Supreme Commander Laurie: Manuscript Status and Spaceships
Sometimes this novel still feels like a rough draft, sometimes a finished work close to publication. But I finally decided that Draft 2 is done and that I’m working on successive edits of a final manuscript of Supreme Commander Laurie. This means seriously considering how my two new spaceships work. Here are new drawings plus excerpts from the ongoing MS.
Typhoon VIII
Out the curved cockpit canopy the compact curved wing of the Typhoon VIII gleamed in the starlight. It had been thrilling to conjure this lovely beast straight out of her mind. She’d followed the Typhoon Design Group’s rough draft specs, aware that VIII concepts broke tradition with previous Typhoons. The familiar triangular wings had been transformed into near-semicircles merging into a more oval fuselage, hinting at a classic flying saucer shape. The ship was more of a sports car than the dependable Typhoon family sedan of recent years, and Laurie wondered if some batty artist had infiltrated the Design Group.
We do say goodbye to the traditional Typhoon spaceship design of the Jack Commer series. And it felt good to nail down the newest ship in the fleet, Pegasus; I even fantasized how I could build a full-scale replica: wing surface sixty-five feet in diameter, saucer height forty feet. Circular design has some interesting problems; much of the tech gets stored in curving spaces useless for normal human movement.
Pegasus
Laurie 283 admired the smooth wing surfaces flowing into the saucer body. Hardly wings, they were now saucer edges. Typhoon design had been heading this way; the VIII’s wings seriously curved around the fuselage, but Pegasus was a true saucer. The interior levels were similar to those in Typhoons VII and VIII except for the semi-circular control room curving around the front of Level Three, with navigation and communication/sensors behind that, taking up huge offices to either side. From the outside there didn’t appear to be a front or back, just smooth white saucer all the way around.
Turret officer Craig Reynolds goggled at the four-inch-wide nozzles ringing the saucer edges: forty PlanetBlaster nozzles alternating with forty sublight/Star Drive nozzles. “We can fire instantly in any direction!” he laughed. “And those Amplified Thought Xons! Man, we could do a hell of a lot of damage with those babies.”
I’d made loose drawings for the rough draft, but have since wondered if I was missing details or creating plot holes. Fortunately there were no serious contradictions, though I had to make sure I knew the placement of the ladders characters are constantly scampering up and down, and I realized that due to the curve of the saucer, Pegasus’ top level must be thirty feet wide, not forty. In making further edits I’ll keep these layouts in mind.
Composing Supreme Commander Laurie during the first year of retirement has been one factor in my somewhat amusing reluctance to fully assess the book. Spinning a new series off the Jack Commer series is another. And wondering what new writing lies ahead is another. It’s wonderful to have fun with a genre novel and make it as expressive as I can, but I can feel the forces behind The Exoskeleton Realization clamoring for something quite different. Great novel title by the way. I know I have this vague complaint that I have no real ideas for such a new kind of novel, but you know, when you think about it, that’s never stopped me before.
Copyright 2023 by Michael D. Smith
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