My Terran Fleet

Recently I have had the joy of moving house several times in one year. An stressful affair definitely, but one that gives you to opportunity to rediscover items and memories from different times in your life. While I was packing up my bedroom I made an interesting discovery. Within an old faded plastic bag was a large collection of old sketch pads and notebooks, each one filled with scribbles and drawings I made throughout my childhood. When I was a lad I was a prolific drawer, constantly scribbling on my school books and filling up sketch pads on near weekly basis. As a quite nerdy kid who loved sci fi and video games, most of my doodles were robots, aliens, spaceships, monsters, war scenes, tanks and any thing else that could be considered dorkish.

So in this bag of old memories, I found a specific sketch pad that I had forgotten all about over the years. It was filled with detailed sketches and schematics of an entire fleet of spacecraft, each design complete with detailed information on how they worked and for what purpose. Looking through the pictures I was amazed at the level of detail young me had gone to trying to make them as realistic as I could. Not only had I tried to design a wide variety of ships, but also the industry and infrastructure that would have been required to build and operate the interplanetary fleet.

Through some minor detective work I was able to get a rough date of when I filled up this particular pad. Back in 1999 I was 13/14 years old and had just begun my first year in secondary school. I was just getting over my obsession with the table top wargame Warhammer 40K, I was enjoying playing my new Playstation and was beginning my foray into PC gaming. Judging by the different designs and some of the descriptions, I can say for certainty that I was playing a lot of Homeworld and Freespace 2. Another definite influence was one of the Star Wars Incredible Cross Sections books, this one to be precise.

I thought it would be nice to share these images for the amusement of the internet rather than leaving them to fade away in a plastic bag in my attic. These are the original scans so view them in full size if the text is hard to read. I wish I could say my handwriting has improved since then but hopefully it legible enough to be read.

So without further ado, I present my terran fleet!