My favorite fighter plane is the F-14 Tomcat, so I created a new fighter for my book covers, paying homage to the F-14. This is the F-114 Tomcat Exo-Fighter which means it can operate both inside an atmosphere as well as in space. She's almost finished here, just tweaking a few little things.
I am almost finished writing my fourth book and I've also been working on the main character's new spaceship for the cover. I have the shape all hammered out so now I can start adding all the small detail, weapons, engines, landing gear ...etc.
Been working like crazy on the 3D model of the second generation battle carrier, which will appear on the cover of my third book. At three miles long, built to scale, it is twice the size of the first generation battle carrier. Its main weapons are 250% bigger than the first generation as well. The last three images are both generations for comparison.
Okay, so after a while I decided I didn't like a lot of things about the two new ships so I basically deleted everything except the main hulls and started over. I have basically finished the dreadnought and am about to start work rebuilding the battle carrier. I am very happy with how the dreadnought turned out and am hoping the battle carrier turns out just as well.
So I have four books published on Amazon now.
The rewrites went well and I ended up getting professional covers made - I found a hell of a deal.
Ended up not using this fighter at all unfortunately - as well as several other ships I built.
After putting all that work in and republishing them, I found out that Facebook and Amazon changed their advertising setups completely.
Now they are designed to completely drain your bank account instead of help you sell books.
All the social media stuff is such a PITA and you get so little return that it's just not worth writing the books anymore.
So disappointed, all that work pretty much for nothing.
I figured I might as well share the covers I had designed.
I built all the ships other than the 3 small Cylon looking ships on the 4th cover.
A little more progress on the new ship. Still lots of detail to add and I need to decide on a color scheme. This is a private space ship, not a military ship, so I think I want to give it some color instead of military gray. To save myself some time I fit the sub-light thrusters from the battle carrier in the back. I'll make some changes to make them unique to this ship in a bit. Still need to ad the thrust cones for the jet engines and the FTL drive assembly - which I'm still brainstorming on. Anyone have suggestions on the color scheme?
Started the long journey of modeling the detail on this thing - it will literally take me 2 years to finish as I am trying to do everything as accurate as possible and that means looking at tons of photos and measuring for scale.
Thank everyone!
Yes - still need to add RCS thrusters so she can maneuver in space.
I'm not going to add too many more details though.
I built this to go on my book covers along with my dreadnought and battle carrier which will be the main center pieces on the covers.
The fighters will be fairly small on the covers so the small details won't even show.
We'll see when the covers are laid out.
I'm currently working on finishing the second generation of battle cruiser and one of the main alien enemy vessels.
The alien ship will be the shape of a giant mechanized angel fish and hopefully it will have a presence like a Minbari warship from Babylon 5.
I'm working on the ships when I take breaks from writing.
I had 3 books published on Amazon, but I wasn't overly happy with them.
I read several books on how to improve my writing and of course like most people I learn as I go, so I pulled them off Amazon to rewrite them.
Book 1 is rewritten, I'm working on book 2, and then I'll rewrite book 3.
Book 4 is all finished and book 5 is being plotted.
I've been an IT person for the last 30 years, lost my job because of COVID-19 and because the Canadian government killed our oilfield here in Alberta.
I was really tired of the IT stuff, and working for other people, so I decided to make my new career science fiction and do my own thing.
I haven't posted anything or even visited these forums in quite a while. I just finished my fourth book and I am currently rewriting my first three books to improve them and apply what I have learned since writing them. As part of the rewrites I am working on new covers as well. To that end I created two new ships in 3D over the past few weeks. The original battle carrier is 1.5 miles long. The second generation battle carrier is twice the size at 3.0 miles long. The dreadnaught is 4.5 miles long. One thing I learned from making the original covers is don't overdo the detail on the 3D ships because it just doesn't show up. All it does is greatly increase the time it takes to render the final image. Here are a few images of the old and new ships together for comparison, without any special lighting, special effects, texture maps, or environment.