Building a battleship - administration

This will be my last post about the process of designing the Firenzi battleship, Admiral George Leonard, which Shayla infiltrates in The Ashes of Home.

Previous posts talked about the general design, the arrangement of weaponry, machinery spaces, and crew accommodation, as well as some of the practicalities of such a large drawing project. We wrap up with a quick look at how a ship like this is run.

As with any large ship, the analogy of a good-sized town joins forces with that of a fair-sized corporation. And organizations of any size do love their bureaucracy. And Shayla is ready to exploit any loophole that such cumbersome machinery inevitably reveals, after some preparation to seed minds and systems with her newly adopted identity ...

      She reached the ship’s administration office and paused a moment to bring her mind back to the task in hand, and to the persona she’d adopted. She asked for the admin clerk the CPO recommended.
      Petty Officer Isobel Mullin spun her tale of woe.
      The clerk looked up her record, asked questions. Shayla had answers to match the records. Those records also confirmed that tales of woe followed Petty Officer Isobel Mullin everywhere.
      He shook his head and helped Shayla access her account. Rolled his eyes when she promptly managed to lock herself out of the system again, though buggered if he knew how she’d managed that under his watchful eye. The system really did hate her. They started again, this time with idiot-proof instructions to keep her account safe.
      Petty Officer Isobel Mullin blessed him with a smile to light the darkest night, and Shayla left with a spring in her step that needed no feigning. She’d just completed a paper trail of authenticity that she couldn’t achieve with any of her fictitious identities. She’d created personnel records, training records, disciplinary records, transfer papers, all the administrative details within reach of a payroll clerk, but it took someone with specialized security clearance to activate her system account. She was now officially legit.

The administration office is part of a sprawling suite that includes stores and supply, procurement, finance, payroll, HR, as well as a mail room and the ship’s own internal news room.

The deck below that, right in the heart of the ship, is the command center, or bridge.

I’ve never understood why sci-fi depictions of spaceships so often place their bridges in the most exposed positions imaginable. On a sea-going warship it makes sense to give the captain and command crew as good a view of their surroundings as possible, but in a space battle I expect speeds and distances to be too great for that to make any sense. Plus, you are working in three dimensions, so no matter where you place yourself the ship itself will obscure at least half your field of view. So in my world, all command decisions are fed into tactical displays fed from arrays of sensors covering the whole sphere. It follows that the last thing they need is access to windows, so the command center is placed in the most protected location possible.

      The command center of Shayla’s old Martha Sandover had been strictly off limits to lowly grunts like her. A shiver of excitement ran up her spine as she crossed the threshold into this holy of holies.
      The noise struck her first, or rather the lack of it. She remembered her first experience of an Imperial capital ship’s command deck and the cacophony of sound that pervaded the space. Here, the air was heavy with a hundred murmured conversations that seemed muted and distant in comparison.
      The captain stood, feet apart and hands clasped in the small of his back, behind a ten-foot-wide tactical display set into a central well in the floor. His white uniform jacket seemed to glow in the twilight world, lit by rank on rank of screens. In front and around him control stations radiated away into multi-hued corridors. A quick survey of insignia confirmed Shayla’s assumption that the most senior officers manned the inner circle of stations, with their underlings seated in decreasing order of rank towards the outer reaches of the wide, low-ceilinged room.

The end result looks nothing like a ship’s bridge, but should closely resemble a modern warship’s Combat Information Center.

If you want to see more, remember that the full completed plans are posted to my website here.

Building a battleship - living spaces

Continuing my tour of the large and ancient battleship, Admiral George Leonard.

Most of the ship’s crew of roughly 6,000 bunk down in the three main mess decks occupying the forward lower section of the ship. Here is the plan of the “G” deck mess where Shayla stows away.

Most of it is given over to rows of bunks and lockers, a cramped labyrinth with occasional more open spaces for mess tables. The bunks are in sets of three, much like this shot from a real battleship.

