Mining ship

[ffutures]

One of the passages in The Struggle for Empire mentions mining ships towing cargoes of rock etc. back to Earth. This is my first stab at one, using bits of submarine, electricity pylon, crane, rock, and a NASA star field.

I think I'm calling it Nostromo and saying it's near a red sun...

Comments

[johnreiher.livejournal.com]

It looks fairly practical and sturdy. A workhorse of a ship. So, did you use an Oscar class sub or something USA or British?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It's a WW2 U-boat (I forget the model) turned upside down with the conning tower removed.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Type XXI, I think.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

I feel the starfield is a little too dense. (Strictly speaking, if the ships are visible the chances are that no stars would be visible, but for the sake of artistic licence I don't mind a few.)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It's a NASA photo, I presume it's real...

[draconin.livejournal.com]

I agree with this comment. Regardless of whether it's real or not, the brightness and sheer 'busy-ness' of the background distracts from the subject.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't doubt that it's real, for certain values of magnified reality, but is it what would be seen by a human eye? Or like what would be seen by the human eye, or like what the human eye imagines it would see?

Humans expect the kind of density of stars in space that they see in the night sky, I think, which equates to something like 2000 pinpoints of light over the whole hemisphere, IIRC. You've got something like that number in whatever angle the frame makes, and a lot of them aren't pinpoints, but blobs.

Plus you have the foreground object much dimmer that the background features, which helps produce an uncomfortable reading of what the subject of the picture is meant to be.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

OK, fair point - I'll look at changing it, spotted a couple of other problems anyway.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

I hate to sound nitpicky, I really like the spacecraft.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I agree. The 'rock' looks almost translucent to me, the highlights on that look like the stars only a bit dimmer and the presence of two star-blobs next to it further confuses the bountary.

Also, I'm not sure where the light is coming from but even if it's directlt behind the camera it seems much too diffuse, there should be more contrast on the ship and rock.

(What did you use to create it?)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Just Paintshop Pro - a fairly basic paint program. It does need more work - for one thing it looks a lot paler on the computers at work, I think I may need to tweak the monitor settings on my PC.