Starfinder Starships, one of my favorite things...

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My first love in Starfinder were starships, of course, right away, I needed more starships rules to fill all the holes, and options I wanted, so Edward Moyer and I started filling them with what essentially became our Starship Operations Manual, 3 years before Paizo released theirs, called Starships, Stations and Salvage Guide. While my station rules were quickly superceded with the appearance of Super Colossal as an infinite bay structure, but only a handful of remaining mechanics have been replaced with official versions by Paizo, the rest is still unreplaced. I needed things like cloaking shields, grappling arms, boarding holds, drop pods, etc. So some of the ships below feature stuff you won't find in the Core nor the SOM. While a lot of the ship deck plans in that book are of weird ships - biohybrids, undead ships, I had to in order focus on the new kinds of ships, Ed created. Most of my ships are more hard sci-fi in design, which I prefer doing.

One of my first favorite ship designs is kind of a cross between the Rasa from Dark Matter, and a Firefly - looks like a small Rasa, with the interior function of the Serenity, if not the plan. I featured this in Rogue's Run, a two-shot I wrote where the PC smugglers are taking illegal cargo to be delivered to an asteroid pirate station, while having to deal with a naval blockade in the Drift preventing or watching all ships approaching the beacon drop point to the asteroid. So the PCs are forced to use a pre-Drift smuggler's route across known space, with natural boosters in places to make the incredible long journey more viable, hence why smuggler's used it. So while it has a place to start and destination for some adventure, the focus of the two-shot is the trip to get there - having to deal with Sector police patrols, naval mine field, and something I call the Sisters, a pair of black holes that counter rotate in their spin, with overlapping event horizons, which can jet a starship riding it at incredible speeds and enormous distances, but there's risk in doing it.

Anyway, the ship is called the Jack of Diamonds, a pitbull class smuggler transport. It's got 3-ish decks, the middle deck is tucked to the rear holding 4 guest quarters, the lower deck being cargo, tech shop and engineering, and fore part intersects where the middle deck would be for taller cargo, also the Smuggler's Cache is split in two, flanking the tech shop bay, and hidden by structurally camoflaged bulkheads as doors, with "traps" like power shorts that knock the deck lights out, when the authorites are trying to find the cache, but their investigations cause "mechanical problems" - they ought to stop what their doing (it's well hidden) . Upper deck is the crew and bridge deck.

 

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Another favorite is the Sector Police boat, a small ship, but fast and well armed with forward swept wings with guns that rotate upward out of the way, for boarding access. An extendable boarding hold allows patrol officers to board vessels for inspections. Bunk beds for six in aft, and a sickbay and crew area, and bridge as top deck, but it's tight space. The middle deck is the boarding hold and brig area for holding prisoners, while the lower deck (yes it has 3 decks, sort of) is more a low ceiling crawl space for engineering. The "name" was just to be funny... though this is the Gendarme class patrol boat.

 

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This one was kind of a weird one, but it's a purpose built pirate ship, by a very bold android captain and crew who call themselves the Cyberians. All crew are either androids, S.R.O.s or heavily cybernetic-implanted humanoids with a disgust for non-cyber hybrid beings. The ship is called the Cyberian and features the Jolly Roger openly painted on it's surface - they aren't known for stealth, and is a huge cruiser. It features two smaller ships attached to it's flanks with external docking rings (a bay option from SSSG), one is a tug boat, and one is fast assault boarding vessel for more effective combat against targetted ships. The android crew, rather than having crew berths, have Borg-like standing units for going into sleep mode.

 

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While I create larger ships, I prefer designing large or smaller as I prefer lots of detail, and the bigger you get, the less small detail you can include, plus deck plans for gargantuan plus is such a pain (they are so damn big). And I will post more, tomorrow, but this is one of my most recent ships, and have been using it a lot as a basic ship for many space illustrations recently - I like the exterior look. This is the Hermes Marathon fast marine boat, a workhorse in the Colonial Marine fleet, though usually not for planetary deployment missions. I designed this to have the fastest Drift drive (which I call hyperdrives, since the Drift is Paizo IP - I can't use it in my publications), as this was used as an escort for a fast diplomatic corps ship with the fastest drives. This too has two decks with a bridge tucked between at fore, with stairs going up and down. Upstairs the fore half is crew barracks, and a separated aft half is engineering accessed from the lower deck. Lower deck is sick bay, techshop, with access to rear exit door.

