When I was a kid back in the 1970s and 80s, I wanted to be a starship designer.
So, I did it. My mom, a patient, wonderful and talented woman bought me a drafting board, a t-square and drafting tools and taught me how to use them. I spent hundreds of hours at that drafting tables drawing designs for fanciful spaceships. Later, when I attended engineering school to become an aerospace engineer, I discovered that there wasn’t a single job opening for a starship designer. Disillusioned, I turned to other career goals.
In late 2012, I found the box of my old drawings in my attic. Here’s a few of them.
1978 Mars Mission Ship
The spacecraft features a NERVA engine (NERVA was a cancelled government program geared toward designing a safe nuclear rocket) with a two crew modules on rotating pylons for artificial gravity. At the top of the stack was a descent module capped by a sophisticated instrument and communications cluster that would be placed into Mars orbit to act as a sensor platform and communications relay back to Earth.
I drew this “Mars Mission Ship” sketch around 1978, inspired by the then-recent Viking landers on Mars, and also by the amazing book “Exploration of Mars” by Wiley Ley and illustrated by the incomparable Chesley Bonestell.
1978 Star Trek Ship
Where does design inspiration come from? The answer is: anywhere, and the best designs are inspired by the most unlikely things. For example, this fanciful starship that I designed as a freshman in high school in December, 1979 was based on a light fixture. Every time I looked at that light fixture, I saw a starship. One day I sat down a drew it, and got it out of my system. After that, it was just a light fixture.
One big design aspect that is evident in this and several of my other designs is the influence of Franz Joseph, the man behind the bestselling Starfleet Technical Manual and the Star Trek Enterprise Blueprints, both seminal works published in the mid 70s. His groundbreaking design themes had a big impact on sci-fi pop culture, myself included. You can still see his influence in modern science fiction movies an television shows.
1978 Beryllium Tanker
In the 1970s a starship was either a flying saucer ala 1950s Forbidden Planet, or a collection of pods and pylons ala Star Trek, or a techno-greebled vehicle ala 2001’s Discovery. This drawing presages the smooth starships seen in the 1980s in Star Trek: The Next Generation. I sketched this design in the late 1970s, probably intending to add warp pylons or some other means of propulsion.
1977 Radiator Ship Doodle
In a boring middle-school class, did you ever doodle starship designs in your spiral-bound notebook? In 1977 I was too scared to write notes to the little dark-haired girl on which I had a crush, so I used the energy instead to sketch science fiction hardware, like this bizarre starship.
1979 Shuttle Bus Modular System
When Space:1999 aired in the mid-70s it was like a breath of air for us kids who had been without TV science fiction since Star Trek went off the air in 1969. I had been six years old when Trek was cancelled, and was eleven when Space: 1999 first aired. I LOVED the spaceships and hardware from 1999, and I hated the bad plots and horrendous acting. This set of blueprints I sketched in 1979 were an attempt to bring the 1999 ship design ethos into the Star Trek universe. This shuttle bus plan was directly inspired by the Eagle Transporter and was a blend of the Trek shuttlecraft and the Eagle. It made sense to me at the time, and it was fun to draw, if a little blocky.
1974 Flying Cars
These flying car designs were inspired by an issue of Gold Key’s Star Trek comic from July 1974. I was eleven years old when I drew these. The artwork in those old Gold Key comics was irritatingly inconsistent with the actual Star Trek TV show, but some of the ship designs were pretty clever.
1975 Racer Skimmer
In 1974 Dan O’Bannon, the guy behind the original Alien movie, released a college movie project called Dark Star. This little gem featured a scene at the end where one of the astronauts surfed down through the atmosphere on a slab of hull plating. When I saw that movie the concept of skimming across the top of the atmosphere intrigued me. My teenaged geek brain envisioned races where un-powered spaceships would skip across the atmosphere and the ship to cross the longest distance would be the winner. This was my attempt to sketch such a racer/skimmer.
1975 Steampunk Space Fighter
There was no such thing as steampunk in 1975 when I drew this rivet-and-steel space fighter inspired by reading the 1932 book Distant Words, by Friedrich Mader, a very early German science fiction writer. I can’t remember what its function was, but from the name (Planetary Nullificator), and the obviously bristling weaponry, I assume it was a quite fierce little ship.
