Always thought the ship from The Last Starfighter could lay the smack down...

I would have a whitestar. Babylon 5 baby.

That ship does look nice, found a pic of it.

Lancer you picked that ship only for the Holodeck admit it.... the things I could do with one of those 🙂

Dang, u hit it on the head. That is one of my favorite ships in my FL mod.

A K-Ship. Hands down.

"Eighteen miles above their heads, one of DeRaad's connexions fired its /HAM engine for 7.02

milliseconds, flipped lazily onto its back and, with the first wisps of displaced atmosphere already flaring

off its hull like an aurora, raced earthwards. That was how Paulie knew he was still a good investment.

The sky opened. A flat concussion ripped the overcast apart. A single matt-grey wedge-shaped object,

its outline broken up by intakes, dive brakes and power bulges, shot across the Lots at Mach 14 and

halted inside its own length perhaps thirty feet above the Baltic Exchange. Parts of the roof blew off, but

the structure held. The K-ship Poule de Luxe, on grey ops out of a base in Radio Bay, hung motionless

for a moment, hull boiling with everything from gamma to microwaves, then pivoted neatly through 180

degrees to dip its snout attentively in the direction of Aschemann's Cadillac.

Paulie was on his feet, dancing about on the concrete, shouting and yelling and trying to wave his arms.

"Oh fuck," he shouted. "Just fucking look at this!"

With the care of a living thing, the K-ship lowered itself to earth in front of him. A cargo port opened.

Paulie stumbled towards it, his arms swinging out haphazardly. "Hey, Vic," he called, "what do you think

of her? It's the old Warm Chicken. Is she ugly, or what?" Tears ran down his face. He struggled up the

cargo ramp, turned round at the top. "Can I tell you something, Vic?" he said. "Just before I go? Even the

paint on this vehicle is toxic." Someone pulled him inside suddenly and the hatch closed.

The K-ship raised itself a little and slid smoothly forward, nose down, until it hung just above the hood of

the Cadillac. There was a frying sound—the air itself being cooked—as its armaments extended and

retracted in response to a change of government fifty lights down the Beach. In the Cadillac, Aschemann

and his assistant felt its heat and steady gaze upon them. Every time either of them exhaled, the

K-captain, buffered and secure in its proteome tank at the heart of the machine, knew. It wanted them to

know that it knew. A minute stretched to two, then three. While they sat there wondering what to do, it

mapped every strand of their DNA; at the same time, its mathematics was counting Planck-level

fluctuations in the vacuum just outside the photosphere of the local star, where the rest of the de Luxe

pod remained concealed. It gave them a moment to appreciate how capable it was of these and other

divergent styles of behaviour. Then it revolved lightly around its vertical axis, torched up and quit the

gravity well at just under Mach 42, on a faint but visible plume of ionised gas.

Lens Aschemann sighed. "Who'll save us from the machines, Vic?" he asked.

No answer."

You have a screenshot or link to one Hendar23?

No, sorry. They are from two books by M John Harrison: Light and Nova Swing.

I urge you to check them out.

Though I'd love to see them in a game, when K-Ships do battle, they move in 14 spacial and 4 temporal dimensions. Pretty hard to code that!

Here is a part I found. The battle between the rogue K-Ship the White Cat, captained by the slightly crazy Seria Mau, and the Krishna Moire pod of K-ships who have been sent to hunt her down:

"The sound of alarms. Under it's shifting blue and grey internal light, the White Cat felt empty and haunted at the same time. Shadow operators hung beneath the ceilings of the human quarters, pointing at Seria Mau and whispering among themselves like bereaved sisters. 'For God's sake what's the matter now?' she asked them. They covered one another's bruised-looking mouths with their fingers. The Moire pod had chased down most of the RF proxies and were running about after the rest like a lot of dogs on the Carmondy waterfront at night. 'We have a buffer a few nanoseconds thick,' the mathematics warned her 'We should either fight or leave.' It though for a moment. 'If we fight, they'll probably win.'

