E is for Engineering

A black and white illustration for the geomorph book I'm working on - a non-specific engineering room. Not necessarily a starships main engineering (although it could be) but possibly a secondary engineering space.

Whether your PCs need to fix it, defend it, sabotage it, or search it - this may be the room they're looking for:

• the fusion reactor control room of an asteroid colony
• air scrubbers in an research facility on a planet with a tainted atmosphere
•  the highport life support equipment terrorists are intent on destroying
• the unfathomable workshop and experimental time machine of that evil genius Dr. Chronos
• the last known location of the cute little alien you picked up at your last stop. Ew - what's this slimy stuff?
• the misplaced cryo-containment unit storing the forgotten zombie virus

Building a Better Ship's Engineer

I hate drawing people, but I'm working on a new illustration and needed a good ship's engineer. I'll usually just do a Google Image search and trace the best thing I find, but in this case I was getting mostly pictures of Montgomery Scott, Geordi LaForge, and Kaylee Frye. Nothing against any of these iconic ship's engineers, but I really wanted something a bit more unique and with more of a Traveller feel.

It's the long way around, but here's my process: I try to start with an image of an actual person in a pose something close to what I'm looking for. In this case I found a carpenter in a nice, natural pose. I then modify the image in Photoshop with whatever accessories help tell a better story. Boots, patches, and vests are a lazy, but effective, trope for quick sci fi costuming, so I went with that. I import the Photoshopped image into AutoCAD for easier vector tracing (SketchUp is terrible for complex 2D drawing). The AutoCAD drawing is imported into SketchUp for coloring.

Starship Geomorphs

I'm putting together a book of starship geomorphs. I've drawn over 400 so far. There's still more work to do before things are finalized, but here is a sample. Astute viewers will recognize that #199 is the plan from the blog header above. No, the lead figure is not to scale.