Blueprints

Joss Whedon has a new TV show starting next week, which reminded me about Firefly. I loved that show. My husband has the Serenity Role Playing Game book - he plays D&D but has never tried this game. We just like the pictures. My favorite part of the book - actually, the only part I understand because I don't play RPGs - is the plan-diagrams of various spaceships from the RPG 'verse.

Much of Song of Scarabaeus takes place on a ship, so I knew early on I'd need a diagram of it to keep directions and locations straight. Similarly, for an unrelated book I'm writing, I needed a plan of the huge house where my heroine lives. I was addicted to Lego as a child, usually making houses with the generic blocks that were more readily available in those days (these days it all seems to come in kits). Another addiction was drawing house plans, so all this is huge fun for me.

There's various software out there for creating house plans, although they're all modern of course and my story is futuristic. I ended up purchasing Punch Home and Landscape and it's pretty good. You simply draw the walls, windows and doors, add furniture and textures, and then "walk through" a 3D rendering of the house. (My system can't always handle the mansion I created...)

But now I desperately want the same kind of thing for creating spaceships. Or maybe I need to take a technical drawing class so I can draw blueprints like the ones in the Serenity book. Failing that, I'm stuck with my pathetic line drawings made in Word. Now don't laugh, but here's a deck of the Hoi Polloi, the ship from Song of S (click to enlarge).



This only includes the rooms actually mentioned in the book - there are various nooks and crannies, and of course the bulkheads are not 2mm thick as the diagram implies. The faint line around the edge is the outline of the lower three decks (topdeck is smaller).