Welp, this is the biggest art project I've done since the Foxfire and Spitfire, and probably is the biggest one yet. The Space Carrier Audacity. Once again, I'll start with setting details, then go into creative details down after that.

The Space Carrier Audacity (D10) is a one of a kind escort carrier, originally undergoing construction as a merchant vessel before being finished as a fully functional space carrier for the United Earth Navy. After serving for twenty years, she was transferred into the custody of the Confederation Navy, essentially a bloc of interstellar powers in a similar vein to NATO and the EU. However, the Confederation Navy is essentially a vanity project, suffering from a lack of funding and excess corruption, meaning that the already relatively 'cheap and dirty' carrier was basically falling apart and was treated like a joke. However, thanks to the efforts of a new captain, the Audacity and it's crew have basically took up the old Audacity legacy and really turned the ship around into a badass.

She carries not only a modest couplement of 60 aerospace fighters (small for the setting) that often launched from the gaping big hangar/launch bay at the front of the vessel, but she has been modified with alot more weaponry than a normal fleet carrier would carry, including two massive cannons that are slung over the deck. She is surprisingly agile too thanks to the drive pods at the ends of the pylons, including being capable of both inter- and exo-atmopsheric operations, which interestingly use no moving parts, thanks to running her engines entirely through EM fields and energy shields, giving her near instant acceleration. Whilst intended to protect convoys, Audacity has turned into a surprisingly multirole ship, ideal for what is essentially the hero ship of her setting - and a right scrappy underdog to boot. I've also added an aerospace fighter as well that the Audacity would carry too, the FS-468F Starcat.

All in all, a huge amount of fun to work on this. I'm really glad with the way she came out... and I can finally revitalise an old joke/meme!

And well, I have a pretty big connection to the original ship, so, this felt pretty important to me.

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The story for Audacity was inspired by a forum discussion back in 2015, which included the WW2-era escort carrier HMS Audacity going up against the battleship Yamato. A 5000-10000 ton ex-merchant with no hangar and only six fighters against the biggest battleship ever. Not a very fair fight, but it did lead to someone quipping about dropping the carrier onto Yamato. Cue a quip about a Space Carrier Audacity along the lines of the Space Battleship Yamato. Something that I couldn't really get out of my head. I did an early drawing for such a Space Carrier at a similar point in time to intergrate into a single setting, but that was before I started doing art more fully.

So in December 2022, I decided to started working on a more extensive specsheet and get the details for a more specific setting sorted out for the Audacity. Something that took a bit of effort with both research, scales and actually drawing the Audacity itself. The good news was, when I originally pondered about the carrier, I did develop a basic idea for the carrier and had some fairly good knowledge about her to boot. The original idea was that this Audacity was salvaged from the bottom of the ocean, much like the Space Battleship Yamato. Since the original Audacity had it's bow blown off, the iconic whale shark bow would have been fitted in it's place. However, once I started investigating things further, I realised that not only the ship would be tiny for space operations, but the original ship was probably not in a great condition to be converted anyway, hence the new ship merely has some metal plates from the original placed in a similar fashion to a ship's bell but is otherwise a completely different vessel. In addition, gaps would be reinforced with new hull plates. New engines would be fitted and of course, the big guns. Unlike the rest, the guns were added partly out of 'hey, looks cool, let's add it' as well as 'oh, let's replace the four inch gun with a pair of 64 inch giants'.

The side was realtivly straight forward, as I got to use the original Audacity's profile to really get things set up properly, as there are plenty of side shots of her. The frontal view was a little bit more difficult, but fairly straight forward once I started lloking more closely at the scales and adjusted things accordingly. The top down was ironically the most difficult, as trying to get the scales of different parts was actually impressively difficult. The top down itself probably doesn't match up as well with the side view, but it is asthetically pleasing once it was all done with the linework. The engines had to often be done seperately, but they were a nice, simple design, especially once the glowing effects got thrown in.

Colours were actually pretty interesting, as I wanted to use the original colours of the WW2 carrier for the Space Carrier. I had an idea of what kind of dazzle camofluage pattern that the Audacity used, and had the right references, however, colours were a different matter. Despite the Royal Navy grey colours of the time having a hint of blue, Audacity was always portrayed with a slight green tinge in most of the pieces I came across. Other diagrams showed her being almost stark weight, and I even resorted to using recolour tools online to try and produce the original colours, only to get browns instead. In the end, it turned out that greys have three main colours mixed in. Blue, violet and green. Audacity's slightly green tinge comes from shadows and low lighting, whereas she would still have the blue tinted grey hull, which was a pretty nice find. Throw in the rest of the shading and the blue glow effects for the engines, and she came out looking really good.

I also wanted to add one of Audacity's fighters too, namely something inspired by the Wildcats that Audacity would have orginally carried. I gave it a retro-futuristic look, even if it started coming out looking more like Sabre or a MiG than a WW2 cat, but I still liked the way this fighter - a Starcat - came out. The colours are based off those that would have been originally used for 802 NAS, a squadron deployed on the original Audacity.

And finally came the details and the background. I wasn't sure what the background would be like, but in the end I settled for a set of different gradients and alot of light blues that had been used for the space carrier engines. Then, I gave them a glowing effect (krita's filters are your best friend) whilst using a black effect to help the other light blue text to stand out.

This piece took ALOT of work to do, but it was definitely worth the effort.