'Well then, go.'

'Where?'

'Anywhere. Just lose them.'

'We might lose the K-pod, but not the Nastic ship. Their navigational systems aren't as good as me, but their pilot is better than you.'

'Don't keep saying that!' shrieked Seria Mau. Then she laughed. 'What does it matter, after all? They won't hurt us - not until they find out where we're going, anyway. And maybe not even then.'

'Where are we going?'

'Wouldn't you like to know!'

'We can't go there unless I do,' the mathematics reminded her.

'Ramp me up,' said Seria Mau. Instantly, the fourteen dimensions of the White Cat's sensorium folded out around her, and she was on ship-time. One nanosecond, she could smell the vacuum. Two, she could feel the minute caress of dark matter against the hull. Three, she could tune into the hideous fusion life of the local sun, with it's sounds no one had ever described. Four nanoseconds, and she had the shifting constantly redesigned command language of the Moire pod drifting up to her through something like the layers of clear liquid, which was the encryption they were suspended in. In five nanoseconds she knew everything about them: propulsion status, rate of burn, ordnance on call. what damage they were carrying from the days encounter - the hulls thinned at crucial points from particle ablation, the arsenals depleted. She could feel the nanomachines working overtime to shore up their internal architecture. They were too young and stupid to realize how damaged they were. she thought she could beat them, whatever the mathematics said. She hung there for a further nanosecond, warming herself in the fourteen-dimensional night. Blinks and fibers of illumination came and went. Distant things like noises. She heard Krishna Moire say 'Got it!' but knew he hadn't.

This was the place for her.

It was a place for people who didn't know what they were any more. who had never know. Uncle Zip had called her 'a sad story'. Her other was long dead. She had not seen her brother or father for fifteen years. Mona the clone had felt only contempt for her, and Billy Anker had pitied her even as she killed him: in addition his hard death still hung before her, like the menu for her own. Then she conned herself that all that complex stuff of being human was transparent at this level of things, and she could see straight through it to the other side - right to the simple code beneath. She could stay or go: in this place as in life. She was the ship.

'Arm me,' she commanded.

'Is this what you want?'

'Arm me.'

At that exact juncture, the K-pod found the last of her proxies and began unspooling the thread that led to her. But she was connected, and they were still thinking in milliseconds. Each time the found her, she was somewhere else. Then, in the instant it took them to realize what had happened, she had got into their personal space.

The engagement had to take place within one and a half minutes, or Seria Mau would burn out. During that time she would flicker unpredictably in and out of normal space fifty or sixty thousand time. She would remember little of it afterwards, an image here, an image there. In ship-space, a high-end gamma burst, generating at 50,000K for an endless fourteen nanoseconds, looked like a flower. Targets turned under the gaze of her acquisition systems like diagrams, to be flipped this or that number of degree in seven dimensions until they bloomed like flowers too. To the targets themselves the White Cat seemed to come out of nowhere on three or four different arcs which though sequential appeared simultaneous, in a mist of decoys, false signals and invented battle languages, a froth of code and violence which could have only one conclusion. 'The fact is, boys,' she commiserated, 'I'm not sure which of these is me.' The Norma Shirike, struggling to connect, broke up into a cloud of pixels, like jigsaw pieces blown off a table in a high wind. The Kris Rhamion and the Sharmon Keir, trying not to run into one another in their haste to get away, ran into a small asteroid instead. Suddenly, it was all unmatched bits and pieces, floating in nowhere. They had ragged edges. None of them looked human, at any scale she chose. Local space was cooling down, but it was still a cooker, resonating with light and heat, glittering with exotic particles and phase states. It was beautiful.

'I love it here,' she said.

'You have three milliseconds left,' the mathematics warned her. 'And we didn't get them all. I think one of them left the system. but Moire himself is loose and I'm looking for him.'

'Leave me in here.'

'I can't do that.'

