I've never really used Cosmographer much, other than borrowing starfield bitmaps or planets as backgrounds for other maps. Here is the beginnings of my first spacecraft.

It's a small saucer shuttle, 50 map units in diameter. (I think the map units are in feet but not entirely sure.) My thought is that it's capable of flying through a solar system but not capable of interstellar flight. Usually attached to a space station or larger interstellar vessel, used for getting a closer look to study planets, entering the upper atmosphere or even landing planet side, collecting flora and fauna for closer study.

So far, I've just done the outside from above and the top-most deck -- the Command and Scientific Research deck. There will be two more decks: the Habitat deck in the center, and Engineering & Cargo on the bottom. I will also do a view from below.

From Above

Here it is from above, with windows shuttered and dome closed, defensive shields activated.

Windows unshuttered, dome uncovered:

I did a lot of experimenting on the windows, including experimenting with using Blend Mode. That worked out, but I ended up settling on using a Color Key cutout (of course) -- but instead of using the traditional magenta color (#6), I used the light blue (#5) and set it with a 20% opacity. I figure it's slightly tinted.

Here it is with retractable thrusters out:

Those gray discs are meant to be retractable hatches for weaponry and sensors. Here it is again with the four weapons (two lasers, two torpedo weapons) and four sensors out:

Top Deck: Command and Scientific Research

I was going to divide this floor into separate rooms, but it looked funny with the "skylight" windows. I suppose it makes sense for a research shuttle to allows the scientists and command crew to be together, since the scientists will really be directing the mission.

I played around with different stair options but didn't really care for them. I ended up settling for an elevator lift on the southern side, with an emergency ladder shaft on the northern side. Command/flight stations on the eastern side, scientific study stations elsewhere. Labels to come.

That's it for now. The other two floors and the bottom view still to come.

This is great. I have a couple of large cities that I’m planning to do, and have been pondering approaches. Using separate layers for each neighborhood sounds like a good idea, and I will study CA129. I think I may do one in SS5 and the other in Darklands City. Any tips — anything you wish you had done along the way or before getting started?

And not that we had any reason to think Winter Trail/Winter Village would be different, but just for fun, here's a sliver of an alpine village.

Added the path to the well and the hitching posts (not stocks), and made some other adjustments. Working on the basement (but I have a recent urge to design a small research vessel in Cosmographer, which I've never really played with so I might get hijacked).

It's fun having a chance to use Mike Schley's latest symbols.

Yes -- or allowing things to have multiple layers (so, for example, a symbol for a particular building on a city map may be on one layer for the type of building and another for its neighborhood).

I do tend to use layers mostly to be able to hide/unhide groups of things together. For example, in my dwarven mines, the mountaintop and all of the terrain and rock symbols associated with it were on one layer so I could cut off the top of the mountain to peer inside the mine with just hiding one layer. Or for a secret treasure chamber, the walls, floors, and symbols may all be on the GAME MASTER ONLY layer to hide or reveal all of them at once. Occasionally I'm faced with the choice of wanting it to be on multiple layers. I suppose that could get confusing, though, if one of those layers is hidden and the other is not.

(At this point, I suspect this thread may morph into a CC4-Plus thread.)