1976 Survey Drone (aka Hairdryer)
This sketch is either a Starfleet survey drone or my mom’s hairdryer circa 1976. At age 13, everything looked like a spaceship to me, including hair-care products. So, I drew my mom’s hairdryer, put a Starfleet pennant on it, and it became a survey drone.
1978 Galactica-Enterprise Size Comparison
I drew this in 1978 or 79 soon after the premiere of the original Battlestar Galactica. While I loathed the silly plots and bad acting of Galactica, I loved the ships. The Galactica looked HUGE! I wondered how it would compare in size to Star Trek’s Enterprise, so I drew this comparo using a traced image of the Enterprise from the book “Making of Star Trek” by Stephen E. Whitfield. Based on the relative size of the opening of the Enterprise hangar deck and the opening of the Galactica hangars, I drew the Galactica to scale. Once I completed it, I realized that the Galactica hangars were probably far larger than the puny shuttlebay on the Enterprise. So, my Galactica is probably too small by a factor of two or more. Nevertheless, it was fun to draw.
1980 Warpfire Full Blueprint Set
There comes a time in every boy’s life when he wants to put his newly-discovered skills to the test. When it came to starship design, this time came to me in 1980, when after playing around with dozens of sketches and designs, it was time to create a full-fledged sets of complete blueprints for a starship of my own design. The design depicted here was my first attempt to take everything I had learned about drafting in middle school and everything I had learned about starships from television and books and apply it to a grand design, complete with operational instructions. This was to be a REAL starship, as real as my 15-year-old imagination could deliver. I called it the warpfire, and I based it loosely on Star Trek technology, a drawing of a crashed ship on the cover of Alan Dean Foster’s excellent novel Icerigger, and incorporated cues from the Star Wars X-wing fighter and Battlestar Galactica Viper, as well as the Eagle from Space:1999.
1976 Botany Bay
In the 1970s, you couldn’t take a screenshot of a television screen, nor could you pause an rerun episode of Star Trek in order to get the details of the spaceship that was shown on the screen for just a few, tantalizing seconds. The Botany Bay from the famous Trek episode “Space Seed” was just such a tantalizing ship. I drew this based on the few glimpses I saw on the black-and-white TV screen from the episode. I thought this little ship was amazingly cool, though I always wondered why it had a conning tower like a submarine.
1970s Recon Ship
This sketch is from the mid 1970s when I was 12 or 13 and depicts a proposed survey/recon/spy ship. The huge antenna array (obviously inspired by the ill-fated array on the Discovery from 2001: A Space Odyssey) can be deployed while the ships sits undetected at the edge of a solar system, enabling the ship’s crew to eavesdrop on all comms traffic in the system. Survey drones are stored in the lower cargo area and can be launched through the two large tubes on the underside of the ship’s bow.
1978 Antimatter Barge
Here’s an idea-sketch for a Starfleet antimatter barge in the Star Trek TOS universe. Because antimatter handling is so dangerous, this industrial ship design features an antimatter pod held away from the main body of the barge by magnetic bottle projectors (some kind of “reverse tractor,” perhaps?), as well as a physical tower as a backup in case of power failure. Another safety feature is a self-sufficient escape pod, landing craft. I probably sketched this in the late 1978, prior to the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979.
1975 Apollo Command Module
The Apollo program was winding down in the 1970s with the final flights to Skylab and the joint Soviet/American Apollo-Soyuz test project. While I spent most of my time sketching and drafting fanciful starships, I occasionally turned my pencil to something a little more realistic. Here’s my take on the Apollo Command Module, probably drawn around the time of the Apollo-Soyuz mission (1975?).
1980 Explorer Starship Sketch
Here’s a very rough sketch and cutaway of an explorer starship probably drawn around 1980. The idea was a small ship with a crew of 3-5 people on long-duration exploration missions of the galaxy. The ship was configured with a crew module attached to four large hyperdrive engines. As I scanned this drawing, I noticed that the tail gunner position would fire directly into the front of the top hyperdrive engine. If some future shipyard decides to build this design, they might want to change the placement of that gun!
1979 Gunner’s Screen
I didn’t realize it back in the 1970s, but the time I spent designing all those starship control panels set me up for a successful career in the tech industry, where one of my first jobs was designing UIs (User Interfaces – basically the design of how a user interacts with a computer screen). I wonder how many other kids from my era grew up and chose a career path based on their love of science fiction technology. I wonder what kids are doing now, where the visual tools are so much richer than a pencil and paper?