Knowing your way around a maze like this helps in an emergency, like when Shayla realizes she’s being ambushed ...
       As she diverted away from her bunk and towards the locker area, the undercover agent once more, hairs on her neck prickled. In her fatigued state, focused on her bunk and sleep, she’d missed small signals that should have put her on high alert. It was near the end of the night watch, the mess areas were normally quiet but there was always someone, a few small knots of people, eating, playing cards, gossiping in low murmurs. The mess tables around here were suspiciously empty. Instead, a few unfamiliar figures lurked at corners between bulkheads and lockers, feigning innocence. The stake out was obvious. Casual onlookers had been warned away. Casting back through her memory, Shayla pictured who was stationed where as she’d entered the labyrinth of the mess deck. In her mind’s eye she mapped the outline of the quarantined area, aware of a slow drift of people closing in behind her. The epicenter lay ahead, where her locker was.

Each of these decks includes shower and washroom facilities, laundry drop-off and pickup points, and a servery linked to the kitchens a couple of decks above by a hoist. While many crew members might choose to eat down in the mess decks, they also have access to a large canteen, open all hours, in the middle of the main recreation area.

As well as the main crew messes, there are at least another two dozen smaller mess areas for the roughly 1,000 officers and petty officers. To help plan these out, I researched navy ranks to get an idea of a realistic proportion of different ranks in a ship’s population.

A ship like this might be away from civilization for months at a time. It’s not enough to provide basic eating and sleeping accommodation, the ship is a fair-sized self-contained town with essential amenities to keep everyone mentally and physically healthy. The recreation deck includes a coffee shop, library and study rooms, and a chapel. The deck above houses a comprehensive suite of fitness facilities including a running track circling the core of the deck. Along in the next section, there are stores for civilian items, and tailor, cobbler, and barber shops.

Building a battleship - fighting capability

The whole point of a battleship is to be able to fight. As I mentioned in earlier posts, I gave the Admiral George Leonard several docking bays to mount weapons or other payloads, giving the ship class tremendous flexibility during the course of their long service lives.

One of the most common weapons in Shayla’s world is the particle beam. This class of weapon shoots a tightly-focused bolt of charged particles - essentially controlled lightning - and the technology is scalable from hand-held to gargantuan.

In George Leonard, the primary weapons are mounted in pairs as shown in this cross section. This view also shows a lower pod of torpedo launch tubes attached to the ship’s ventral docking points.

     The hatch popped open and Shayla slipped inside the weapon bay. How to board a ship without boarding the ship, that was the trick. Although she was now technically on board, safely enclosed at last within the ship’s armored walls and shielding and subject once more to gravity, this cavernous hold was unpressurized and still technically open to space.
     Shayla examined her surroundings with a pang of nostalgia. Life had been so much simpler back then in her days as a lowly marine. A wash of red light barely dispelled the darkness. Suspended overhead, the barrels of two particle beams—warehouse-sized siblings of the hand-held weapons she heartily despised—each dwarfed the scout she’d recently abandoned.
     Pale green striplights marked a maze of companionways and catwalks that weaved between the inert bulk of machinery clinging to the bay walls. She craned her neck, eyes tracing the lines of cables and conduits high above.

Of course, this kind of offense needs a comparable defense, which Shayla later uses to her advantage ...

     The maintenance corridor ran near the outer skin of the ship. In compartments alongside, electromagnetic shield generators lay dormant ready to protect this flank of the ship in combat. Thick doors at intervals down the narrow passage gave access to the shield machinery. Vivid signs on each door warned of deadly levels of radiation and electrical discharges.
     Shayla cracked open the nearest door and slipped inside. She stopped a few minutes to study the layout of cables and machinery. The shields may be dormant but the circuits would still be hot, ready to come to life at a moment’s notice. She might not be an engineer, but she knew engineering, especially anything to do with weapons and defense systems—how to use the former, and how to disable the latter.
     A ship’s shields worked by deflecting the energy from charged particle weapons—beams and plasma. Most incoming offense was deflected straight back out into space, but the shields caught and channeled a significant amount of run-off. Shield machinery also contained a large quantity of delicate electronics. The two were not meant to mix.
     Shayla stood between two green-painted electrical cabinets. Massive bus bars along the far wall linked the shield coils to banks of cells, reservoirs to contain the leakage. Florescent hazard lines on the floor warned against straying too far into the room. She eyed a run of white-painted pipes along the ceiling, picking her target.

