Star Wars: Stormshadow - Starcruiser

Lady Feyn's starcruiser (and the shanghaied heroes' chief ride), the eponymous Stormshadow.

The "Royal Starcruiser" is the ship that never was: conceived to be the ultimate expression of Naboo’s noble purity and ideals — and an answer to the increasingly dangerous space of the era — but it was not to be.

Although I had long intended the Stormshadow to be derived in-story from the unrealized plans for this Royal Starcruiser, I had never really tried to nail down the antecedent's differing attributes.

The schematic above is thus a devolution of the Stormshadow plans, and its development necessitated some adjustment to the plans of its supposed descendent, as well.

If one experiences a vague sense of loss for what might have been, it is an intentional effect; likewise, there should be a slight impression that the derivative Stormshadow is in some ways a subversion of everything the Royal Starcruiser was to represent.

Some may recognize the base design as one of the rejected Royal Cruiser concepts by Doug Chiang for SW-EP2 (see pages 20-21 of The Art of Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones) all three concepts made their way into the Stormshadow storyline in one form or another, and this one was chosen and recast as the title vessel. Initially this consisted of some basic reworking in Photoshop — principally to test the distinctive iridescent finish that would set this vessel apart from its Naboo roots (inset photo). With a bit of further conceptual elaboration — and a significant bit of scaling-up — this design was then expanded into the schematics above.

A chief challenge was to preserve the virtues of Chiang's concept while subtly reworking key components — not to mention extrapolating that singular model image into a scale schematic: a good piece of practice in conceptual development.