My back has me off work for a few days, so rather than lying down, I'm sitting in front of the computer with a heating pad and some muscle relaxers. Whatever - at least I can go lie down while things are rendering. This image, at 1200X1920, will grace my vertically-configured monitor when I get my ass back to work. This picture (except for the map mat images) is all Bryce and rendered in Bryce (ok, not the signature). Mars is the result of some PSP work (still more comfortable with it than with CS3). The basic terraformed Mars map comes from a Celestia add-on made by Frank Gregorio. I took one of his maps, made another layer for the ocean and seas and added a layer for some (very) sparse city lights and another for clouds - courtesy NASA before I played with it. I saved the layers out one by one (.png for the ones with transparencies) then added them to a series of concentric spheres that became Mars. The two fuzzy blue spheres above those made the atmospheric glow. The cool thing about using different layers for land, water and clouds is that you can give them different bump levels and specularities, which adds to the 3-d effect. Phobos is two concentric Phobos models from Celestia: one with terrain, another with an ambient tech material for the lights of civilization. The starscape is also done with customs mats. The main field is a plane set back and perpendicular to the camera. I made some really tiny stars out of a heavily modified cloud material, then added a nebula transparency to cut out a more "random" pattern. I did a similar thing with an ellipse to get the tiny "milky way" effect that you can probably only see at full size. The freighter is a modified version of a Bryce model that I made earlier in the year. Thanks for viewing a comments! --- Phobos Control kept us waiting for three days. Seems a war broke out and they needed to get a fleet out to fight the Belters. I'm not sure if that's going to be good or bad for trade. Either way, I think I might see if I can get a black market gatling gauss gun or two installed. At least triple g fire might discourage the casual commerce raider. For those three days where we weren't making any money, we orbited Mars every seven and a half hours. Now the library says there's over sixty million people down there. That's five times as many as the Moon, but only a hundredth the population of Earth. So the city lights looks sparser than you'd think over the night side. A lot fewer Marvins than Earthers, but they're all marching in lock step now. I think the Belters might have stirred up a wasp nest. The Marvins are used to war and I'm pretty sure they're not going to quit until they kick some Roider ass. There's bound to be some profit in it. Just gotta figure out the best angle. Lyndia Beulke, Captain LSS Barnaby, 4 March 2519