"HQC Spacecraft for the Victorian Age" Topic

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The Hive, Queen and Country Universe requires economical space travel between worlds. Our Spacecraft book will detail the vessels, stations, crews and economics-as well as combat- that will characterize space travel and exploration in the HQC Universe

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The ships will be available as 3D printed models from Shapeways and possibly from other sources as well link

If we hit our stretch goals you'll see a book with 100 designs stretching over the first few decades of space travel in our universe. Please help us out, help us reach our goals so you can get a great Victorian Space reference AND excellent models!

Best of luck with these, but…

… really not picking up any VSF vibe from these designs.

I wouldn't want to see 'Steampunk' cogs and gears festooned all over the things, but some riveting, wrought-iron work, piping, etc would certainly sell these to me, and, I expect, many who would like to see some decent VSF spaceship designs.

These are too, well, featureless. There's nothing about them that specifies them as being from the bygone age of daring, 19th Century, spacefaring. The ring-shaped ships in the pic above could have popped out of Clarke's '2001', for example, or a kid's picture book of 'How we will live in Space' C. 1958.

I do hope you do well out of the KS, and it gives you a springboard to greater things, but I do hope you reconsider your ship designs. Best of luck!

I agree with MacrossMartin. These look cool, but do not look VSF. How about a spaceship that is designed to be fired out of orbit in a cannon, but then has rockets and fins and such that fold out from the hull after launch? And lots of rivets.

Hi MacrossMartin!

Thanks for the interest! You are correct that these ships don't look particularly VSF or very detailed– we are still in the very early stages of planning and are only starting to look at general shapes and the underlying technologies. The space vehicle book is a stretch goal, deliverable sometime after August 2017.

If you're interested, we'd love to get more input on the visual and technical designs. You might want to check out our mailing list:

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Or some of the
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We are looking at how we are going to surface detail these vessels. The images we currently have are just the base outlines. The final designs will explore the richness of Victorian aesthetics. We won't have useless gears and sprockets, but will have details that are either functional or represent ideals of Victorian design.

Just paint them brown and bronze and they'll look plenty steam punky.