My latest way of not writing is drawing spaceships.

I’ve started what I hope will be a set of stories about a rag-tag group of free traders in the 32nd century. I’ve got two stories done so far, but I thought I needed a picture of their cargo ship. That led to learning something (more than the zero I knew last week) about this subject.

Sometimes it pays to be obsessive. It’s been a struggle, but I’ve managed to produce what I imagine their spaceship looks like. It’s got an engineering and command/control pod in the center, with passenger and cargo pods arranged around it. The engines (what I’ve whimsically called “ghost drives”) are attached at the bottom of the central module.

The ship is named the Arlo and it has a mind of its own–literally. It has an electronic mind that’s a full-blown character in the stories. So the Arlo is both a space ship and Arlo’s physical body.

I called the engines “ghost drives” because there’s something called “ghost condensates” in quantum mechanics. Almost everyone thinks they’re just a mathematical convenience to make the equations balance and easier to manipulate, but everyone thought the same thing about complex variables. Anyway, if “ghost condensates” are real, they are wierd little critters. Among other things, they permit faster-than-light travel, hence the name of the Arlo’s engines.

Anyway, here’s the only thing I’ve accomplished in the last week–a picture of the Arlo.

Here’s the latest picture, looking more like a cobbled-together tramp freighter.

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