1978 Galactic Starchart Set
Starships need a universe in which to navigate and explore. These days the galaxy around us is mapped with high precision, thanks to NASA programs like Hipparchus, Kepler, and others. We know the exact position of stars, and in many cases, the number and positions of planets circling each star. If you were a kid with an overactive imagination in 1980, however, and you wanted a realistic universe in which to pilot your starship, you had to invent it yourself. These pages are scanned from a 100-page starmap I created, complete with astronomical legend and formulas for interstellar navigation. I was probably inspired by the beautiful Star Trek Maps published by Bantam Books in 1980. Interestingly enough, years later when I was designing database schemas for software projects, I utilized some of the data deconstruction and cataloging techniques that I learned by making these starmaps. I guess it wasn’t time wasted after all.
1970s Sci-Fi Gadget designs
Part of the appeal of science fiction is the cool gadgets. Cell phones, tablets, the Internet, all were presaged by science fiction stories as early as the 1930s. Here are a few gadgets I designed back in the 1970s to populate the science-fiction universe in my overactive head. So far, none of them has been invented yet, but who knows…?
1979 RPG Designs
Before XBox, before PS3s, before even Nintendo there was… your imagination. In the late 1970s and early 1980s there was an explosion of role-playing games (RPGs) in every genre. For fantasy-lovers there was Dungeons & Dragons. For spy/mystery fans there was Top Secret. And for science fiction fans like myself, there was Traveler. Populated with a great backstory and a well-thought-out universe, Traveler also featured some really cool ship designs. Here’s a version of one of them, modified to suit my 14-year-old tastes.
1979 RPG Level Design
In 1979 I discovered RPGs (an acronym for Role Playing Games), where players came together under the guidance of a “Game Master” and embarked on adventures of the imagination. These games provided a low-tech way for individuals to interact within a Science Fiction story and were direct precursors to today’s immersive computer games (only without good graphics.) In fact, there were no graphics at all, just whatever each player pictured in his or her mind’s eye. At the time the most popular Science Fiction RPG was a game called Traveler, based loosely on the Foundation books by Isaac Asimov. In order to add an element of realism to the game, I sketched plans for space ships and alien ground bases. Here’s one, a heavily-armed defensive outpost that was a part of something called the Earth Close Support Network.
1970s Space Colony Design
What would it take to build a successful colony on another world? Here was my middle-school attempt at a little off-world civil engineering. The idea was to create a self-sufficient compound that could be defended against native life-forms and also attack from enemy colonies. This may have been inspired by reading Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle books.
1979 RPG Vehicles
The XBox game Halo has cool tanks and other ground vehicles. Back in the “old days” of 1980 we had role-playing-games like Traveler, with similar vehicles. Only in our version of Halo, the vehicles only existed in our heads… unless we drew them on paper.
1979 Game Level Design
Video game developers devote enormous amounts of time to developing complex levels in which the game play occurs. So it was back in 1979, except instead of complex 3D computer-aided design tools, we used pencil and paper. Here is a map of an island I developed that served as the base-of-operations for a role playing game. Not as sophisticated as today’s PS3 or XBox game maps, but probably just as much fun to invent.
1980 Classroom Doodle
After the moon program was cancelled in 1972, NASA still had several Saturn 5 rockets left over. A group of clever NASA engineers developed a plan to convert the 3rd stage of one of these leftover rockets into a giant space station, and thus the Skylab program was born. Launched in 1973, this massive space station circled the Earth and hosted several crews who performed ground-breaking science. When the last Saturn rockets were converted into museum exhibits, Skylab fell empty. The intent was to use the Space Shuttle to continue its use, but the shuttle program was delayed. In 1979, without a way to boost it into a higher orbit, Skylab crashed to Earth, breaking up in the atmosphere and slamming into the Australian outback.
I was seriously inspired by the Skylab program. That thing was way cool. I loved the way that innovative engineers had repurposed what had essentially been a fuel tank and turned it into a huge space station. I wondered what other kinds of uses the remaining Saturn 5s could be put. Here is one idea…obviously inspired by a ship from Disney’s movie The Black Hole.