Building a battleship - filling in the details

Continuing my posts about drawing up plans for the ancient battleship, Admiral George Leonard.

Once I had the main structure in place and identified the broad layout, it was time to fill in the details. This is what took most of the time on this project.

There was one aspect of the design that helped here - not planned, it’s just the way it worked out. The deck areas were sharply divided up into distinct zones by the keels and structural frame. This suggested that it would make sense to designate zones to specific purposes, and focus my efforts on one zone at a time.

Here, for example, are close-ups of the main medical center and ship’s administration offices.

Once I got going, I quickly realized something that I hadn’t fully thought through yet. Faced with all those empty boxes, repeated deck after deck, I had a lot of space to fill! In the book, despite the overall enormous size of the ship, I do my best to give the impression of cramped and crowded living and working conditions. But in practice I seemed to be faced with a positively embarrassing surfeit of real estate.

Of course, there’s also a lot of stuff needing to go into that space, but I had to start getting pretty inventive thinking through all the possibilities that might be required in a fighting ship with a crew of six thousand, isolated from planets and bases for months at a time. I had to be fairly generous in my use of space, without making it look too generous. So I carved the deck up into lots of small compartments, and assigned functions to them as creatively as possible while making it sound and look credible.

One of the upsides of taking on a large project over a long period of time, new thoughts would pop into my head from time to time. I can tell you, I was always happy when a new idea cropped up, and I thought ... yes, that is going to need a lot of room! And it was a big relief when I neared the end and found I was now having to look for odd corners to squeeze things in.

BTW - the full set of completed plans are posted to my website here.

Building a battleship - drawing practicalities

One thing that most distinguished this drawing project from others, is the sheer scale of the drawing.

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, here’s the kind of window I am usually working in ...

... it looks small as an image here but this is a snapshot of the drawing window in iDraw that takes up most of my screen. This kind of scale is comfortable to work at, close enough to handle small details but not too close to give me tunnel vision.

And here is the view zoomed out to the whole page, with the previous portion highlighted. You can see that at any one moment I am only working on a tiny fraction of the whole plan.

And this is just page one of three!

A task of this size poses a series of challenges.

The big picture

For fine positioning, iDraw has a grid feature. Helpfully, it lets you set up a two-tier grid, with large and small units. In this case I worked with a 0.5mm fine grid, with heavier grid lines every 5mm. My scale is 0.5mm to 1ft. Yes, I’ve always been weird that way - measuring in metric but thinking in feet, but the latter makes sense in Shayla’s world because I have them talk in terms of Imperial units (miles etc.) to give a sense of tradition and antiquity.

This grid is great when it comes to drawing the detail of rooms and corridors, but to help with overall orientation I add in a broader grid of lines to give me a large scale framework.

You can see that the plan is actually a series of plans - mostly decks, but also profile and section. Laying these out on the page needs some forward planning. I decided on the overall dimensions for the different elements and then worked out how much room each one needed on the page - not so close that they overlap, but not too far apart either. I then laid out my own large scale grid lines to mark out the boundaries. I put these in their own drawing layer behind everything else so they are visible but don’t interfere.

Here is that same view of the page with the grid lines emphasized.

Keeping it together

The next challenge, which applies to any plan but is made trickier working on such a large scale, is vertical integrity. Decks don’t exist in isolation of each other, there are elements that link them together and which therefore have to be positioned correctly from one to the next. I’m talking here about obvious things like elevators and vertical service shafts, stairs, and inner and outer structural members.

Again, this benefits from some forward thinking. I started off with the main structural framework of the ship - keels and horizontal and vertical plates. Again, I put these into a drawing layer of their own for easier handling. Making this ship a fairly boxy shape helped, because there was a lot of repetition from one deck to the next. Once I had worked out the parts of the framework that pierced one of the main decks, it was a matter of copying and pasting to the others.

