Swiftsure render

[Graham Kennedy]

Wow, today has been a hell of a session. Having finished off the Vanguard I decided to tackle another one, this time the Swiftsure. Not a warship, this, but rather a testbed for new propulsion technology. She marked the transit from sail type drives to midspace drives. This form of midspace drive required the ship to have two hulls connected by a thin neck. You can see that same design principle in the Vanguard class, albeit in much modified form. There are actually two or three generations between the Swiftsure and the Vanguard, which will be forthcoming. After Vanguard the next generation used a more advanced midspace drive which allowed the hull to be one single unit with no neck, eliminating a weak spot. Hence why the Kororra doesn't share that look.

As you can see, the Swiftsure has a little sail ship buried in the forward hull. The idea was to give the crew a way to abandon and make their way back to a friendly port if the midspace drive failed. I like playing with ships that are on the boundary between two different technologies, clinging on to the old because the new isn't quite trusted yet.