You have piqued my interest with this, Twelvefield!

Thanks for that and I'll try to find out something about Chris Foss soon.

Going to space in vessels of pure art sounds intriguing and the right thing to do.

Chris Foss was the first to put massive "decals" on spaceships and make them colourful. He was also one of the first to deploy angular ships. Before that, SF magazine spaceships tended to look abstract, and before that they tended to look like cigar-shaped rockets. There are some exceptions like the Discovery and the USS Enterprise, which Jodorowsky hated.

Those ships created technical problems beyond their aesthetic, though: it was difficult to photograph curvilinear ships without them going out of focus. In the case of the Enterprise, Star Trek lived with terrible blue screen artefacts. In the case of the Discovery, they had to use careful, deliberate movement and expensive anamorphic lenses.

Ships like the Star Destroyer and the Sulaco were designed with a minimum of curvature so that they would photograph with a minimum of fuss. The Sulaco especially was designed for in-camera forced-perspective effects shots, meaning that there was no blue or greenscreen, the effects were optically produced - back in the day, James Cameron wrote the textbook on cheap-end film-making.

Now that those ship styles have become iconic, there's a big problem: we're no longer restricted to the primitive lenses and motion control cameras from the 1970's & '80's. Yet the style persists, which is what Jodorowski alludes to.

To be fair, at this point, if you haven't searched out Alejandro Jodorowski, you should, especially Jodorowski's Dune. He is... interesting. And polarizing. There's a lot about him and his work I can't agree with. But I find his points to be illuminating, if perhaps cracked. But he is working from the heart, he's not a Hollywood bean counter. I can only guess at what kind of videogame he would come up with, if he became interested in the genre.

Back to Chris Foss: strangely, I never paid his designs much attention until the original Homeworld came out, if you remember that game. I learned from their art deprtment that they travelled to England to meet Mr. Foss and work out their ship designs with his help. Thet would be like asking Frank Sinatra or Elvis or the Beatles to write an anniversary song for your wife. It turns out Mr. Foss lived in more or less a shack, and every surface was covered with spacehip illustations and designs. He never quit.

As for ships of pure art: I believe there is an intersection of art and applied science at the uppermost boundaries of each discipline. You can't be an artistic Master without a deep understanding the physics and chemistry of your medium. Likewise, scientific engineering becomes a physical masterwork at the highest level. Consider the geometry and elegance of the thruster bell of a space rocket, and how advanced physics has shaped it into something that looks nearly organic.

That was a good read. I feel that Tomislav's artwork on the ships is closer to John Berkey's work, although they are unique enough to stand alone. In this game you can find 75 different ship designs, ok some are iterations on the previous, smaller models, but that is a kind of logic I can fully agree with. Once the technology will be mature and powerful enough for us to allow such machines to be built, a cruiser will iterate on the a destroyer's well-tried-out basic design. I love these ships, you never get bored with them.

If there's an argument against the illustration style of John Berkey, I'm not going to be the one to formulate it. His ships are beautiful and unique. He also made the pulpier "palette knife" ships look more solid and less abstract than his imitators - a masterful sense of composition and weight. In the 1980's, most of his ships wouldn't translate directly to cinema on account of the limits of modelmaking, but today in CG there should be no such constraints (except copyright, of course).

It is a pleasure to read you, Twelvefield. If you find time, you could write some passages to the ships in the wiki. They are patiently waiting for the background lore, I just do not have the time to write them all.

Great Bird of the Galaxy! This is very high praise, now I am blushing. I will see what I can do, but my specialty is geek illustration more than writing. I have a friend who is a writer, he might be interested as well.

If you want to see all my stuff (minus NDA's), I keep a blog,

http://shyluk.blogspot.ca/

but it just rambles on and on. Still, it's fully illustrated, and the best stuff is in the Showcase section.

@ Twelvefield

Thanks a lot for the tip on "Jodorowsky's Dune". As a big fan of the Herbert books, I'm quite embarassed that this documentary had passed under my radar. Just watched it and getting quite depressed, that we'll never see this movie. Greatest movie never made?!?

Dali as the emperor would have been brilliant, not to mention everybody else participating.

Will check out your illustrations. Cheers mate! Have you checked out the upcoming game "No Man's Sky"? Looks beautiful, though the ships I've seen looks a bit too much like Star Wars ships. Still; The planets are absolutely astonishing.

Jodorowski's Dune would have been the chisel that finally shattered cilvilization as we know it into unredeemable, unrepairable fragments (provided that Justin Bieber hasn't accomplished this already). But what a magnificant blow to the soul that would have been, to go to the theatre and see that. Likely, it would have been the end of cinema, how could anybody top it? Just the documentary is enough as it is.

The man went on so many tangents in his conception of the film. Many of those tangents would have cost the budget of a "normal" version of Dune, let alone his. The really striking thing is that I think some of Jodorowski's concepts were even more brilliant than Herbert's. Heresy! Right?

Well, I actually liked the way Jodo wanted to end the movie. And the AD would have been far superb compared to Lynch's version. Really loved when Jodo was smiling widely stating "It was a disaster. I couldn't help but feeling happy.It's human to feel that way" (when talking about going to the cinema and watching Lynch's version).