Long may she fly.
(Next in my series of "Space Pirate" posts. Let me know when you get tired of these.)
At some point while reading through SPE1, you may have wondered "what does Captain Jack Flint's BAE CT-1300 model corvette look like?"
Well, thanks to the miracle of modern technology, I can deliver images through the intertubes directly to your Technicolor Rasterizificationer.
But before I do that (that is, give you what you want), allow me to go through the evolution of the ship (that is, bore you with details you don't want).
My starting point for designing the ship was a C-130. I figured this basically described everything your average Joe space pirate could need. A large fuselage, capable of carrying lots of loot; the ability to load it with guns, for massive broadsides; and small enough (in spaceship terms), to be agile.
However, I wanted to make some changes to this design. Firstly, I always liked how the nose cone on a C-5 could open to allow the loading of cargo in through the front or back. This seemed like a handy thing for a space pirate to be able to do. But I thought it should be able to do that in flight, so the idea of the entire nose opening, and blocking the view from the cockpit, was impractical. Instead, I opted for a cockpit that was above a loading ramp.
The first drawings were based on this idea. You can see how I worked through different hull shapes, trying to hone in on one I liked. Other changes I made involved wing shape and placement, turret placement, engine configuration (I always knew it would have four; again patterened off the C-130), and addition of tails. The drawing closest to the middle of that page (the side-view; second side-view down on the right) was the first one I really liked, so I drew a perspective of it, to get an idea of what it looked like from other angles. It was getting close, but it still lacked something.
Around this time, I decided that many of my ideas were too close to Star Trek, and I wanted to move the feel of the story back about four centuries, closer to Master and Commander. This led to many other changes in the story (which I may talk about later), and I strived for less futurism and more anachronism.
The way this manifested in Redemptrix was that I decided it should be more like a sailing ship and less like an airplane. The obvious way to change this was to move the bridge to the stern of the ship, and you can see this in the drawings towards the bottom of the page. The only other things I played with from there were changes to the slope of the hull.
This is the drawing I made about the time I started writing the book, and was the first "final" drawing. As I wrote, I realized I needed to make a few minor changes. The engines, which were supposed to be atop the wings, on the downward slope of the hull, were moved. (I realized that if you are accelerating a ship at 9.8 m/s2, you would want your thrust to be downward, and not aftward, so you could walk on the floor, not the wall.) Also, all the weaponry was moved forward to be in the nose cone, and the number of cannons was reduced from eight to six. (Moving the cannons into the nose cone meant that, due to the slant, all six guns could point forwards, which meant you could bring more firepower to bear on a single target.) But this drawing is still pretty close (although the final design is proportionally longer).
From that drawing I was able to build a very simple 3D model in Anim8or.
This model is completely untextured, and no details, such as the rail gun turret, cannon portals, or throats, are shown.
Since no one has yet opted the rights to make Space Pirates into a multi-million dollar blockbuster and it remains only a book, you will have to use the old-fashioned technique of using your imagination to visualize the details. To help you along, I have provided this quote from near the beginning of chapter two of the work-in-progress Space Pirates Episode II.
"The hull was colored a dark bluish-gray, except for the vertical stabilizers at the ends of the wings, which were painted gold, and the word "REDEMPTRIX", painted across the stern of the ship in large, serifed, gold, electro-opaque paint. This special type of paint only turned opaque when an electric current was supplied, meaning that if the crew didn't want to broadcast who exactly it was that was stealing from you, they could simply turn off the incriminating name."
Even though it is very simple, it really did help me visualize what the ship looked like, and from there I was able to work out the details of the interior.
In those schematics, the dashed lines represent the ceilings of the respective decks, since the sloping of the hull makes most of the decks wider at the floor.
"The entire ship was sixty meters, stem to stern, fifteen meters, keel to dorsal, and thirty meters, wingtip to wingtip, which put it squarely in the standard classifications as a corvette: slightly larger than a sloop or sloop-of-war, and smaller than a frigate."
(In Episode I, Jack says that Redemptrix is 100 meters. That was before I worked out the exact size, and it will be corrected when I go back and edit it.)
As for the name, there was no real evolution. When trying to come up with a name for Jack's ship, I sort of knew the direction I wanted to go. Redemptrix occurred to me, I liked it, and, more importantly, choosing the name helped shape the plot; obviously I had to figure out why Jack chose that name (his reasons will be revealed at a later date).
