Shadows in the Corner

Flight classes

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"Tutorial" on how to draw an OC with dwarfism (well, some of it).

Boring tired disclaimer: Keep in mind that this is an introductory "drawing" "tutorial" and has some generalizations in it, so not every “X is Z” statement will be true for Actual People. Which happens to be true for everything in general.

You are heavily encouraged to do your own research because this does not contain everything you should know before making a character with any type of dwarfism.

Consider supporting me on ko-fi if you find this to be helpful.

We've finally arrived at the bottom: deck 5, home of the hangar, the Kodiak shuttles, and now, Marine Land!

There are some oddities with this deck, because I was guessing at how fast the hull tapers towards the bottom at the back (I'm working off references that show front and rear elevations, but that only shows you the broadest points). I messed up something with my core chamber measurements and had to make the entire rear end (heh) slightly bigger here before posting, but the deck design errs on the side of narrower.

Hangar

When I wrote A Star To Steer Her By I ignored the silly shipbuilding because I was focused on a relationship (and because it wasn't supposed to be a door-stopper novel. Oops), but as I went on things like "this hangar should be regularly exposed to vacuum, how can you leave gym equipment in here" bothered me more and more. By the time of Sunset and Evening Star I couldn't let that state of affairs stand. So: this hangar is regularly exposed to vacuum. No fancy force fields that keep in the air but let out shuttles. You don't leave anything in here that isn't protected from vacuum and strapped down.

The hangar is the limiting factor in the size of the entire ship; it has to fit between the central elevator and the hangar door, and it must fit two Kodiaks. To reach this size I had to make the Kodiaks boxier; my drawings are taller for their length than the game models. They still seat twelve, and there's room for one to do a 180 on it's axis while the other is in its cradle. The hangar floor slopes down slightly towards the door in the middle, and the Kodiaks are 'shelved' to the sides.

Cortez runs the flight deck from the exact same place he is in game, but now he has bulkheads and windows between himself and the cold death of space. Airlocks on either side give access to the flight deck. There are also giant doors straight into the deck 4 cargo bays, but those won't open unless the hangar is pressurized.

Marine Land

Jack's Sulking Pit is now a gym, with weights, treadmill, stationary bike, heavy bags, and mats for sparing (and occasionally making pillow forts for evacuee toddlers). Mats are usually stored stowed against the wall, and other equipment can be moved as needed.

To port are the marine berths. The usual compliment of marines is a dozen, including their unit leader, but there are twelve bunks as well as the officer's tiny cabin (because there's no point wasting the space, and you never know). Other than their semi-privacy, the marine racks are no different from the enlisted racks on the two decks above.*

*"Except for the smell." — the rest of the crew, probably.

Berthing the marines on deck 5 is all about quick access to their arms, armor, and transport. Directly across from the marine berths is the entrance to the locker room and armory. After armoring up they grab their weapons and can get to the shuttle through an airlock entrance in the armory. On the way back, they reverse the process; stow weapons, strip off armor — often dropping damaged plating into the recycler chute as they go by — strip down, and shower.

The Alliance military is gender neutral, and nowhere is this as obvious as the marine lockers. The marine unit regularly strips down in front of each other; it's just part of getting ready for work. You can't be body-shy and be an Alliance Marine.

(I like to think the separate bathrooms on the crew deck were the Illusive Man's weird traditionalist decision. Sometimes the gendered-bathroom thing starts to grate on Bo Huan, the third-watch pilot, so they come down to deck five to use the locker room showers, leading Joker to quip "Ah, the third gender: marine!")

More engineering, and the answers to a few questions

Ladders from deck 4 lead down to another engineering area on the hangar level. It's not connected to the main areas of the deck by conventional corridors, but it is accessible through the warren of service passages that run throughout the ship. More of those access-ways lead aft of the eezo core chamber to the fusion plant (not shown). Because the core chamber narrows faster than the ship, it's easier to get around it here than it is on the engineering deck, where the core chamber is at it's widest but the hull has started to narrow. These access tunnels are rarely comfortable to get through, though they often open out into areas that are easier to work in, or into surprising pockets of unused space. They may require crawling or climbing, or clambering over obstacles.

