Wow. Just wow. Where to even begin?!

I am absolutely stunned by the number of subs and by the superb feedback over the last week and want to give a huge thank you to everyone who took the time to explore the ship and leave feedback. I've been looking after a sick wife the last few days and last I saw I thought it had reached about the maximum I could expect at 1000 subs; it was quite a shock to see how far things have come.

I’ve had a lot of private messages and so on which I promise I’ll reply to individually as soon as my wife is better but to answer some of the more common questions…

The ship was built entirely by myself over the course of about 4 weeks worth of evenings and weekends. I do not do an enormous amount of planning, and certainly no sketches or drawings and so on. I did however have a rough image in my head and a goal for what the ship would be about. All three of my larger releases have all started with the dorsal bows then worked backwards doing much of the dorsal side before the ventral. My interiors I usually leave entirely empty until the exterior is completed, though in this case as the flight deck was such an important part of the vessel, it was built right from the time I did the mid-ship exterior. My aim over the last few ships has been to start my fleet with ships that follow a consistent style without every just duplicating a feature and I think what I have works fairly well together.

As far as joining corporations and so on, I am actually already a member of Phoenix Shipyards. It was Dark Lord’s work that first got me into ship building and the other guys there also make some superb stuff.

For those who liked the lore, there’s a little more to the story on the Phoenix Shipyards wiki page as just before I released the carrier I wrote a very short story about the merger to fit in with the original Phoenix lore http://www.spaceengineerswiki.com/Faction:Phoenix_Shipyards (also available as a very silly ‘BBC-News’ style article I made when drunk (http://i.imgur.com/2UMyp7n.png)

As for the images, I had never used anything other than MS Paint before! They were all made using GIMP. I will be making a tutorial on the Blueprint on the forums in the near future for anyone interested and may well do so for deck plans too. Although originally they took a bit of time to produce, once I had the templates I can no produce them extremely quickly… the images for the Avalon were only an evening’s work.

Anyway, thanks once again, truly staggered that so many people have enjoyed this and want to extend my thanks to anyone who took the time to rate/comment and to the guys on the forum who helped keep me motivated when designer fatigue began to set in on a few occasions, particularly Dwarf-Lord Pangolin, mattryan72, Xocliw, Tyriosh, gFleka, Sungur, DarkS33d, Agnar and PyreStarite who’s encouraging posts kept me going, and particularly Tyriosh who was first to walk her hallways in the last few days of development.