Starship Galileo Study

This is a study I did based on the starship featured in SF author Allen Steele's novel, Spindrift. Allen shared his preliminary design work with me, and encouraged me to flesh out the design. Eventually, some of my design fed back into Allen's novel. It was great fun brainstorming with Allen!

The torus is not there to produce artificial gravity for the crew. Instead, it is part of the near lightspeed drive, which inflates to this shape, after the ship has passed through an initial starbridge that gets it out of the solar system. Nanoassemblers are then let loose in the toroid to build the Diametric drive.
The scene depicted occurs shortly after Galileo arrives at an extra-solar system object named Spindrift. The ships lander, the Maria Celeste, has just undocked in preparation for deorbit and landing.
I enjoy Allen's fiction greatly, he's one of the few hard SF authors who are regularly writing today.

Modeled, textured and rendered in Lightwave 8.5 Post work done in Photoshop CS2

Thanks for taking a look!