Malthea's Dagger: tethered Shard-Ship on border patrol duty

[Caenwyr]

Hey all!

I've been thinking about drawing a ship for quite a while now, but hadn't found that little extra fantasy element to turn it into something truly weird and (hopefully) wonderful. But then a few nights ago I woke up with the remnants of a dream, which led to the concept of a "shard ship".

The shards in question are fragments of a massive, monolithic block of rock which was originally situated deep within the heart of a mountain. When part of the rockface crumbled during an especially devastating earthquake, this rock was exposed, and small slivers of it were found floating nearby instead of falling to the ground like the surrounding rock. The members of the expedition (originally set out to rescue inhabitants of a nearby village after the disaster) soon discovered that it was all but impossible to move the rock fragments to any other elevation. With some effort, small pebbles could be taken down for examination, but they shot up again as soon as they were released. the larger the fragments, the harder it was to move them out of their apparently fixed horizontal plane. It was easy enough to move them around horizontally, incredibly easy even (the only friction they underwent coming from the air around them).

The members of the expedition eventually arrived at the village and saved the ones they could, and when they came back to civilisation, word soon spread about what they had found. The rector of the University refused to believe the tall stories of the exhibition members until one of them discovered a tiny sliver stuck to the top of a heavy chest, and brought it to the University.

Further examination soon revealed a rather sinister aspect of the rock fragment: anyone who touched it, or even came close to it, slowly became very sick. Nowadays we would recognize the symptoms as radiation sickness, with one big exception: those who had stayed just beyond the "sickness radius" of the rock fragments, like the rescued villagers and some of the less curious expedition members, never showed any of the symptoms.

Even before the first expedition members started dying, the government reacted. They had all of the members quarantined, and sent a second, heavily armed expedition to the mountains. The valley with the floating rock fragments was hermetically sealed except for people with the highest government clearance. Cheap labour was attracted with promises of high wages, keeping silent about the high risks involved. In the early months of Project Skystone, many of these workers met an untimely death, but soon they developed a process that allowed them to mine the rock without exposing their labour force to deadly radiation levels - although accidents still happened, naturally.

Then, huge caravans started bringing in building materials. Months the wagons kept streaming to the massive depot just outside the new wall closing off the valley, where they were unloaded and sent away before Project Skystone's private workforce brought them inside. Not one of the workers was allowed to leave in this phase of construction. Government officials kept saying they would reveal the result of all their efforts as soon as it was finished, but it just dragged on. Months they kept building, the sounds of woodworking echoing through the mountains 24 hours a day. They even started building towers on hills and crags, interconnected with massive steel cables hundreds of meters above the ground. The people working on those builds were allowed to go home once their project was done, but they know only what they had been ordered to do: build a tower, and connect it with cables to the ones nearby. They too had no idea of what the government was building. Winter came and went, summer came, slipped into winter again, and then, when the last snows had cleared, it happened.

On a bright spring morning, a thundering, booming horn started echoing through the valley. Over the last few days a huge crowd had gathered just outside the valley wall, eager to know what was happening, and they all came out of their tents despite the cold, and stared intently at the gates, waiting for them to open. Then a massive shadow fell over them, and in unison a thousand pairs of eyes looked up, and saw...

...the underbelly of a massive ship, floating in mid-air. Or rather, two halves of a ship, built around a spherical metal cage containing a big chunk of vibrating, greenish rock: a Skystone Shard. And then another one appeared, just to the left of it. And another one to the right. Five, eight, twelve ships drifted over the wall, stately as swans viewed from the bottom of an incredibly still pond, and they just kept coming. Only after a while the people below began noticing that each of the ships was tethered to the massive steel cable going into the valley - the terminus in a network that was even now expanding throughout the kingdom.

The kingdom had just revealed its Skystone Navy.

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Okay, so that's a bit of backstory, some of it made up on the spot for dramatic effect. But this is the idea: the Shard-Ships are vessels constructed around a cage that holds a shard of the Skystone. It looks like the stone is suspended in the middle of the spherical cage, but in fact it's the other way around: the cage, and the ship that's constructed around it, are all hanging from the shard. The heavier the ship, the larger the shard needs to be to keep it aloft. The cage is slightly larger than the "sickness radius" of that particular shard, allowing the sailors to move safely about without feeling even the smallest effect from it.

