Survey Ship

 Here is a medium-range inter-stellar survey ship. It is designed to conduct thorough surveys of planets and stellar systems: for this purpose, it has wings and poly-environment engines (let's assume rocket/ scramjet and fusion, but I will dwell more on it in another post).

 It is lightly armed, with a small 2 meter mirror laser, located in the hull front, under the hemispherical fairing. The dorsal fin is mostly here for radiating the heat of the lasers -like the wings do for the engines when navigating through the void.

  Since it has to be able to land planets will little or no infrastructures, this ship does without a classical landing gear. It simply sits on its tails, like the rockets of olde times. A long-legged stable landing gear and slightly swiveling engines make for safe landings. The swiveling of the propulsion allows for the thrust axis of each engine to pass through the center of gravity of the ship, so that it may accelerate normally even with one engine offline -important when you operate far from your bases.

  The cockpit features unrivaled visibility forward and down (just right for the ship's mission). Under the cockpit is the chin-mounted lidar and sensor pack -also with a particle beam gun to scan below the surface. To the right of the cockpit is the large cover of the laser mirror, that also doubles as a higher-definition lidar.

Finally, here is the ship standing on the solidified surface of a volcanic planet.

The ship was made with a space-sim game in mind and is about 6400 triangles heavy, with a single 1024x texture. Despite some mistakes in the modeling and the texture allocation, it is quite close to what I had in mind. I always enjoy some Chris Foss in my life, and I am a bit fed up about seeing square ships everywhere.