Spaceship Sketch, the shark

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TSS Shark, a spaceship sketch

Spaceship Design Sketch TSS-Shark.

This spaceship sketch is of a medium-size spaceship flying low over the surface of an asteroid. Its resemblance to a shark was at first unintentional, but once I noticed that it was looking more and more predatory I played up this aspect of the spaceship design. It is a spaceship design that is rooted in the Tarazet universe that I have been toying with in my mind for some time, as a combination of role-playing game setting, background for novels and unifying theme for a series of illustrations.

This is a good example of the spaceships of the Tarazet universe in that it is actually a large robot that happens to have internal storage which can be used to carry humans. The spaceship itself is an entirely autonomous intelligence - an artificial one of course - and is only a member of the Tarazet defense forces on a pert time, voluntary basis. This entitles the spaceship to put the prestigious letters TSS in front of its name.

The ruler of Tarazet entrusts very little of its defense needs to the humans, or other organic life forms of the Tarazet game setting. It does send out some humans, and other life forms, sometimes they turn out to be immune to a viral attack that might compromise the intelligence gathering of an artificial intelligence. It is also useful to have humans and other life forms get first hand experience of the threats that are out there. The ruler of the Tarazt does have to get elected after all, and on a one intelligence one vote system, the humans of Tarazet have a lot of power.

As you can read here at this post on my illustration blog, this sketch was done in answer to the Illustration Friday art challenge website. It is really useful, once a week, to have to sit down and produce a sketch. It's too easy to be distracted by all the other things an illustrator working in a digital medium has to worry about. It's important now and again to take a break from adding more features to GIMP, playing with Blender and learning how to get the effects you want in Inkscape. And when you add technical difficulties to the mix, such as my Windows machine giving up the ghost and having virtually overnight to switch to Linux, it's a wonder anything gets done.