One of the things I take pride in is my attention to detail in ship combat. I don’t go through the motions when it comes to combat and everything I describe “happened” when I was plotting out and tracking weapons fire in combat. There are no cute tricks or hand waves where one ship gains an advantage that actually couldn’t have been gained given the confines of the scriptures of my stellar combat.

Early on, when writing the first book, This Corner Of The Universe, I used an old 3-d art program. It helped to not only create the corvette, Anelace, but also to give me a visual representation of the battles fought in that novel.

I also used it a lot when devising the escort strategies found in No Way To Start A War. In fact, one of the first things I did was create the escort formations that I thought made sense when providing missile defense for the Brevic carriers. The crude representations below (same scene but viewed from different angles to show the 3-d aspects) helped me visualize what I wanted to write about:

Well, what’s old is new again. I found myself struggling this week to visualize the first combat scene in Last Measure Of Devotion, so I broke out the program once more. I reworked a line battle to help me understand how Admiral Wallace accomplished what he accomplishes in the first battle. I won’t post that screen shot but I was beset by the irony that one of the very first computer programs I used when writing my first novel was having a hand in the last book in Heskan’s series.