All the maintenance accesses are kept pressurized and aired up, but the habitable area shown on these posts is wrapped in an inner hull, and the doors for maintenance access are all pressure doors: if a hit damages the tunnel you use to access the ship's innards, it won't kill all the crew in the room next to it.**

**It will obliterate the illicit still and the not-actually-a-secret-make-out-nest, as well as anyone stupid enough to be distilling and***/or fucking in those locations, which is why we don't lollygag between the hulls in combat, private!

***AND?****

****Some people are remarkably talented.

Normandy redesign posts

Intro

Loft

Command

Crew

Engineering

(This will be so much shorter than deck 3. Phew).

Decks 4 and 5 have a defined relationship: the hangar (Deck 5) is two decks tall, extending up to the top of engineering and bracketed by the Deck 4 cargo bays. You look out into it from the corridor that runs port-starboard. The hangar aligns with the hangar door, and deck five fits around the hangar.

Fitting the engineering deck into a 194 meter hull required bringing the both cargo bays in substantially (click the image to see the new footprint overlaid on the old one).

There was plenty of extra 'liveable' space to claim on this deck after getting rid of the huge double-staircases down to Jack's Sulking Pit. The elevator opens on both sides on this deck, giving direct access to either engineering or the cargo bays; between that, the central ladders, and extra ladders for engineering near the core, they were easy to toss.

Cargo

I ended up having the cargo bays overhang the hangar slightly, with the shuttles tucked up underneath on their cradles (placed by mechanical davits; no one is steering them into that tight spot). It's a tight squeeze, but keeps the cargo bays big enough to maneuver in. Huge doors open directly to the hangar, so crates can be loaded in via forklift mech.

Liara wasn't allowed to claim the cabin or XO's cabin unless she was willing to do the job of a first officer. Her researcher/shadow-broker activities required SCOPE, so she claimed empty space in the back of the starboard cargo bay. The crew still needed space and loaded in supplies, so Liara now has an impressive Shadow Broker Box Lair.

(If the crew is too noisy about retrieving a crate, she yeets it at them biotically. The whole shadow broker thing has not been great for Liara's mental health.)

The starboard cargo bay was designed for another alternate use: housing an extra unit of marines if needed. Liara's bunk is one of the fold-down racks intended for them. The one just outside the cargo bay, where Ness is berthed, is intended for the officer in charge of the unit.

The port cargo bay is used for cargo, and that cargo is mostly food. Perishables come in sealed cargo containers with self-contained refrigeration. Others are full of rice, flour, and other shelf-stable bulk goods. This is also not the only cargo; there's a lot of odd pockets in the hull that aren't too hard to access. The most out-of-the-way places are used for the emergency ration bar stocks, which last forever* and theoretically could sustain the entire crew for months.

*For the same reason "dogs' milk lasts longer than any other milk: Because no bugger'll drink it."

Racks & laundry

Each of the smaller corridors sleeps eight enlisted crew. At the end of one is a bathroom (sink and head only, no shower). At the end of the other is the laundry room for the ship, with a fold-up chair for catching up on your reading while you wait.

Engineering, shop, and lab

Engineering is unchanged**, but to either side are two new areas. The lab on the starboard side isn't a bio lab (though they could probably fit it out as one). It's the small-scale, low-tolerance equivalent to the machine shop on the port side. Delicate work is done in one, and larger scale repair and manufacture in the other. Normandy carries a supply of feedstock for the fabbers and CNC machines in the shop, and the fabber can also recycle a wide variety of materials. It's all easier to store than food, because most can be safely exposed to vacuum. The A-gangers (hull crew; general maintenance work) can do amazing things in the machine shop. (And Samantha Traynor is about to do amazing things in the lab in the next chapter).

**Because fuck if I know what goes in engineering! I put some Mysterious Machine Boxes in there! Salmon Rushdie invented M2C2Ds*** for this kind of situation, and if more people were familiar with Haroun and the Sea of Stories I'd have labeled them all with that.

***Machines Too Complicated Too Describe.****

****Now go read Haroun and the Sea of Stories, preferably aloud. That's your homework.

Normandy SR-2 redesign posts

Intro

Loft

Command

Crew

Engineering

The crew deck sits in the middle of the ship, where the hull is widest. This is where design for a larger crew really comes into play.

