I’m jumping the queue here, but one tires of waiting for one’s illustrative collaborators. (That’ll come back to bite me, no doubt.)

I wanted to do a properly peculiar alien ship, so I just drew some random shapes and tried to fit them together. Here’s the result, tracking silently across the void. (And it really is a void, as adding the background colour was about as far as my Photoshop skills went.)

—MR

Somewhere above an alien landscape (insert planet name using template Z[consonant][consonant][numeral]-[consonant]), a plucky one-man fighter manages, even with one engine burning, to blast a heavily armed battle cruiser out of the crimson sky. (I can’t do crimson with this pen, you’ll have to imagine it.)

I have been reading this magnificent book (shockingly out of print), and have got to the Battle of Britain section, which may explain this picture.

—MR

This is what happens to your brain when you spend too much of your youth playing Wipeout: sleek, hovering-a-couple-metres-off-the-ground, no-discernible-cockpit ships like this just plop out of your brain when you least expect it. All is needs is some Designers Republic pseudo-branding in the background! Forgive the graininess – for some reason I like to draw my ships really small.

— DG

Fellow copywriter Nick Asbury got wind of this blog, and tweeted some suggestions or, as he put it, requests for ships with certain names. Tempted as I was to tackle the USS Martin Amis, LeftAlign immediately summoned an image along the lines of the one above. I think I might prefer to re-name her Ragged Right, but both work admirably. She seems to have become a sort of hotel/sightseeing pleasure vessel, cruising here past one of the galaxy’s more spectacular nebulae. I was quite pleased to get a suggestion of leading in there, and even a drop cap created by the cruise corporation’s logo.

—MR

Much happier with this cargo cruiser. I seem to be going against the outlined, Mœbius-style drawings, but using the ProCreate app for iPad makes me want to get a bit more realistic.

So, my first StarDraws attempt and it’s not a great one. I’d gone too far to scrap it by the time I realised it wasn’t great. It’s just a ball with antenna! Anyway, it’s a Recon Droid (W-2 Class, of course).

Oh, and I drew it on my iPad. So, you know…boldly going and all that…

Next one will be a warship. With guns and detail and stuff.

As this blog got going, Dan Bull issued a kindly tweet mentioning #lasernoises, and I realised that neither of my first craft had bristled with menacing weaponry like the ships of my youth. Hence this destructive thing, which seems to be a cross between a tank and an Art Deco armchair. Instead of random numerals, I’ve opted for another staple of these things: the eldritch alien marking. I can never resist a docking bay, either.

—MR

Bit of an exercise in detailing this one – I’ve probably overdone it, but it’s rather fun getting all the little hatches and cables and grills on there. Looks a bit like a piranha, a bit like something you’d find in the sky over Mega-City One.

—DG

So this is like an asteroid tug thing. Probably something to do with mining space minerals. Which one hopes would be called Galaxite or Asterium, but which would be probably just be iron or something. (Apparently not such a far-fetched idea these days.)

I was listening to Cameron on the Lord Leveson Show, and got a bit caught up in my hatching. It’s very meditative. (I also forgot to rub out my pencil, so I confess to a bit of rough tidying-up in Photoshop post-scan.)

—MR

I was drawing a nice big ship and … it went very wrong. After far too long playing with vanishing points and perspectives and making a big bloody mess, I doodled something else and came up with some kind of deep space science facility. I was aiming for something Moebius-ish, but it just kind of looks like a potato. Not very happy with this at all: mostly because I drew it far too small.

—DG

Daniel did a little one, so here’s a big one. Some sort of cargo vessel by the looks of it. The front looks a bit like a teddy bear’s face, I now realise, which wasn’t quite what I had in mind.

Daniel, you’re spot on about random numerals and other codes. Fundamental spaceship elements, which I hope I’ve represented adequately here. Over to you.

—MR

WLK-Class Escape Pod

It started off looking like a whelk, and then a croissant, and then it started too look a bit like a ship. But a small one. After lots of notepad rotation, I finally figured out which way up it goes. Note the important spacey design feature: random numbers.

—DG