Drone. This is a very loaded word in our modern world, but the truth is that a drone is nothing more (or less) than a tool. What matters is HOW it's used, not what it is. All of NASA's Probes that visited Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto are drones. The rovers that confound us with amazing photos from Mars? Drones. Drones can go where we (at present) can't, and they are nothing more or less than what we send them to do. And they can do great things. If we let them. -From a promotional campaign, designed to maintain interest in Vanguard's main (and most successful) post-war exploratory drone. ------------ (Sometimes I despair at the irrational behavior of humanity) As a space and SciFi-nerd I have a desire to put humans at the center of everything. And ultimately, we are. If we are not writing our own story, then who is? But the difficult reality that NASA, ESA, and others consistently show is that humans are fragile, weak, and expensive to maintain. The bulk of the work in exploring space will, of necessity, fall upon drones. Which is far less exciting and appealing for us, but physics is as physics does, alas. ------------ This is a composited image. The model was my own creation, built in Bryce out of primitives, using mostly my own textures, but a few presets as well. The image of Earth comes from NASA's new EPIC (that's really its name) camera on their newest weather satellite. Stars came from Photoshop. Compositing also was done in Photoshop, as was a bit of "weathering" and such. The hardest trick was in finding how to merge these elements, while avoiding the hard edges that CGI and digital altering produces. I finally realized that several layers *below* the main one, with varying amounts of blur, will blend the edges, while preserving the details. Ugh, it's so hard faking what reality does for free...