Grounded

After the Archer-class Sagittarius had gone silent, Genoese was sent out to search its last known location, en route to one of the moons of the sword-world Flamberge. The shuttle Kepler, with a crew of only two, encountered a micro-singularity, its gravity waves decimating their guidance systems, and before they could recover, they learned, painfully, the fate of their target. Rescue may still be hours away, so they do what they were ordered: determine the fate of Sagittarius's crew. Their first surprise is that Sagittarius, though missing for fewer than 4 days, appears to have been here, in this valley of floes and ash, for several years - perhaps why there had been no communication received from them. That doesn't bode well for Kepler's crew, either ...


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I wasn't totally happy with my last image (Base Camp) and wanted to do something a little less 'staged'-looking. I discovered I had RuntimeDNA's TerraDome 2 and thought, 'well, this looks like a good place to start for a landscape,' and when I loaded Kepler, it was partially sunken into the ground - the image just kind of created itself from there .

I admit, this was partially inspired by the latest Star Wars trailer, with the star destroyer crashed and partially buried in the desert ...

EDIT: I couldn't resist 'tampering' with the image - I re-rendered it at 2x the size, and added a couple of huts to further the narrative of Sagittarius's crew's efforts to survive after crashing on the moon. I tried to bring a little more atmospheric detail and depth to it, and also took advantage of the larger size to try to add a bit more surface detail to the ship, to make it a little less smooth, maybe a little more 'weathered.'

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Archer-class scout, designed by Masao Okazaki (www.starfleet-museum.org) and modeled by Mark Azevedo (www.3dmaz.com); Poser conversion and mapping by moi, textures and DAZ|Studio version by Rob-Caswell.
Sword worlds from the mind of H. Beam Piper in Space Viking