The Voidskimmer is a standard craft design of Sha Rephart which is primarily utilized for scouting, small scale shipping, and short-range passenger travel. It normally has a minimum two-person crew, and has enough beds and amenities to comfortably support those two on longer journeys.

Well, ten years and I finally came back and made some significant updates to the Voidskimmer. A major change is the placement of the propulsion. The old design had vents along the edge of the vessel’s outer “ring”. It came to my attention that placing air inlets right on the plane of the void was a bad idea, as all solid materials settle along that plane and would then easily get sucked into the engines. Instead, there are eight curved funnels on the sides, redirecting the flow off of the plane. The funnels are divided into left and right sets. By independently changing the direction and output on either side, the pilot can steer the vessel.

The boarding planks now rotate from an upright stowed position to the deployed position, instead of awkwardly sliding into place. There is also a box on each side for mooring supplies, including bumpers and ropes. The railings are built a bit better now, going off of things I learned designing the Obmunjalae. It’s not apparent in the images, but there is a cargo hold below the front deck; the hexagon visible in the images is the door to access it. The height of the front deck was increased to allow more vertical space in the hold.

I made some considerations and decided to remove balconies from the back end of the ship. The main engine intakes are placed on the top of the machine room and it likely would be an unpleasant place to stand within relatively close distance to those. Also, the view was dominated by the machine room anyway, so it was not as nice a view as the forward facing balconies. In its place I put a decorative element to the frame, enclosed the section, and turned that section into what may be a lounge type area:

It is in an odd curved space of the vessel, so I’m not exactly sure how to arrange the furniture in there. Have to figure in the height of the ceiling and all that. For now, it’s arranged a bit like a bar and grill, I guess.

I made up a little sort of x-ray view of the vessel as it exists now. In it, you can see that I added shelves to the storage rooms and tall tanks to store liquids in the last section of the storage rooms. You can also see the location of the new lounges and the current shape of the decorative frame elements right next to them. They… have a Earth 1950s vibe to them.

A small personal craft used by Lady Obmunjalae. It’s one of the most compact voidplane craft in service. It was designed for single person use, though a couple of guests could tag along on short trips. There’s a small cabin with enough room for a nap and to stow supplies. In the picture, the craft is parked in the Obmunjalae’s hangar.

The craft’s hull resembles the core shape of the Obmunjalae. I don’t know if that shape has an actual name, but it could be imagined as the cross section of a lens revolved on a different axis than the traditional 3D lens shape.

Oh hey, and there’s a model of Lady Obmunjalae in that picture…

I’m starting to get used to the new version of Blender and its new rendering engine. I’ve mainly been working on the Obmunjalae as practice. I went off on a tangent planning through its construction steps (again…), but finally got back around adding some new details.

Not satisfied with just making a fantastical vessel, I have also designed out its framework. I’ve done something similar with the Ayra Katrin Library, actually thinking out the steps used to build the structure. I whipped up a quick turntable view of the framework below.

A purple crescent is the insignia of the Obmunjalae and shows up on the vessel in many places, including on the engine frame that you can see in the video clip.

I’ve settled on a name for the large Voidplane craft: Obmunjalae (oh+b, m+uh+n, j+ah, lay) which in the Gwil language translates to “Voidplane Master”. This was a title for its owner, but over time people also started calling the vessel by the same name.

Between the last update and this one, I did some rebuilding of the vessel’s frame and shell. I found a better tool in Blender to create cleaner cross sections. The Obmunjalae’s shape creates some interesting challenges because the floor cross sections are not regular elliptical shapes.

Another change to the vessel is the frame pieces that attach to the engines. Originally there was just a deck between the engine and machine room. Now there are large braced frame pieces, which you can see pretty well in this back shot.

The hangar now has a third mooring spot at the opposite end of the door. There are also two smaller elevator shafts instead of one large one. Instead of lights hanging from the ceiling, there are now lamp posts along the railing providing the main lighting for the hangar.

The design of the nose door has been updated. The door itself is a bit smaller, as I aligned its frame to be spaced evenly with the other main rings of the frame. The hardware that opens the door is also significantly different. The changes resulted in the door only needing two points of articulation – an initial push away from the frame and then a rotation. The earlier design pushed forward, then pulled outward, then rotated. There’s also some bracing framework attaching the hardware to the main frame rings.

Something I’ve never done before on the site: here’s a video! It’s of the nose door opening, playing at 4x actual speed.

I also started working out early ideas for the “Machine Room”. The vessel is powered by a large crystal core (the big glowy purple thing in the picture). The door on the right leads out to one of the engines.

I’ve been working on a vessel for Sharpheart – a large Voidplane craft for which I haven’t settled on a name yet. It is owned by a traveling adventurer sometimes nicknamed “The Voidplane Queen”. She lives independently of other nations and travels great distances through the Voidplane on her ship, all the while collecting, trading, and exploring. No one else travels as far, and she is responsible for many of the sparse nations being aware of each other.The vessel has a hangar bay in the middle (you can see it through the big side oval window above), two floors on each side with various rooms (14 of their balconies can be seen above), and one floor with a large single room on each side (topped with the oval roof window). The floors are accessed via an elevator, which is the gray circle to the right of the big roof window below. The back section houses the mechanical room and the two wind turbine engines.

There are Voidskimmer craft in the pictures as a size reference.

Pictured below is a partial view the front. At the bottom left is the nose of the craft which also acts as the door for the hangar room. The first balcony is where the vessel controls are located.

The architectural side-view is below, where you can see how the ship is vertically symmetrical. On the Voidplane, a gravity-like force pushes things to the center of a plane (which for this vessel lies along its center line), so someone standing on one side of the ship would be upside-down in relation to someone on the other.