All of the decks are longer and skinnier than what we see in game. (This isn't a complaint; running through a long skinny map is tedious!). The command deck is a particular puzzle, because it doesn't need to be as long as it is, and we're supposed to believe it's much longer — extending all the way to the nose, which it can't do unless the deck curves down:

Aesthetically, I'd like the command deck to extend farther forward than I've drawn it. Practically, I can't think of a reason why it would.

CIC & cockpit

Spaceships fly by instrumentation; you can steer from anywhere, so there's no reason to hike an extra forty-four meters to the cockpit. There are also far more work stations shown in game than seem reasonable: 14 in the CIC and corridor to the cockpit. What are they all doing? When you take into account capable Virtual Intelligence systems (the Alliance didn't know about EDI, but would have designed for a VI) it's even sillier, so I drastically reduced the number of stations in the CIC, and removed them from the corridor entirely.

The corridor needs to stay to keep the feel of the space, so I used it for escape pod access. In the CIC itself, I kept the shape but oriented the workstations forward in case of inertial-buffer overloads*. There are two doors to the CIC, so the Officer of the Watch doesn't have a door directly at their back.

I also added a ready room, the office for the Officer of the Watch (accessible from the CIC), which also serves as a briefing room. In Sunset and Evening Star, this is where Shepard and First Office Nguyen have their morning meetings.

*Any system can overload. The trick with inertial overloads in fiction is convincing the reader that there's enough overload to feel without mashing everyone inside into paste, which is an astonishingly narrow window. It's an even narrower window if the human is sideways to the inertial force; we are very bad at surviving that.

The awkward middle

I stretched out the area forward of the elevator as much as I could. As well as the two new offices, there's a head for the CIC crew, another escape pod, and access to the secure areas aft. Moving that access here reduces traffic through the CIC.

(It's still a big waste of space).

Moving aft: from tactics to strategy

While the Captain commands the ship in the Combat Information Center, the Admiral leads the fleet from the War Room.

Turning starboard from the elevator, there's a security station (so Private Campbell can remain the most put-upon person in the Alliance Navy). Past that is the Admiral's office, which wasn't finished when the reapers attacked Earth.

The Alliance is actively trying to take a larger role in galactic affairs, so there are some concessions to other species. In addition to the conference room, there's a head with a stall big enough for a krogan, and a beverage station set up for both dextro and levo species. Please click to embiggen and admire my stupid little coffee mugs.

The war room is centered, in the most protected part of the ship. It keeps it's general layout, but with fewer stations (focused inward so staff can see the strat map holo display). Only one is usually manned. The Strategic Map is the grand-scale equivalent to the Tactical Modeler in the CIC. (The names are wishful thinking; in a real military both would be impenetrable acronyms).

The QEC is the same Mystery Communications Circle it is in the game, but only a quarter of the way around the War Room from the entry instead of on the opposite side.

Normandy SR2 redesign posts

Intro

Loft

Command

Crew

Engineering

The Alliance refitted Deck 1 for an Admiral, but they were working from the original Cerberus SR2 layout, which is decadent even for the shiniest of top brass. The Illusive Man is absolutely a believer in the Great Man theory of history, and the belief that a Capital-L Alpha-human Leader both requires and deserves luxury. From his point of view, this is the bare minimum. Why is there a fish tank on the stealth frigate? Because the Illusive Man decreed it thus. Then he went back to snorting space-blow off the ass of an asari hooker.

(During the refit, Anderson performed some interesting conversational and logistical gymnastics to keep the giant bed and the fish tank, without seeming like he was personally invested in a big comfy bed and a fish tank).

General note: I drew bulkheads one foot thick throughout. It matches the game's thick walls, makes the plans legible when zoomed out, and allows plenty of space for wiring, plumbing, life support, etc. The ladders and central elevator access every deck of the ship, and the elevator has doors both fore and aft.

Redesign/refinement

The loft is more refined than redesigned. The head is pushed out to use the empty space around elevator, and I added a tiny private cabin for two admiral's aides. (On Rhi Shepard's Normandy these were never completed, which she is deeply thankful for; fraternization is hard enough as it is).