Even that simple exercise was a bit of a headache until I developed a technique to handle positioning. With such a large drawing, when you zoom out far enough to see the whole deck you are too far out for accurate positioning. And at that distance I also found it next to impossible to “grab” a set of lines I’ve just pasted to drag them into position. My solution was to add some temporary drawing elements to help move and position. You can see one or two red triangles nestling in the corners of my grid. I select the items I want to copy, along with one of these triangles. When I paste into the next deck, the large triangle is easier to grab while zoomed out, so I can get things roughly into position. I then zoom in on the triangle and nudge it until it is precisely positioned against the grid lines and I know everything else - out of sight because I’m zoomed in - is also moving with it into correct alignment.

With the structural framework laid out, I moved on to the outer hull, and then internal elements such as shafts and stairs. This was a game of patience, and checking and double-checking everything before I started filling out the details.

Keeping track

The last major challenge was simply keeping track of the overall plan, and keeping motivated by seeing progress as I fleshed out the enormous amount of detail.

Here I set up a spreadsheet to mark out zones along the length of the ship, and decks down the page.

This became my master plan for what went where. On a copy of this master plan I used traffic-light shading to show which sections were complete, in progress, or still to do. At first this served to emphasize what a daunting task I had embarked on, but it was satisfying to see the steady spread of green as time went by.

Building a battleship - machinery spaces

Armed with a general idea of the overall layout, it’s time to start piecing the main parts of the jigsaw together.

As I said last time, with a seagoing warship you are pretty much constrained by the realities of marine engineering. The general shape and proportions of the hull follow a common pattern and everything fits into that. But with a space craft you have a freer hand to invent your own body plan.

Even so, it helps to pay a bit of attention to basic physics and structural mechanics. It helps to have something that at least looks like it would hang together.

In the case of the Enforcer battleships, my starting point was the structural frame of the ship. I settled on a box frame arrangement. Typical sea ships have a single keel running along the bottom of the hull, to which everything else is attached. Admiral George Leonard has four keels arranged in pairs, upper and lower. Large horizontal and vertical plates link the keels together, forming a series of boxes down the length of the ship.

I placed most of the ship’s tanked storage (water and fuel) and services (e.g. waste processing) in the upper and lower spaces between the keels (click on image for a closer look).

     Down ladders once more to the lowest level, Shayla found the laundry and clothing store. Each deck on a ship like this had its own distinctive look, smell, and sound. The similarities to her old Martha Sandover were uncanny, and brought back sharp pangs of nostalgia. Down here, in a space nestling between the massive frames of the lower longitudinal keels, it felt subterranean. Yellow light glistened off cream walls. Pipes twisted thick overhead. Steam and chemicals tainted the air.

The framework between upper and lower keels extends all the way through the decks in between. Everything else has to work around these immovable structural members.

In this view, you can see that most of the ship is taken up by the two main machinery spaces.

In Shayla’s universe, there is one important design constraint that I don’t have to worry when it comes to the ship’s drive. Most ship designs have to accommodate large rocket (or other) exhausts at the rear. Interstellar technology in this world, however, uses fields that manipulate space and gravity. No opening to the outside world required, so critical machinery can stay safely tucked away behind shields and armor.

     Industrial ear muffs barely deadened the noise echoing back and forth in the cathedral space that rose through most of the height of the hull. She’d grown used to near silence in Blazer’s machinery space, but here the quintuplet of hulking, pot-bellied power units was anything but quiet. The curving shells that filled most of the compartment hummed an almost subsonic note that tingled her bones. Accustomed as she was to technology from the microscopic to the gargantuan, she had never been this up close and personal with the living heart of a capital ship. Despite herself, her skin crawled in awe at the unimaginable power contained a few feet away. Behind layers of armor and magnetic containment fields, humans dared subvert the power of suns.
     She shivered, and returned her attention to the job at hand and the instructions in her earpiece fighting to be heard. From her vantage point high above the deck, the shrieking din of ancillary equipment that clustered at floor level was lessened, but only just.
     A narrow slice of unencumbered air ran the length of the power plant on either side, giving minimally-adequate working room. Canary yellow gantries spanned the engineering space and hoisted the two ton dead weight of the fuel injector high into the air, but it took sweat and muscle, and a constant stream of commands mingled with colorful invective to line the cylinder up with its housing forty feet above the deck.