All of this (or at least some of this) will eventually appear on the map. For now I only have an unfinished ISO view of the ship, but on the sides there will be plans for each of the decks, a vertical cutaway, and even a small inset with a wider view showing a few docking towers and a bit of pleasantly mountainous terrain. But all that is for the distant future. For now, please enjoy this WIP!

shard ship 2.jpg

[Caenwyr]

Okay, update!

Played around with the sails and the rigging a bit, and started detailing the hull.

shard ship 3b.jpg

Still got some tweaking to do to the main image (the only one present for the moment), and then I can go and start detailing the floorplans!

Any remarks? Let them come!

[Abu Lafia]

Really cool concept with a great backstory! I like that you brought in the "dark side" of the new material/technology too
The ship itself looks very neat and with a lot of wonderful details already. Only nitpick in my view would be the shard itself. Compared to the fine linework of the ship and the cage it looks a bit ... clumpy(?) Maybe adding some more details to the texture of it or just giving it another basic shape?
Btw. what is it with the second cage at the prow? Is there another smaller shard?

Looking forward to see it coming together

[Kellerica]

Ooh, I love it already! Beautiful design, I adore those fine ropes.

[Caenwyr]

Really cool concept with a great backstory! I like that you brought in the "dark side" of the new material/technology too
The ship itself looks very neat and with a lot of wonderful details already. Only nitpick in my view would be the shard itself. Compared to the fine linework of the ship and the cage it looks a bit ... clumpy(?) Maybe adding some more details to the texture of it or just giving it another basic shape?
Btw. what is it with the second cage at the prow? Is there another smaller shard?

Looking forward to see it coming together

Hey Abu! You were absolutely right about the shard. I had dropped it in as a sort of place holder, but knowing myself I would probably have kept it as it was. Thanks to your suggestion, I went and redid it completely. It's now more of a humongous crystal, which means I'll have to change my backstory a bit (now it might be a cave that got exposed during the earthquake? Maybe? I don't know), but that's nothing I worry too much about.

The second cage at the prow is actually an observation orb, split in two levels. The top-down plans should help identify it as such, but I gave the orb its very own redesign to set it apart from the RCS (Radiation Containment Sphere), just to be sure.

Ooh, I love it already! Beautiful design, I adore those fine ropes.

Ooh thanks! I'm trying to give my structure maps a bit more of a handdrawn feel, since some people felt my previous map looked a bit too computer-generated, but I realise I still have a long way to go. So yeah, I'm glad you're happy with the ropes!

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Alright, update! Gave the main image a splash of colour, and added actual deck plans. These aren't finished yet, but I felt like sharing them already


shard ship 4.jpg

[Caenwyr]

Update!!

shard ship 5.jpg

[Abu Lafia]

Oh this is wonderful! Like the deckplans and the illustration a lot, especially the idea with the ropeway. Didn't want to talk you into redesigning the whole thing actually, but the crystal looks really cool. XD

[XCali]

I frikken love this. It is so out of the box and the details are top notch. I can tell you now the RPG community would love this kind of thing. Well done!

(And just to say, respect on those fine ropes. Looks time consuming to say the least.)

[Caenwyr]

Oh this is wonderful! Like the deckplans and the illustration a lot, especially the idea with the ropeway. Didn't want to talk you into redesigning the whole thing actually, but the crystal looks really cool. XD

Oh don't worry, I learn things from critique, so thanks! Oh, and I'm glad you like what you see! That always makes me happy.

I frikken love this. It is so out of the box and the details are top notch. I can tell you now the RPG community would love this kind of thing. Well done!

(And just to say, respect on those fine ropes. Looks time consuming to say the least.)

Hey thanks XCali! Yes, it was a bit of work, but not as much as you'd expect. Well, not drawing them anyway. I spent a good deal of time studying old sailing vessels to get the rigging right, and I still messed some of it up probably. But it looks at least plausible now, so that's something

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AND I have an update for you guys! I took care of the shading of this monster, detailed the terrain in the bottom left image a little more, and started throwing in some weirdly shaped blobs of text. Next up: labelling! But considering the relative simplicity of the ship, I don't think that will take too much time.

shard ship 6.jpg

[Caenwyr]

Update! This is probably gonna be the last one before I move this thing to Finished, so if you have any remarks or suggestions, now's the time to yell!

shard ship 7.jpg