Do you like the Illustrated Novel Space Ships?

Reminds me of starship trooper ships.

While I'm no fan of grav plating nor of having every ship in space all being equatorially up level and lined up with every other ship. As pictured on the cover art of every Honorverse book.

Yes I would much rather have centripical gravity and soup cans. The cylinders are much preferred than the winged ships.

Suggestion:

If you think the canon ships are too utilitarian and eye-candy has to be added to them to sell better in a comic (that's not my opinion but I concede it may be a concern)

then

make the eye-candy fit the physics of the Honorverse.

Which means:

Instead of adding nonsense fins and thrusters at the stern rather emphazise the alpha and beta nodes.
I am sure one could paint them in a sufficiently 'flashy' way instead of the very muted design David came up with. This would even offer the opportunity of having the wedges (or sails) being visibly projected from the nodesm (kinda like the sails on a sailing ship). A real cool vision. And revolutionary.

I'm but a snottie, and a late-comer to the Honorverse at that - for some reason, although I've been reading SF/F for 50+years, DW had completely slipped my notice - and when I first started reading the books and googling "Honorverse images" I didn't like the look of them at all.

But they kind of grew on me, and the shape kind of makes sense when you consider what they're supposed to do - you ain't never going to land them on a planet, not in one piece, anyway - and now, on my third read-through in a year, any other design looks wrong.

I mean, you wouldn't put fins on Babylon 5 or the Sulaco. Ships that don't enter atmosphere don't need wings/fins/streamlining. Form Follows Function.

pyan wrote:I'm but a snottie, and a late-comer to the Honorverse at that - for some reason, although I've been reading SF/F for 50+years, DW had completely slipped my notice - and when I first started reading the books and googling "Honorverse images" I didn't like the look of them at all.

But they kind of grew on me, and the shape kind of makes sense when you consider what they're supposed to do - you ain't never going to land them on a planet, not in one piece, anyway - and now, on my third read-through in a year, any other design looks wrong.

I mean, you wouldn't put fins on Babylon 5 or the Sulaco. Ships that don't enter atmosphere don't need wings/fins/streamlining. Form Follows Function.

On the other hand, the B5 ships (like White Stars) designed to enter atmosphere and the various landing capable shuttles DID have wings &/or airfoils as part of the design. The rest of the ships were all "functional" within the then level of tech of the individual races. Earthforce ships were mostly boxy rectangles with spin-gravity sections and equipment, gear and weapons sticking out. Minbar ships had flowing lines (like giant Angelfish) but they appear to combine a level of esthetics with the more different/advanced tech. but the shape still appeared to be part of the functon of the ship given what they worked with. That a Shadow capital ship could land on a planet was more a funtion of their tech than the shape of the ship.

pyan wrote:I'm but a snottie, and a late-comer to the Honorverse at that - for some reason, although I've been reading SF/F for 50+years, DW had completely slipped my notice - and when I first started reading the books and googling "Honorverse images" I didn't like the look of them at all.

But they kind of grew on me, and the shape kind of makes sense when you consider what they're supposed to do - you ain't never going to land them on a planet, not in one piece, anyway - and now, on my third read-through in a year, any other design looks wrong.

I mean, you wouldn't put fins on Babylon 5 or the Sulaco. Ships that don't enter atmosphere don't need wings/fins/streamlining. Form Follows Function.

I think this post, and others like it, are kind of missing the point why these redesigns happened.

The problem here is this: When reading a book, we never have to be able to identify ships visually, at a glance, in order to figure out whose side they're on and what they're doing. If the author does his job, we have a clear picture in our heads as to what is going on.

In a visual medium, like comics or films or games however, a lot of the tools the novel writer is using are simply unavailable. There, we have to rely on visual shorthand in order to get the point across.

What these designs are intended to do is to define a clear style we can always identify as "Manticoran" or "Havenite" or "Andermani" or "Solarian", without having to look for the way the hammerhead is shaped (which is what SITS did), or look at how the names of the ships are written (Is it just a simple hull number? Mantie. Full name? Grayson.). The canon designs, with their hull shapes dictated by the physics, simply aren't detailed enough to provide that information at a glance. Remember, in a movie, the designs have to be recognizable enough to work in a 1.5 to 2 second establishing shot, and canon Honorverse vessels look too alike to work there.