Building a battleship - general arrangements

When you design a seagoing warship, especially a WWI/WWII battleship, you pretty much have to start off with the general arrangement of big chunks of machinery. Main and secondary armament with their associated shell rooms and magazines demand large unbroken slices of real estate, as do the propulsion units. Together, these largely dictate the overall profile of the ship.

With a traditional ship, you are always working within the constraints of a hull, along with rules of buoyancy and center of gravity.

When it comes to a spaceship, two obvious differences spring to mind immediately.

First, you can abandon the need for streamlining. Depending on how things work in your story world you may have other unique constraints to think about, but spacecraft generally don’t have a dense medium like water to plow through, or depend on aerodynamics for lift. So you can think beyond the ship’s hull or aircraft’s fuselage and go for different shapes - blocky and angular, spindly and fragile - and you essentially have complete freedom over basic body plan. Who else remembers the shock of the first appearance of the starship Enterprise, making a break from sleek Buck Rogers-style rocket ships?

To me, that freedom actually makes it all the more important to start off with some overall concept to work within, otherwise you risk ending up with a mess (unless, of course, a disordered mess is what you actually want)

Second, a seagoing warship is typically designed to afford its main armament as broad an arc of fire as possible. With superimposed turrets fore and aft, the entire main armament can usually be brought to bear on a target broadside on (and for maybe 15 degrees either side of perpendicular.)

Classic big gun broadside

Outside of that arc, you can bring no more than half your guns to bear, either the forward or aft batteries. But you only have to think about coverage over a two-dimensional surface. In space, this problem extends to three dimensions, posing new challenges and compromises.

In the case of my Imperial Swords, I chose to compromise. The ships are designed to attack ground targets, to terrorize rebelling planets into submission, so the primary weapon doesn’t need a broad arc of fire.

     With almost leisurely movements, Hammer rolled away from George Leonard. With a sick feeling in her gut Shayla knew this was no act of submission. The Sword’s primary weapon, her city-wrecking plasma cannon, occupied the full two-thousand-foot height of the battleship from the bulbous upper pod containing hangars and the main battle platform down through the height of the hull to project from her underbelly. She was taking up an attack posture, lining up a kill shot.

Their secondary armament forms a ring around a broad pod spreading above the main hull. This gives almost complete field of view, but there are gaps ...

     Icy fury flooded Shayla. She blinked her eyes clear and brought herself even closer in. From past experience she knew these ships had many blind spots up close, the most extensive being right on top of that upper pod.
     Hammer maneuvered away. Her captain was also aware of those blind spots and determined to bring his weapons to bear.

Unlike the ground-assault Swords, battleship Admiral George Leonard is intended for general ship-to-ship combat so all-round cover is vital.

I started with an image in mind of a fairly slender body, with paired pods of weapons down either side. The pods jut out from the sides and give relatively clear all-round cover, with roughly half the main weapons able to target any given point of space. The feel I was going for was of a narrow and cramped interior surrounded by machinery. As it happens, some of that thinking went by the wayside as I’ll explain in a later post, but this gave me the conceptual framework to build from. What you can see here is a plan view of the frame.

The weapons are mounted in separate modules that dock in the bays on either side.

     Once aboard, the going should be easier. Enforcer-class ships were huge, second only to Imperial Swords, and the mainstay of the Firenzi navy for the last five millennia. A bulky hull contained machinery and accommodation, but farsighted architects had designed them with pairs of vast docking points to mount weapons or more specialized payloads. This flexibility, and the ability to upgrade weapon systems over the years without a massive overhaul, was the secret of the ancient ships’ longevity.
     If Admiral George Leonard was typical of her class, she’d be packing six batteries of beam weapons at those docking points. Shayla hoped to identify the source of the blinding shot that had vaporized the scout. From her stint aboard a similar ship, she had the glimmer of a plan to avoid arousing suspicion.

