Been a very long time since I did any spacecraft designs. General principles still apply though, remembering this is a self-contained, self-reliant unit, so essentially you need everything you'd have on a normal ship with a sizeable crew - they need to eat, sleep, stay clean (clothes and person; toilets as well), exercise, medical facilities, a means of controlling each system on the vessel, a means of communicating with other vessels and shore/planetary/orbital bases, a means of carrying out the vessel's primary and subsidiary functions, emergency escape facilities, emergency handling facilities (e.g. fire, flood, general damage control), a means of observing whatever is around them outside the vessel, and as you obviously already have, propulsive engines and fuel sources. This list is not exhaustive! And almost all this has to fit within the outer hull somehow.

Spherical and rounded hull shapes are a nightmare to design for. About 40 years ago, I drew out by hand a spherical free-moving spacecraft intended as a planetary defence vessel, one of a fleet, and that was horrendous, as (well, if you're me anyway) I had to keep checking how the outer circumference affected the internal space for different parts of every vertical level, and having to keep changing things because they'd no longer fit at the size intended, and so forth.

Unless there are strong reasons not to do so that make sense in-game, there's no physical necessity from our reality to have streamlined forms for spacecraft at all. Doesn't look so "Hollywood movie pretty", I grant you, but...

Nothing to do with this topic, but I did just want to say very well done to C.C. Charron for creating the new Ancient Cities mapping style that's just been released by ProFantasy as June's Annual issue! Based on the "Sumerian Kinda" Forum posting here, of course!

One alternative you might try would be not using the RGB Matrix effect, but setting up a simple rectangular polygon that covers all the map on its own, new, sheet, setting the polygon to have a solid red colour, and then adding a Transparency effect to that sheet. If you move the sheet to be below the text, but above the rest of the map sheets, that might work. You'll probably need to keep adjusting the Transparency, and probably also the colour of the polygon (likely somewhere in the reds and oranges range) to get to something you're happy with. Not guaranteed to work ideally, but it should give you more control over the final colour of your text, at least.

Lot of detail there, certainly!

If this was going into the Atlas, I'd suggest a rethink on some of the labelling, as to my eye much of it's getting lost amongst the terrain in places (using the larger Gallery version to check this). Indeed, there are labels visible on that version that I didn't spot on the Forum one. Since it's for personal use, that's probably less of an issue though!

This is the Annual issue 92 Quenten referred in his Oct 22 note above (only obvious if you can convert the month and year into a number correctly for the Annuals, however, so no blame attaches!).

The issue covers importing and converting real-world vector data from the free-access Natural Earth website (there's a link from the Aug 2014 Annual page) into CC3, and comes with a group of so-converted FCW sample maps of the world. It especially concentrates on converting the continent of South America into a standard CC3-look overland map as its worked example, albeit with just the coastline and rivers illustrated (you get three FCW maps showing the process). There are also files with the 1:10 million vector data that were used to create the various CC3 maps with the issue.

Can't really say much more, as although I've had it for some time, I've never used this particular issue of the Annual, and it could be a while before Ralf gets round to demonstrating it in his weekly YouTube live-streams, unfortunately, as last week's covered issue 15!

It does seem as if it should be possible to prepare the sort of map @serious77 was wanting using it though.

Yet still no cat... 😁🐈️

Map six - Hex 1304, Arvika:

Arvika was one of the three settlements in this area that were originally shown on the existing Atlas map. In the absence of any text notes for it there, I simply looked at what the symbol was - a hamlet. As luck had it, no random feature was selected during the creation of my Whispering Wastes regional map for the hex it was in, but there was something in an immediately adjoining one, a mysterious ravine partly filled with webs, where a legendary artifact was guarded by a nest of Ettercaps. So I simply moved the ravine into the hamlet's hex, combining both elements. The hexes are six miles across, north-south, after all, so there's room for a lot more than just a single feature in each one.

The setting for the place was to be in a river valley, the Silvertongue, and I randomly discovered instead of the fords, so popular elsewhere so far, the proximity to the uplands had clearly provided stone enough for a bridge here for once, and it also turned out to be notably ancient, something that, like the Stormy Cleft ravine, simply helped reinforce why this hamlet had ended up being shown on the Atlas's area map, while other, seemingly larger or similarly-sized, settlements in the Whispering Wastes had not appeared there. Mapping it was straightforward enough, with the contour symbols fitted-in to act as the entrance to the ravine, although I did add a few more fields than I'd initially thought to provide some further interest around the settlement itself, which also lessened the impact of the ravine on the whole drawing.

As the perceptive among you will have noticed, I made a further change to the locations of some of the upper level layout designs after hiding the bitmap sheet I'd been tracing, something that I find happens all the time, when things don't look quite right. And which are liable to be changed repeatedly thereafter till I'm happy (or happier...) with them!

However, to today's update. The exterior is done for now, with ground cover, some vegetation and a few tumbled smaller rocks. I've also added the new SCREEN Sheet mask to hide what's beyond the map border:

The effects on the various external ground and symbols sheets has needed a degree of amending as well to reach this point, and I've also added those three free-standing boulders/rock pillars at the mouth of the southern front cavern. Haven't done anything inside the caves as yet, although I have had to add a small polygon of one of the patchy grey dirt terrain bitmap fills (one of the "T" types) to better disguise one of the outer-inner transitional passageway ends, where (as sometimes happens), the Edge Fade, Inner effect was giving too sharp a line where the outside brown dirt bitmap fill met the grey of the cave floor.

Next will be the initial interior cavern features.

Sometimes getting things to stand out more means just changing the colour or line thickness a little (or font size for text). An outer glow of some kind can help, but it can also make things look too misty, which I think it what's happening with some of the smaller text labels presently. I'm not sure that brown colouring on the labels is working well enough, and even the grey labels could be a little clearer.

The general textures seem fine, although the desert edge is maybe a bit too abrupt (very obvious where the green coloration alongside the river ends currently). That seems to be accentuated by the line of desert-edge dunes north of the river too. The more wavy edge of the dunes south of the river looks more natural to my eye at least.

And obviously shocked there's no wyvern statue 😉🐲

Yet 😁