The hull outline comes in and clips the ladders. This is a limitation of plan-view; that is actually the hull outline at the top of the space, where it's narrowest. The ladders aren't hanging outside the ship, they just have slightly less head-room (still not a problem, even for a turian).

Inside the cabin, the L desk is rotated 90 degrees, because no N7 in the world wants to sit with their back to the door. This also makes it more comfortable to have working meetings with subordinates. The extended wing of the folds and can be stowed out of the way under the rest. Pushing the head out into the corridor also means better visibility and more usable pace here.

To the left of the door, a small stowable table is a space for more casual conversations or private meals. It's also a place for more formal meals; with the L of the desk folded away, the small table can actually extend to seat eight, allowing the admiral to wine-and-dine visiting dignitaries or senior staff.

Rhi Shepard refers aloud to her model ship collection, but in her heart they're toy ships. The lack of fish is absolutely NOT because of her horrible track record with previous fish; it's because using the stealth systems means accumulating a lot of heat, and water is an excellent auxiliary place to store heat. It may not seem like much next to the ship's massive built-in heat-sinks, but every little bit helps, and with an estimated 4' height, that is a 485 gallon fish tank*.

*Thank you Aquarium Volume Calculator, which is also how I learned that aquarium stocking sizes are given in "inches of fish." This tank can hold about 598 inches of fish. A marvel.

The seating area is basically unchanged, except that admirals rate their own coffee maker. I also added a frosted translucent panel dividing the living/entertaining area from the sleeping area, because sometimes you want to entertain guests without feeling that all focus is on the sybaritic splendor of your bed. The panel also displays media (from either direction).

Normandy redesign posts

Intro

Loft

Command

Crew

Engineering

Yes, she mocks rape victims. She threatens litigation against the mildest criticism against her. She has created an LGB group to make it so very clear that trans people are not welcome where she gives money. She is the funding behind Scotland saying trans women aren't legally women. The list goes on.

But. I promise you, 99% of the people around you don't know she's done any of this because they aren't following her social media or stories about her. To them, she is just the author of those fun wizard books. You gotta talk about how she's SO WEIRD and ISN'T IT SAD.

You need to tell the normies how she uses the funds from all her payout agreements for ALL Harry Potter licensing, including the re-release of these movies.

"It's so fucking weird. It's so fucking off-putting. It's so fucking sad." Say that over and over. Don't try to tie it into larger ideas. This is not how people will listen. "Isn't it just fucking sad she has all this money that could go to literacy or scholarships, and she's using it to attack people who are just living their lives? What a weird fucking choice."

We need to out-Morbius Morbius in terms of this tanking, and the way you do that is talk to normies about how fucking WEIRD and RUDE she is. How ODD that the second Fantastic Beasts movie gave a "actually, fascism isn't too bad" vibe all the way through and especially at the end. How she has complained that the child actors from those movies particularly don't agree with her views on trans people and that she's publicly said that's why she wanted a new show.

What a WEIRD thing to say about child actors you worked with over a decade ago. It's so WEIRD she would care that those child actors have different opinions than her. It's really SAD she apparently has no hobbies except posting on social media about how she hates trans people. A beloved author who could be using her name to raise money for animal rescues and homeless people and all sorts of really great causes that could improve people's lives, and she's out here doing THIS? It just bums me out. I just can't support someone who uses their money to harass and harm other people like this. I don't know WHY she acts like this or WHY she's chosen to make it her whole personality, but it just makes it really hard for me to want to support any Harry Potter stuff, even when I loved it so much. Knowing any money made from that franchise goes into her pocket to just pour out onto orgs and laws that tell adults they can't just live their lives and be left alone is WEIRD.

And then say what you're gonna be doing instead. You know, I'm going to go and find some new fantasy books at the library. I'm going to boardgame day down at the game store. I'm going to a stitching group. I'm going to host a 1980s fantasy fest at my place; do you have any favorites you recommend? We should have a film fest where we watch all the movies that scared the shit out of us as kids.

Rolls out April 12, calling all Canadians to boycott!

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