The main engineering spaces lie between the pairs of docking points, with main crew accommodation forward, and hangars aft.

More of that in future posts ...

Building a battleship - look and feel

In both Ghosts of Innocence and The Ashes of Home, Shayla spends quite some time on board warships of one sort or another.

When writing scenes, I find it important to have a firm idea of the look and feel of the setting, the kind of atmosphere I am trying to evoke. For warships, I have always avoided the clean, shiny ultra-modern feel of Star Trek or Star Wars interiors. One possible exception is the vast Imperial Sword-class which are big enough to hide messy machinery out of the way. Apart from that, though, there are few sops to creature comforts.

Everywhere is certainly clean in the sense of not dirty - navy standards are strict - but definitely not clean in the sense of uncluttered. Everywhere, there are hard surfaces, painted metal, and pipes and machinery are exposed. Living and working spaces are cramped. Function comes first. The needs of people have to fit in and around the workings of the ship.

This is particularly true of the Admiral George Leonard. This ship is five thousand years old. Although well-maintained, it is ancient and I wanted to convey some of that sense of antiquity and solidity.

My main influences were twentieth century large warships. These have always held a fascination for me anyway, so it’s only natural that I should want to recreate some of this atmosphere in my writing. Hey! I’m the author! I get to decide things like that :)

So a typical corridor is likely to look more like this ...

than this ...

She headed aft, to where she knew another near-vertical highway connected the ship’s decks. Shiny gray walls reflected yellow-white light. Battleship gray. In her time in the navy nobody had ever been able to explain why this particular shade of gray should be associated with battleships. Tradition, they said, as if that explained everything.

She ducked through an open blast door into another corridor. Pale green decking gave way to dark blue. Refreshed by her brief rest, she bolted up the last three flights to ‘A’ deck.

Crew sleeping accommodation is similar to this ...

Down a couple more decks, the cramped warren of the crew’s mess was a marked contrast to the hubbub upstairs. In between ranks of kit lockers, mess tables lay mostly vacant. A few off-duty crew members lounged, read, played cards. Shayla avoided these oases of light, tuned to the artificial day/night cycle, and scurried through the permanent twilight of the dormitory areas. Past rows of curtained sleeping racks, she counted until she found the rack she’d assigned herself, the lowest of three. Low level racks, inches off the deck, were least favored but also least likely to attract notice. She crawled silently in and drew the curtain.

This could easily be a corner of the kitchens where Shayla works undercover ...

And this could definitely be a model for the officers’ wardroom where she overhears useful information ...

And finally, there’s the place that Shayla always seems to end up in. The brig ...

She woke, head pounding, on a hard metal bench and thought for a moment that she was still on Eloon. Her surroundings came back into focus: white-painted metal walls, a steel toilet and basin in one corner, a sliding metal grille for a door. The door and floor were painted a fetching blood red. The heavy omnipresent thrum of the warship enveloped her. The air was warm and dry, but pricked with a whiff of disinfectant.

Building a battleship

Worldbuilding is an essential part of speculative fiction, and it’s something I enjoy at least as much as the actual writing. In fact, there’s a visual part of worldbuilding that I’ve come to regard as a natural extension of the visual arts that have always been a part of my life long before I started writing.

While I’ve been writing The Ashes of Home some of my time has been devoted to a massive drawing project. The project is a detailed deck plan of the ancient battlewagon Admiral George Leonard that forms the backdrop to about a quarter of the story.

Because Shayla spends so much time on board this vast battleship I needed a clear idea of the general layout, and enough detail of specific locations to be able to write scenes effectively. I’ve previously posted about the importance to me of visualizing the physical setting as a way of avoiding the dreaded writer’s block.

Of course, I fleshed out enough detail for story purposes ages ago, and I could easily have stopped there. But this project has gained a life of its own, and is close to completion.

Over the next few weeks I plan to talk a bit more about the parallel processes - conceptualizing the ship itself, the influences and thinking that went into its design, and the challenges of converting this into drawing, keeping track of a wealth of detail across two thousand feet in length and thirteen decks.

And in case you are wondering, yes, this is the ship depicted on the book cover.