With that in mind, all that talk about "get rid of the extra detail" is missing the point. In order to work on screen or in a graphic novel, more points of distinction between different factions have to be worked in, and that is not really possible within the current paradigm.

The most constructive criticism about the design I've seen here so far has been "lose the rear thrusters", which I agree with completely.
But everything else has been all about how we want the canon designs back, not how the canon designs might be altered in order to work in a different medium, and that's something I think we should concentrate on.

This design, for example, strikes what I believe to be a good balance between canonicity and the need to add visually distinct features that can be altered between classes.

The E wrote:I think this post, and others like it, are kind of missing the point why these redesigns happened.

The problem here is this: When reading a book, we never have to be able to identify ships visually, at a glance, in order to figure out whose side they're on and what they're doing. If the author does his job, we have a clear picture in our heads as to what is going on.

In a visual medium, like comics or films or games however, a lot of the tools the novel writer is using are simply unavailable. There, we have to rely on visual shorthand in order to get the point across.

What these designs are intended to do is to define a clear style we can always identify as "Manticoran" or "Havenite" or "Andermani" or "Solarian", without having to look for the way the hammerhead is shaped (which is what SITS did), or look at how the names of the ships are written (Is it just a simple hull number? Mantie. Full name? Grayson.).

This point has been discussed before - extensively, and I hope that most of the fans understand it. However, it also misses a couple of points: first, we need consistency between the comics and the films, and second, the final designs, whatever they are, should be within shouting distance of the descriptions in the books and in the Companion.

These are all different media, granted, but someone who comes from the comics and then sees the film ought to be able to recognize whose ship it is right off. Same for uniforms, ship control rooms (bridges) etc.

The only excuse for some of the things we've seen so far is that the artists didn't read the books, which is also the excuse for a lot of the misleading cover art that infests the genre.

I grant you that the artists have somewhat of an excuse: there are several million words to read, most of which have nothing to do with things that need to go into an illustration.

As far as I'm concerned, however, there's no real excuse for someone (RFC, Bu9, Evergreen) not extracting the couple of dozen scenes (maybe five thousand words) where Honor Harrington is described and putting them in a file, labeled "This Is How Honor Harrington Looks." Etc. for other major characters.

Or, for that matter, not giving Top Cow a dozen copies of the Companion so they have an idea of the basic warship design that they can riff off of.

{end rant}

pyan wrote:I mean, you wouldn't put fins on Babylon 5 or the Sulaco. Ships that don't enter atmosphere don't need wings/fins/streamlining. Form Follows Function.

But they did put them on Minbari cruisers, Centauri cruisers, and oh, yes, Discovery One, though Discovery had her fins removed because they looked too much like wings.

The point is that yes, form follows function, and there are plenty of functions for fins other than aerodynamics. All kinds of equipment might function better when mounted further from the hull - tractors spring to mind, for example.

Take a real look at the ship. It's (roughly) cylindrical, with impeller rings fore and aft, weapons bays along the broad side, and some differentiation between the main hull and the bow and stern; it's not all that far from the canon designs. The only truly baffling departure are the thrusters at the stern, which are far too large; the rest, you could get from the text descriptions.

The E wrote:This design, for example, strikes what I believe to be a good balance between canonicity and the need to add visually distinct features that can be altered between classes.

Tom did do a good job with that one, but he is the in house designer along with Tom Pope and is familiar with how things have been worked out by BuNine.

An outside designer doesn't have that insight, hence the clumsy attempt we've seen.

Mike.

I still say: If you have to add eye-candy to the designs - and be it to make the various navies easily distinguishable - do it with the Honorverse physics instead of against them.

So no thrusters, wings, fins etc. Go for fancy nodes and cool wedges instead!
Make the wedges visible and give the different nations different colours. Sure - not canon but will look great and make distinguishing the navies child's play.

I think the Honorverse physics can make for fantasic looks if one makes the most of them. Plus they would be very much their own thing(TM) and not a Star Wars or Trek clone.

I can forgive many things......but really....rockets/trusters? Are you f-king kidding me? Come on! It's like the whole point of Honorverse physics/battles/rules....Impelers.....

Who needs coffee when you get -this- ...