One of the many illustrations where I used this craft, is of a world that is half land and half water, which would seem a good place to colonize, however whatever the bizarre geologic forces that created this landscape, makes it nearly impossible to adequetly use either the land or the sea for colonization purposes, on a rescue recovery by a Marathon.

 

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Last post, just an aside as it sort of fits - here's some of the space station illustrations I've done (I enjoy doing station maps too).
Elysium Station (a science station), The last is actually a repurposed station basically two 4 sided die, stacked in opposite facings, but I made it floating terraforming platform as an illustration for my The Planet Builder supplement (my most recent product release, from last December).

 

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One last pair before I go to bed. When I was creating my Colonial Naval ships that I posted in my setting thread - all inspired by sea life. I did this one too, in that odd motif, but as a gargantuan cruise liner, Dolphin class, and not a warship, no guns at all. Under it's metal glass roof the interior is designed like a resort surface city, with tree lined streets. This particular ship is doing the Nine Moon cruise around a gas giant, only venturing in patrolled space...

As well as a heavily armored and fortified small Robber Crab pirate vessel. This ship is armed only with guns that take down ship shields without damaging them, then races forward, to grapple victim ships. Boarding pirates using cutting lasers breach the targetted vessel to engage, with intent to seize the ship.

 

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The Minestar Starfish starship is a huge grappling mining platform ship that attaches itself to asteroid and small planetoids with microgravities, with burrowing equipment underneath that begins harvesting minerals from the rocky soil, These rotate in place slowly carving a perfectly circular hole as it digs in, eventually completely consuming the stellar bodies it mines. It's arms can even grapple smaller pieces of the asteroid as it becomes mostly mined away, closing it's grip even tighter.

The second image is a view of the same ship, I designed to use as an included illustration for an upcoming one-shot module, I'm still developing called Rogue Moon, which features a rogue moon representing my version of Aeaea, Circe's isle from Homer's Odyssey, where Circe is a powerful lich, and I'm doing a twisted version of the Circe story - which will feature this ship.

Edit: oh, one more, this ship crash lands, because while the scale of the planetoid should have a microgravity, an artificial 1G, makes for a crash landing instead and a necessary rescue by the Colonial Marine squad of PCs...

 

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This space station is called Ammon Station, which was commissioned to me by Derwood's Starship Combat League (DSC League) a Discord community where the focus is on running starship combats, vehicle and mecha combats as well as races, one-shots and privately running campaigns using Roll20. They use elements of the Drift as there own setting. This station is supposed to be the antithesis sister of Absalom Station of the Pact Worlds setting, located deep inside the Drift. I did some biblical research to learn who Absalom was, one of King David's sons, whose primary opponent was his half brother Ammon, so chose that name for this station. I gave it an industrial age feel, almost like 1920's Earth, but is a murky station under mixed control. While the two red lights are repeated around the base of the station, from this angle it appears to be eyes giving it it's deserved sense of malevolance...

 

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This is the Pandora class small corporate shuttle, really a luxury craft, with 4 huge crew berths with private restrooms and a desk, with a small enginnering section to the rear and bridge at fore - all on the middle deck. The Upper deck serves as a meeting room, dining area and observation deck, while the lower deck is techbay, sickbay and cargo hold, with a front ramp as egress into the ship. As it is sometimes for weekend getaways on alien worlds, and that is shown in the illustration...

 

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Another odd ship that I actually created two years before Starfinder release, and eventually converted it to SF rules, which T. H. Gulliver featured in his Dead in Space one-shot series horror anthology. This is a bio-hybrid living ship of a space born creature that spent too much time inside a necrotic energy emitting nebula which infected it with vampirism. It is part of a vampire fleet. The ships are the master vampires with it's crew, it's spawn. To the rear of the middle deck is a kind of regeneration/healing pod bay, with 8 grub-like, open slitted worm beds that the injured crew crawl into and is healed over time. However, this is the mechanism for how the ship feeds itself, and/or converts the interred into a spawn. I designed this ship to be more like bio-hybrid in my perspective with viscerals and veins to emphasize it - most bio-hybrid ships in sci-fi television look nothing like biology to me, so I wanted to make sure that couldn't be missed on this ship... enjoy!