Artwork Bear Ribs' Random Drawings

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
Ball Turrets seem to always have one or two barrels so I decided to give one three to see how it came out.

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Bear Ribs

Well-known member
The Penitent Class Micro-Ship was something I put together for an SB contest. I was loosely inspired by the Turtle Submarine, the first submersible actually used in combat. As so many starships are massive mile-long affairs, I thought it would be interesting to reverse course to a single-person craft so tiny the pilot takes up half the ship and can't stand upright. In-universe the rationale is that a jump drive power costs rise exponentially with size so this is about as big as can afford to jump, with the majority of ships actually being the size of a bean and used only to power an FTL internet system.

Because of it providing very inexpensive single-person travel, many Penitents are in civilian hands and about as common as automobiles today. Due to it's uncomfortable nature and relatively short range, the Penitent is most often used for short jogs around the solar system but it's quite capable of interstellar travel. Due to the need for frequent rests from the uncomfortable pod, "rest stops" in the form of thousands upon thousands of space stations to service travellers exist, being nearly as common as gas stations today. The Oort cloud is teaming with them and millions of travellers stop each day on their way to the next star.

Directional and Cutaway views.


Isometric View, Colored
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Isometric View with Solar panels and communication systems deployed.
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Penitent decelerating on it's way to an Oort cloud rest stop.
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gral

Well-known member
The Penitent Class Micro-Ship was something I put together for an SB contest. I was loosely inspired by the Turtle Submarine, the first submersible actually used in combat. As so many starships are massive mile-long affairs, I thought it would be interesting to reverse course to a single-person craft so tiny the pilot takes up half the ship and can't stand upright. In-universe the rationale is that a jump drive power costs rise exponentially with size so this is about as big as can afford to jump, with the majority of ships actually being the size of a bean and used only to power an FTL internet system.

Because of it providing very inexpensive single-person travel, many Penitents are in civilian hands and about as common as automobiles today. Due to it's uncomfortable nature and relatively short range, the Penitent is most often used for short jogs around the solar system but it's quite capable of interstellar travel. Due to the need for frequent rests from the uncomfortable pod, "rest stops" in the form of thousands upon thousands of space stations to service travellers exist, being nearly as common as gas stations today. The Oort cloud is teaming with them and millions of travellers stop each day on their way to the next star.

Jesus Christ, you can't even sit normally on them. Penitence, indeed.
 

Culsu

Agent of the Central Plasma
Founder
Could also work as some sort of light house, like the Pharos of Alexandria.
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
Did a little bit of work with tone and shade on this one. Here we have the "Pug" ultralight mortar drone. It was nicknamed because it's small, ugly, and mostly useless, at least according to it's detractors.

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The Pug is part of a setting I've been putting together where a supermajority of combat is done by machines, with actual soldiers considering themselves jammed together if there's more than one of them per continent, a single soldier operating several million drones simultaneously to handle combat operations across such a wide area. Soldiers write their own combat software and algorithms and guard them jealously, for having an enemy know how your machines operate means they will exploit the behaviors and guarantee your defeat.

The mining of asteroid fields has reduced the cost of raw materials to virtually nothing. The biggest expense to obtaining anything in this setting is fabrication time, effective the time and energy it costs for a printer to make it.

Actual combat is relatively rare, a huge percentage of the a battle consists of maneuvers and positioning as soldiers try to get an advantage, and quite often the battle ends in surrender when it's clear one of them has a solid advantage. The actual shooting part is usually seconds to a few minutes after hours of maneuvers.

The Pug is a treaded, ultralight support craft with positively sloppy tolerances, thin armor, and relatively simple indirect-fire weaponry. It's dimensions are approx 1 meter high, 2 wide, and 3 long, and are designed to fit stacked neatly into a standard shipping container for easy storage. Each tread mounts a forward-looking sensor while the front-mounted ammo bin does double duty with a sky-searching sensor array. It doesn't even include a steering or aiming mechanism and maneuvers entirely by changing the speed of the electric motors on it's treads, while it's mortar is fixed forward requiring it to rotate it's entire body to aim, though fortunately the mortars themselves tend to be semi-guided and make up for the Pug's lack of finesse. This allows the auto-loading mechanism to be extremely simple and also allows the Pug to burn through it's ammunition with a vastly higher rate of fire than a more complex aiming system would allow.

Armor is 2.1cm spaced honeycomb sides and rear, 2.9cm front. Ineffective at providing protection from any modern weaponry but able to provide ample protection from debris and terrain.

Armament consists of 5 Single-use pods normally loaded with anti-air missiles and a single tube high-caliber auto-mortar with 28 reloads. A Pug can fire 2 mortars each 3.75 seconds causing it to run out in 52.5 seconds. Many people have suggested that a Pug needs more ammo though those who've used it tend to laugh at that notion, it rarely manages to run out of shells before hit by a counterfire battery. Long-lived is the Pug that survives a full 30 seconds once combat is joined.