'Leave me in, or we're stuffed anyway. He used his team as decoys, went on ship-time late. The bet was he would have a millisecond or two left to bounce me as I slowed down.' It was a textbook tactic and she had fallen for it. 'Moire, you fucker, I know what you're up to!' Too late. she was back on normal time. The tank proteome, flushed with nutrients and hormonal tranquillizers, was beginning to try and repair her. She could barely stay awake. 'Fuck,' she told the mathematics. 'Fuck, fuck, fuck.' There was laughter on the RF frequencies. Krishna Moire flickered briefly into existence in front of her, dressed in his powder-blue stormtrooper uniform.

'Hey, Seria,' he said. 'what's this, you ask? Well it's goodnight from me. And a fucking goodnight to you.'

'He's on us,' said the mathematics.

Moire's ship flickered towards her through the wreckage. It looked like a ghost. It looked like a shark. nothing she could do would be fast enough. The White Cat turned in panic like one of it's victims, looking for a way out. Then everything lit up lit a Christmas tree, and the Krishna Moire was batted away in the blast, a black needle toppling end over end against the dying flare of the explosion. In the same instant, Seria Mau became aware that something huge had materialized beside the White Cat. It was the Nastic Cruiser, its vast, mouldy-looking hull, like a rotting windfall in some old orchard, still crawling with autorepair media.

'Jesus,' she said. 'They bumped him. Uncle Zip bumped his own guy.'

'I don't think it was Uncle Zip,' the mathematic said. 'The command came from somewhere else in the ship.' A dry laugh. 'It's like the bicameral mind in there.'

Seria Mau felt weepy when she heard this.

'It was the commander,' she said. 'He always like me. And I always liked him.'

'You don't like anyone,' the mathematics pointed out.

'Usually I don't,' said Seria Mau. 'But I'm very up and down today. I can't work out what's the matter with me.' then she said: 'Where's that bastard Moire?'

'He's down in the outer layers of the gas giant. He got out by surfing the expansion wave of the bump. He;s taken damage, but his engines still work. Do you want to go in after him?'

'No. cook it up.'

'Pardon?'

'Cook the fucker up.'

'?'

'If you want something done,' sighed Seria Mau, 'do it yourself. There.' Ordanance disengaged from one of the complex outer structures of the White Cat, hung there for the blink of an eye while it's engine fired, then streaked down into the gas giant's atmosphere. Gravity tried to crush it out of existence, but between here and there it had turned itself into the voice of God. Something like lightning flared across the face of the gas giant, as it began to torch itself up. Uncle Zip opened a line to the White Cat. He was puffing up his cheeks angrily. 'Hey,' he said, 'all that was unneccesary. You know? I paid good money for those guys. In the end I wouldn't have let them hurt you.'

Seria Mau ignored him.

'Better light out,' she advised the mathematics. She yawned. 'This is were we're going,' she said. And finally: 'I really didn't want to be bothered with that fucker again. I was just too tired.'

As they left the system, a new star had begun to burn behind them."

Sorry about the typos in the above quote. Yeah, I actually sat and typed that all in. And now I can't seem to edit it.

I lied, there is actually a picture on the cover of the original British edition. Not much detail, but you can see it forming out of fractal pixels, which sounds cool, but is actually really, really, creepy and disturbing when you have read the books...

What really makes K-Ships scary is not just the fact they are totally bad-ass pieces of technology. It's the fact the captains all have really unstable personalities. They are all a bit crazy. K-Captains are permanently hardwired into their ship, their minds merged with the alien K-tech mathematics, a proccess which sends most recruits completely insane or dead. Those that survive tend to look upon regular humans as pathetic and beneath them, which gives them a casual attitude to murder. They are mad and bad 🙂 It's like handing over the launch codes of nukes to a bunch of psychotics.

