On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

...in fits and starts.

Click on the image to find out what I mean.



At least I managed to stay home all day.

Something I was fiddling with today.

It amuses me to keep playing with this. I learn things from this project. It won't earn me any money (unless someone with hiring power thinks this is evidence that I will be Useful), but learning from the work is fun and useful anyway. "Fan art" is good practice.

As ever, if Disney/Marvel wants me to take it down, I'm not exactly lacking in ways to be reached.

As for the rest of you, if you've any suggestions on stuff I should add/remove before locking this down, please do post in the comments.

Continuing the practice...getting the guidelines for the deck lines into place, streamlining the dorsal radome, adding transverse bulkheads (but not prepared to die over specific placement)...

So I've been fiddling in Adobe Illustrator tonight. Half-tempted to revert back to CorelDRAW instead for this sort of thing, but never mind that for the moment.

This afternoon and evening, I spent part of the time fiddling with that Helicarrier tech art from the Marvel Universe Handbook from 1983. The working assumption being, if its length was about the same as a Nimitz-class CVN, what should its internal structures be expected to look like?

( Screengrabs after the cut! )

I think we have another 'Carrier class design debuted this week in the above-named X-Men-related mini-series, right?

How many classes in service these days?

This is a thing I've decided to start doing for fun.

Angela Chang is in charge of SHIELD AI surveillance/reaction division as of Avengers AI # 1.

Alison "Dazzler" Blaire is on the payroll and part of the task force chasing down Scott Summers' X-faction as of Uncanny X-Men (current series) # 8.

Maria Hill's still bouncing all over the landscape, from Secret Avengers to Indestructible Hulk to Uncanny X-Men.

We have a couple of new Helicarriers, Hercules and Constellation (both sister ships with Constellation as the class namesake), to put next to the Iliad. Thank Paul Cornell over on Wolverine.

Additional note: Hercules is designed to be submersible, so I guess that the Chinese government wasn't willing to hand over the sub-carrier Leviathan on a long-term basis to SHIELD after that business of sending the Hulk after Attuma. And SHIELD likely wasn't counting on such a donation to begin with, either, given lead times on shipbuilding processes.

What am I missing?

One of the things that really got my attention, and that of more than a few others' as well, was the movie version of the Helicarrier. When I got that coffee-table book on the movie's production artwork, I was hoping for a large chunk of page-count devoted to that vessel. I was not let down.

Over at Facebook, box_in_the_box and I started out discussing the way Black Widow was depicted as out-conning a Trickster-god figure - sorry if that spoils any plot points at this juncture - and segued into discussing the 'Carrier. "Box" is of the mind that the movie provided the best depiction to date in any medium - including the original comics - for such a vessel as this.

I'm not sure that I can make any counter-argument. I have no expertise sufficient to that challenge, assuming it needed to be made.

There's been a couple of things about the specific comics version as shown in the Marvel Universe Handbook that caught my eye, though...both cobbled together from Marvel Universe Handbook imagery and line art from the Federation of American Scientists' website(or perhaps the USN's own public-access archives?).

Assuming that the Nimitz-class CVNs are the same length as the Helicarrier design given us by Eliot Brown...
Honestly, I usually get this techno-nerdy with Star Trek's fictional spacecraft... 

Some of you may recall my post on SHIELD back in September, explaining why I think it a fun concept to set up heroes and stories around.

I still do. In that vein, I spotted a bit of techno-financial trivia that got my attention about their signature capital ships, the Helicarriers.

( Read more... )