One must ask then why so many soldiers are fond of such a useless, weak excuse for a tank. The answer lies in the Pug's sloppy tolerances and the fact that it can be printed in 5 sections and quickly assembled. These two qualities let Pugs be mass-printed out of even civilian grade fabricators at high speeds and in tremendous numbers. While a single high-performance hovertank or fighter can kill vast numbers of Pugs, even more vast numbers of Pugs and their relatively dumb ammo can be printed for the same time cost. Pugs can be crafted so quickly that some soldiers have actually managed to reinforce themselves mid-battle by suborning a city's worth of civilian garages and having their printers churn out several thousand Pugs in the space of a few minutes.
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
Sketch of a Trek style ship, though I was trying to conspicuously avoid making it anything like any canon design.

Trek ships are fun, they have so many angles and interesting shapes. So many ships people make these days appear to be either a box or a cylinder covered in kibble, it's quite boring sometimes. I detest "Box with thrusters on one end" designs, so generic, nobody finds these boxes iconic.

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Bear Ribs

Well-known member
Alien City Sketch.

This one was a bit of a silly AU. Thinking on alternate histories I wondered, what would a city look like if the builders had only clay to work with? A few seconds later I realized they'd make bricks out of the clay, like every other civilization did. But the thought of a city with round buildings as if all of them were thrown on a potter's wheel stuck with me and I thought it make make a nice alien landscape.

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Laskar

Would you kindly?
Founder
Ball Turrets seem to always have one or two barrels so I decided to give one three to see how it came out.

5vWq1AR.gif
It looks wrong, but I can't put my finger on why that is. Is that really a drawing? Looks good enough to be a quick 3D sketch.
One must ask then why so many soldiers are fond of such a useless, weak excuse for a tank. The answer lies in the Pug's sloppy tolerances and the fact that it can be printed in 5 sections and quickly assembled. These two qualities let Pugs be mass-printed out of even civilian grade fabricators at high speeds and in tremendous numbers. While a single high-performance hovertank or fighter can kill vast numbers of Pugs, even more vast numbers of Pugs and their relatively dumb ammo can be printed for the same time cost. Pugs can be crafted so quickly that some soldiers have actually managed to reinforce themselves mid-battle by suborning a city's worth of civilian garages and having their printers churn out several thousand Pugs in the space of a few minutes.
Those had better be some sturdy cities, given what mortars tend to do to buildings.
"Yes, I had to flatten the city in order to save it. Don't worry, I have a blueprint for a quick fire truck and ambulance that can be printed off in the remaining garages."
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
It looks wrong, but I can't put my finger on why that is. Is that really a drawing? Looks good enough to be a quick 3D sketch.

Those had better be some sturdy cities, given what mortars tend to do to buildings.
"Yes, I had to flatten the city in order to save it. Don't worry, I have a blueprint for a quick fire truck and ambulance that can be printed off in the remaining garages."
I think it's the concentric circles at the base that make it off. I normally avoid anti-aliasing because I'm used to producing images that will be printed in black and white with no AA and that can make them look jaggy.

Three barrels also don't look as good as I'd thought. It also doesn't help that the actual shapes are nearly all primitives, modified spheres and cylinders to make it easier to draw. I got my drawing training from years of drafting.

As for as flattening the city, yeah, I'm going on the David Drake expounded in Hammer's Slammers. "If the enemy has line of sight to you, and is armed, you are only still alive if they don't want you dead for some reason." Most fighting is urban, underwater, jungle, or similar because any open field results in the fight being over so quickly a normal human will barely start reaction before it's over as the drones blow each other way at extreme range. Even then as mentioned, a lot of fights end without a shot being fired once it's obvious one soldier has attained a superior position and has a compelling advantage.
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
I do, though, dabble in 3D rendering though I'm not much good at it. Since I'm too busy to put a drawing together I'll repost these.

The "Compass Rose" series actually derived from a series of sketches I did all the way back in grade school of a hot-air balloon flying through exotic locales, usually full of dinosaurs because Grade Schooler. The idea of a fantastic journey through all sorts of worlds, though, is a powerful one and stuck with me. Eventually the balloon became a zeppelin and got the name Compass Rose and I pieced together a sort-of story for an airship that jumps through portals in the upper atmosphere to consecutive worlds, pretty much Star Trek but without any actual space, just increasingly strange worlds to visit.

The Compass Rose explores the ocean moon of a ringed gas giant. Models designed in Rhino, rendered in Bryce.

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BlackDragon98

Freikorps Kommandant
Banned - Politics
I do, though, dabble in 3D rendering though I'm not much good at it. Since I'm too busy to put a drawing together I'll repost these.

The "Compass Rose" series actually derived from a series of sketches I did all the way back in grade school of a hot-air balloon flying through exotic locales, usually full of dinosaurs because Grade Schooler. The idea of a fantastic journey through all sorts of worlds, though, is a powerful one and stuck with me. Eventually the balloon became a zeppelin and got the name Compass Rose and I pieced together a sort-of story for an airship that jumps through portals in the upper atmosphere to consecutive worlds, pretty much Star Trek but without any actual space, just increasingly strange worlds to visit.

The Compass Rose explores the ocean moon of a ringed gas giant. Models designed in Rhino, rendered in Bryce.

eGCV5zP.jpg
Sounds like the plot of "Up" combined with "Journey to the center of the earth"
Very cool.
 

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