trying to keep them from throwing too many weird shadows.  I also created two sheets for the legend plate in the bottom right but I think it looks pretty standard.  Just a couple of rectangles with shadow/blur effects and some words on that.

On my website I’ve got the finished image  (not as high rez) and a few of the “in production” images that I sent to my play group to show them the process.

Scrying Eye are also in the RPG cartography business, but they provide the end result, not the tools to do the job! Recently, they’ve used our Cosmographer 3 software to create detailed miniature-scale deckplans under license for Mongoose Traveller. James Miller of Scrying Eye talks about Cosmographer 3 and his deckplans at about 5:20 in the video below:

Speaking of science fiction rpgs and maps done in Cosmographer 3 in our previous post…

I recently had the pleasure to create a trio of maps for the new FATE edition of Brennan Taylors Bulldogs! game. I drew the following encounter, galaxy and deckplan maps with Cosmographer 3: Continue reading »

Ralf created this map with Cosmographer 3 for Pelgrane Press’s forthcoming SF game, Ashen Stars, now on pre-order.

A long wait is finally over. We’ve got the Cosmographer 3 materials from the printer and Steve has been building stock and assembling shipments since Friday. Look for your Cosmographer 3 box in the mail soon.

I’m very happy to report that Joseph Sweeney has taken to Cosmographer 3 like an angry Rancor to Jabba’s fighting pit and produced his first video tutorials for our sci-fi add-on. Continue reading »