When 3d artists decide to write science fiction...

Just cracking myself up imagining a story as told by hardcore art detail fanatics.  No point here, just good fun.  Enjoy:


The enemy’s long white energy bolts seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. Starpilot Gunny Sunway noticed their emissive bloom reflected in the sheen off his domed cockpit glass.

“Shit!” he said into the segmented boom mic built into the side of his helmet with a cable sort of spiraled around the base leading into a pretty typical mic port recess, “behind us, people!”

He knew he was pegged dead to rights in the enemy’s sights.  He could feel their hud elements scaling down in a non-linear motion and locking onto his ship’s silhouette while several emissive leds must surely be lighting up  small insets of their dashboards, foretelling his death.

He grabbed the throttle slider instinctively.  His leather flight glove, with years of wear discoloring the areas around the contrasting stitches creaked, but fit snugly into the shape cut into the thick handle for his palm.  Several small cylinders that jutted outwards from the back of his hand at 45 degree angles, rotated and indicated a good connection with the control surface.   He jammed it hard forward down the recessed slider track while his other hand’s thumb flicked up the semicircular mostly clear safety cover that rotated down like a clamshell over the defensive chaff rocker-switch with the tightly beveled edges on it and a cool little cylindrical bit on both sides that allowed it to rotate in both directions.

He thumbed the countermeasure trigger with a satisfying ‘click’ of feedback.  Several recesses in the rear of his ship spiraled outward, revealing a series of circular cutouts on the panels under them, each with a semi-elliptical lathed warhead extending from them, and a series of recessed arcs forming a dotted line around the rim.  Little hydraulic piston servos arranged in radial symmetry around each tube tilted the launch devices slightly, for an idea 120 degree dispersal arc, centered on the negative of his Y axis, because positive Y was known to be “forward” by all the intelligent races of the universe.

The laser chaff rockets launched as a cluster, each about .05 seconds  after the next, with the first to launch being the centermost, and progressing in a sort of hexagonal spiral pattern from there.  Each launch spawning a cool little bright reflection on the radar dampening ship surface nearby.

After the tubes emptied, it was clear there were tight bundles of heat-wrapped wiring beneath each tube, with wires in mostly the same shiny pewter color, but occasionally one was bright red or orange. There was still some cool charring though, especially around the little collars where each wire fed into the ship’s surface.

PHOOOM!

The laser chaff rockets, in sort of a drunken missile pattern erupted, fanning out like pinwheel flowers, dispersing thousands of 100% reflective 2.5 centimeter wide hexagon sheets of ultra-mylar, creased down the center for maximum angle of incidence.  The effect was like looking into a sort of kaleidoscopic lens flare.

Under his carbon-fiber patterned helmet with some longitudinal paint stripes with chipped edges and squad number 08 stenciled on both sides, clear spherical beads of perfectly reflective sweat ran down the back of Sunway’s nearly shaved but still stubbly head and under the slightly weathered metal reinforced studded collar of his pressure-suit.

He gritted his super realistic teeth together hard and braced for death’s hot plasma phone call. He prayed that chaff would be enough.  That, or perhaps that enemy lasers would impact on the super shiny portions of his ship's surface panels, rather than the more roughly muted areas that seemed to follow the panel lines in a pattern that looked as if they were masked off of perhaps a sheet of heavily rusted metal.  He'd surely be screwed then...