Anyhoo, I'm a big fan of Harrison, and I'm not the only one 🙂

"Who writes better than M John Harrison? Of the, let's say, four hundred writers of English prose alive today worthy of serious and sustained critical attention, the answer is: very few." - Adam Roberts

"This is a novel of full-spectrum literary dominance, making the transition from the grainily commonplace now to a wild far future seem not just easy but natural, and connecting the minimal and the spectacular with grace and elegance. It is a work of - and about - the highest order." - Ian M. Banks.

If I ever finish my space game, the style will be heavily influenced by his work.

So many universes to choose from...

Not much in Star Trek, except maybe the Klingon and Romulan ships. Star Wars has some nice ones like the Eclipse on one end and the X-Wings on the other, but in between, hard to pick one. Anime has the battleship Arcadia, which I'm sorry to say kick more ass than the Yamato. But one ship in EVE Online has struck me with the "OMFG I must get one!" bug: The Guardian Angel's Vindicator.

Think of the Gallente Megathron and imagine it even more hard-hitting. At prices in the capital ship range, this would be the ultimate pimp mobile 😀

How much that run ya in EVE currency r3dfiv3?

Say you fit it very pimp with faction modules and T2 rigs, easily 1.5 to 2 billion ISK

You can visit my blog where I just posted a little something inspired by this very thread 🙂

Ahhh...EVE Online. I only stopped playing because I couldn't play it enough to get the most out of it, and I was getting frustrated. If I ever end up divorced with no life, I shall play EVE again. 18 hours a day.

Funny because that's pretty what happened to me. I knew about its existence from Day One and being a sucker for everything Sci-Fi I knew I'd get sucked in deep. Well, the bad thing happened in November 2007 and in January 2008 Cozmik R5 was born in Heimatar space.

1-2Billion ISK. How long does that take the average player to get years?? I know I personally only played the trial and new the game was going to need to much of my time to play so I didn't invest into it. I can maybe only dedicate 1-3 hrs per day to a MMO if that. So in a few months in playing I least want to be somewhat competitive in the game I choose. Shame EVE takes that much dedication to really get somewhere.

A newbie can be useful in PvP as a tackler from day one. If you join a corp, they will provide you ISK for basic ships for PvP. They way the skill training works, you can be decent in PvP in a month or two if you concentrate on it. What really takes time is leveling up -you-. EVE is more about your persoanl skills. What you know about fittings, fleet tactics, the politics, knowing important people.

I got into EVE strictly for the PvP; the industrial side is just too tedious for my patience. I got into a pure PvP corp at my character's infancy 3 weeks after installing the client. It's not exactly easy to do because you still have to make ISK to pay for your toys, and as the character progresses the toys get more expensive. But I was guided and helped by some good people, got a few ISK breaks here and there (a free battlecruiser all tech 2 fit is always nice :)) and I've always flown what I could afford to lose, which is Rule #1 in EVE.

Now I'm taking it a bit easy in my real-life friend's alliance which is half-and-half industrial and PvP, doing all the fun wormhole exploration and Tech 3 production. I do have a other characters which are basically untrained but serve as my money makers by playing the market. They serve my purpose quite nicely.

All this to say that getting in PvP from the start is hard, but very doable. And I never got broke so to speak.

A part of me would like an entire smaller class starship like a frigate or something, while another part of me would prefer a nimble starfighter. Decisions decisions.

It has to be this one.but without Bomb 20 😀

and for a run around this. 😀

Pic to big to post:

[hsimg] [/hsimg]

http://www.affuniverse.com/artdepot/pub ... n3000x.jpg

USNV Swift, Huginn class Battleship. I'm a bit biased though since the devs of the mod named it after me 😀

Failing that, I was always fond of the Victory class Star Destroyers from Star Wars.

Fixed your pic.

That looks like it would give my battleship Yotomato a run for it's money.

Very nice which game is from. ❓

talking about starship scales this a grat site for that.

http://www.merzo.net/

I want to say that ship is from the Planetfall mod for UT3.

That's a cool site Pinback. I might add that link to a misc section in the links area when I get around to redoing it.