When you're writing the book, the work is purely text-driven and by comparison with creating movies or internet, it's so easy. You let your imagination run wild, you let the brakes off and freewheel ... you can write big and bold, because it's only text: if this were a motion picture — you would be the director, the producer, the designer, and all of the actors! You get to play every part, fly every plane, planet-hop, and uh, jump into bed with whomever you choose.

And yes, it's fun. Which is why so many people are writers by inclination and would love to 'go pro,' give up the day job and do this 'work' for money.

Then one day, you find yourself making the transition from pure-text to packaging books for an internet 'presence.' Sure, it's a different kind of fun. It's also surprisingly hard work! First, it's about covers. Would somebody PLEASE put faces to these characters?

Many hours and many experiments later, the faces of Jarrat and Stone were more or less worked out, tentatively 'locked off,' and we breathed a premature sigh of relief, because we genuinely believed the hard part was over.

In fact, creating the character faces and designing covers turns out to be the easy part!

Way back in the days of yore, GMP never offered much two-way communication between writer and cover artist, so the faces and hardware were always 'off' by the proberbial country mile. The cover artist was Nicholas Hoare, and his covers were the best GMP ever used, bar none. Still, the Jarrat and Stone faces (at least in my mind!) were not what I imagined.

In the novels, I had described the characters as being a few years older and not quite so ... shall we say, fringe? I don't want to say 'punk,' but ...! Put it this way: in the covers of the GMP versions, I find it difficult to see a couple of guys who would have the maturity be trusted with about sixty billion dollars' worth of hardware, and several million human lives.

So, when the books turned over to DreamCraft and became creatures of the web, the real 'fun' was about to begin. The books became 'Internet Dynamic' ...They were no longer driven by the bookstore industry ... They had to have a VISUAL component, to 'come alive' on the screen, in web pages.

Everything had to be designed. Hardware. Things. The objects and places that make the plot 'go.' And if we could nail down the designs for weapons, planes, helmets and people ... What was going to be so hard about designing the carrier?

Maybe we had be become complacent, but this turned out to be a classic case of famous last words.

Two YEARS and about 100 designs later she was actually flying, in a design-form close enough to the 'final' version to launch her... ...and to share the story of how she came to be!

STAGE ONE was to get the design concept ... and this was the hard part. We looked at over 100 ideas (more like 500), ranging from the real (NASA drawing board items) to the imaginary (movies and TV, everything from 1970 onward).

The toughest element is this: since STAR WARS (designed in 1976), over 30 years have fled by, and virtually every ship design you can think of has been done. Everything is out there, from the neo-utopian designs of the Rodenberry shows, to the 'down and dirty' designs of the ALIEN movies. Come up with something new — that was the challenge.

Next, we looked at ocean-going ships ... at aircraft, at every conceivable kind of spacecraft, and drew a consistent blank. Then we sat down and started to 'make shapes,' like blowing smoke rings, waiting for inspiration to bite. It didn't.

Then, when I wasn't even thinking about the carriers, I saw a shape. It wasn't a ship or plane. It was an experimental, drawing-board, futuristic oil production plaform, in a 30-year-old book of SF paintings. Cut the bottom off it, cut off the top, stretch it out sideways, rotate half of it around, and add the details ... there was our shape, not standing on great pylons in the sea, but floating with a power and grace all of its own

We had our basic shape. Now, what to do with it?

FIRST: make it conform to every description in the books. It has to be flat-bottomed, because the gunship and fighter hangars are right on the keel: everything launches there. It has to have a forest of superstructure: all the comm arrays are 'up top.' It needs a piloting module somewhere up near the sharp end; and it needs a monster engine deck somewhere around the blunt end.

The engine deck was the only troublesome point: we still don't really know what a Weimann housing looks like. So an organic shape was drawn, and added on, with this logic: the Auriga engine (later, the Weimann engine) is a module which is fitted later, after the rest of the hull is complete. The module is mounted, connected, and protected by an armored fairing. It's not actually part of the rest of the ship so, in essence, it could look like anything. Organic was just fine.

Now, the whole thing was still at the line-drawing stage. These line drawings were produced 100% inside the computer. No physical pen or sheet of paper was ever used. The carriers were born digitally. First the line sketch was produced, in its simplest form, using what are called 'primitive shapes' which are then deformed in software into anything at all. The resulting 2D drawing was very exact and digitally 'clean.' Next, it was loaded up with detail; then 'colored' in graduated tones; lastly, the emerging ship was given the 3D treatment.