August / September 2012 Lite Challenge: Sector 883 Exile - Bottle Nebula Improvements

[jbgibson]

The as-sold views of the Bottle Nebula are from Wikimedia Commons - I didn't have a circular enough cloud to build my own from.

And if I have a chance I'll detail what I intend by a spineship. Don't think spine = vertebrae, think spines like a porcupine. Until I draw one, this looks similar:



... that's a Creative Commons attribution-licensed photo of an Echinops Spinosissimus flower on Flikr by a guy named Jeremy Vandel. Scale would be anything from forty meters across to 1500 meters, across the visible ends of the spine tips. Not visible, the spines exend monomolecularly from ten to 200 meters further out. The central hull could be as small as a five meter globe up to a good 800 meters for the big freighters. Convict droneships are simplified (no real engines, duuh) in the middle of that range, are automated, and tend to fall apart when tampered with. The government keeps one popular entertainment video or another in circulation at all times with some incidental footage of one coming apart at FTL... Makes impressive theater, and just as impressive meddling-deterrence.

In addition to before-and-after (the official theme) this does incorporate
cloud-based,
muted colors & predefined shape (as well as I could do on the parts with photo based images),
prison,
and technically it's a side view too :-). Call the as-sold look "front-on", this is at about 105 degrees around to the "side".

So it's satisfying as well as insane. The overall mappishness is pretty simple - that suits the "executive summary" nature of the presentation. After all, we're talking an audience of accountants, division directors, and high-falutin' bureaucrats, not geographers. It makes the case pretty plainly "You guys were sold something broken. We fixed it. Pay up, please."