I knowww, I know. It has no furries whatsoever in it but bare with me!

A couple weeks back I entered into this EVE Online art contest hosted on DeviantArt. Not sure if anyone knew about it, or if anyone here even plays the game (I'm sure you know about it.. EVE kind of has an unacquainted presence, like... you KNOW about EVE Online but not at the same time? At least that's how I was about it for a really long time...) but when I heard about this golden opportunity I had to jump on board with it.

In a couple days the semi-finalists will be read out, and there've been some really interesting concepts, I just hope mine at least makes a presence to be one of those semi-finalists, that'd be pretty amazing. I put alot of work into this, like... at the point I finished it I was so sick of looking at it that it kind of set me back to not want to draw for a while.

Looking at it now, I'm fairly pleased and proud I did this. I don't get many chances to do technical drawings and this was an excuse as good as any. I learned alot from pulling this out too, ugh.

Like any other drawing I did. I couldn't just let it sit without a bit of a story behind it:


--=- Project Testament. Primary Research Coordinator Log:

When approached by our clients, whose names I will disregard until official release of this design is declassified, we were asked to create a ship, as they put it, intended to be the last thing they will remember. Make it a sign of their testament to whichever higher power they believe in.

It seemed an ambitious role to assume, creating this design as we had no idea where to run with. We ran through countless designs, and that was part of the problem. We were so focused on how the ship looked, we hadn't thought about how it could perform. Scrapping all previous attempts on design alone, we focused in on practicality. Coincidentally, a design development occurred around its function so that was an added bonus. To offer the sheer, awe striking amount of firepower, we considered the interior schematic of the ship; by allocating power grid units from the weapons system in sync with the afterburner exhaust systems. We figured if power from the weapons would absorb and expel the most use of power at a given instant, why not use the exhaust from the afterburner units as a means of coordinating power dumping?

This is where the practicality of its form comes in; being a longitudinal design allows for not only agility, a streamlined signature in visible view, but also a chance to coordinate weapons systems on each end, dedicated to a much shorter response time between our proposed weapons-to-afterburner power grid system. As the lasers commence their firing pattern, the energy would expel directly to the afterburners as a form of exhaust, channeling spent energy and heat dissipation away as an intermittent propulsion byproduct. By fine tuning the exhaust propulsion to simply bleed heat and energy from the weapons, this could improve performance of the ship as a whole. We theorize the ship would not only perform better this way, but adhere to much longer, efficient, dedicated uses of skirmishes on the battlefield. This is where we firmly believe 'Project Testament' will truly shine. As an added perk, we also theorize that with the efficient transitioning of power from the hybridized power grid system, the weapons system can actually fire off between rounds much faster than ever seen before. Without having to come up with a newly designed weapons system, we've already solved multiple issues by reinventing several, already established systems. Testament's true and tested form could not make this possible otherwise. The concept is genius!

In terms of agility, we believe Testament will prove more agile than any ship in its class, only challenged by that of smaller, much more agile ships; however in a class in its own, it can be unprecedented. A series of thrusters will run along the 'spine' of the ship's longitudinal design of a presented seven (Septum Burst) thruster system. The last and final thruster will act as a designator, like a single fin rudder system to a boat, where as the main propulsion of all other thrusters firing strong, the last thruster will be able to move freely. Projected tests in our computers depict that the ship will be able to pivot on its own axis and simply turn the whole chassis on point without sacrificing much, to little to no, speed at all and maintain its course to wherever it may need to be directed.

As for the weapons systems themselves, we took a rather unorthodox approach with our ship's already unorthodox design. Rather than assembling a practical, symmetrical design, we ventured for an asymmetrical unit that would best define the qualities, as well as uniqueness of Testament's design. Upon testing, we'd discovered that attempting to simulate tests of our proposed weapons system would have crashed the ship's internal systems completely from an overabundant focus of power on a single area where equal units of power were centralized. In short, if you can imagine a single wall with explosives on each side, with both set of explosives ready to go off at once, and that, that wall was able to withstand at least a single unit of the ordinance distributed, it could hold itself up against the blast. However, fire both ordinances at once and the wall would surely be destroyed because of an equal or greater force its threshold could not sustain.

The same problem existed with the weapons system when they were implemented to make Testament's guns symmetrical on its hull. When simulated on tests, the ship simply exploded when all weapons went online and fired! To remedy this disaster, we simply redistributed the amount of energy of the power grid systems through its internal structure. By spacing the weapons systems far enough, yet close enough to our proposed "Nexus" design, we'd again solved the problem without an overhaul on its principle design. Lastly, comes the fact that we chose to use a recessed weapons system concept. To maintain Testament's streamlined look, we chose to 'sink in' the weapons for Testament's armaments. This was not simply a matter of choice, but practical decision making as the recessed power units allow for Testament's pure efficiency of power distribution. The closer we could get the guns to the power grid's core central, the better. It also proves to make Testament look less than threatening, until all weapons fired, ideally surprising any assailant who would underestimate the ship's less than intimidating exterior. Again, another miracle and pure genius!

With only a minor set of design kinks needing to be worked out, we feel comfortable to assess that Project Testament will be seeing its first phase of prototyping in an amount of time much less anticipated by our clients! Perhaps we can earn an extra amount of income in the form of a bonus out of this...

=======

Idiots.

Pardon the informal introduction to today's research and development log but it's finally come down to the last straw with everyone on edge on this particular project... or shall I say 'wager'. The devs and labcoats have chosen sides on either end of the project's last phase and somehow, somewhere, we managed to coordinate our efforts into not just one, BUT TWO grandiose battlecruiser designs which are both more than capable of seeing production for our clients. This most likely happened to the fact that our simple, yet genius, problem solving ideas had saved us alot of time, effort... as well as resources on the side. Ironically, our clients have no idea we've developed two classes of the one ship they intended us to develop which has led to this insanity I am about to document right now.

The researchers and science teams have decided to take advantage of this opportunity to experience that which we rarely ever get to do, and that's field testing our own creations... ... against one another. Why on any forsaken planet would we do such a thing? As stated earlier, an influx of resources and time management has miraculously astounded us with two amazing designs in which the knuckleheads who've developed each have begun picking favoritisms out of the two. It's come down to much heated arguments over the desktops, trickery and insults which at times have broken into bare fist fights. It's gotten out of hand, but the teams believe they have the proper solution.

Two ships, one fight, one destruction, one design.

Statistically the ships are quite formidable to one another with very marginal differences except for perhaps... the exterior of the hull.

"Give it the gold-nano infused hull participant assembler unit! It'll make it look shinier!" Says Team Judicator.

"No! Fit a jet black and smoke trim assembler on it! Make this beast look SEXY!" Say Team Prometheus.

Yes, you read right... they've even divided themselves up by TEAMS!

I'd also like to note that Team Prometheus believes anything in black is sexy... I am surprised my hands freely noted this commentary.

I honestly don't know what to make of this anymore except that it's been ultimately decided what to do at this point. Sometimes, I wish I hadn't signed up for contract to these sort of things. This is a freelance R&D Agency with enough freedom to do whatever they want, and apparently that means enough freedom to allow insanity as part of the mode of operations here. I really don't care WHICH design makes it, but it frustrates me that they can't just openly accept one another's designs and have TWO ships... but that wouldn't be much fun for them I suppose.

Idiots.

I hear the cheering and everyone's rushing out to the docking bays... I suppose it's on. We'll have one ship after all of this is done, I hate to admit.

Journal out. --=-