And the ALIENS Technical Manual described a variant of the seen-on-screen version of the M41A, called the M41AE2, with a longer barrel and no grenade launcher (bipod instead)... I figured since I had the heavy lifting done with the original design, I would go ahead and draw up the 'E2 as well (variety is the spice of life!) and add it.

ALIENS fans who are twitching at the ammo counters being the wrong color, take note: since Vrusk don't see red, in my universe these have green ammo displays. ;) [I even considered that you could loosen the screws on the panel and underneath there'd be a switch for changing the display color, but default is green for UPF Marine use]

Not all of my imports were going to be strictly sci-fi... A real-world gun I've always found fascinating (and apparently, I've learned, a BUNCH of other people have as well) is the near-mythical Pancor Jackhammer. It's a bullpup style, fully-automatic, drum-fed assault shotgun, and the drum can be converted into a reusable landmine.

Only three were ever made and the 2nd and 3rd were destroyed, leaving only the prototype model in existence (it apparently sold at auction in 2019, not sure what it went for).

Anyway, this thing certainly LOOKS sci-fi enough, and I figured why not??? Illustration started, but not ever finished...

To continue on with my borrowed stuff... This is one is a bit weird (I guess even for me...?), and I'll have to spiral into it:

When the book covers robot body types, it mentions anthropomorphic as 'bodies that look like one of the four major species' [well, it says 'races' in the original text, but I subbed in 'species' everywhere in my text because it sounds more science-y and less 'jackass in a white sheet']... In my universe, humans are really the only species who build robots that like look them. Yazirians mostly DON'T build robots at all (but when they do, they're industrial-type 'bots made for specific tasks like you might see in a factory), Vrusk build robots that most definitely have insectoid characteristics, but don't necessarily look like Vrusk themselves, and Dralasites build some weird stuff... But!

When you see Dralasites drawn, they're mostly drawn with three legs and I ran with that, and postulated that when they build machines that WALK, those machines would ALSO be three-legged.

Hmmm...three-legged walking machines...

So a bit of trivia in the BD universe (that the players may not have ever had any reason at all to have ever discovered/been aware of and certainly that no one living there is) was that The Great Meeting was actually NOT the first time that Dralasites and Humans encountered one another...

Several hundred years before, Dralasites had experienced a period of intense technological development AND turmoil on their homeworld during a time when they weren't as humorous and philosophical as the ones we know today. At the close of that time of strife, a ship full of exiled, warlike outcasts fled the planet, having failed to dominate their world (shades of Khan, no...?). This is well before the miracle of the Void had been discovered, so they relied on cryo beds and planned on a looooooong journey to get anywhere (and really weren't sure WHERE they were headed, but they weren't welcome at home anymore, so...).

Things went awry when a system failure caused their engines to far exceed normal rated output, resulting in the deaths of the 'awake' crew and pushing the ship—accidentally and uncontrollably—into Void space for an unprecedented First Jump that the 'sleeping' crew weren't even aware of. With ship's systems in disarray and no one at the wheel, the ship tumbled through space before the engines burnt out, allowing the ship to drop back into normal space. It hurled along still at fairly enormous velocity until, over years, it slowed enough from extremely lucky passes by large bodies of gravity and collisions with stellar objects that, when it finally impacted on the fourth planet of an unknown system, a small number of the crew and some of their equipment actually survived the crash!

All was NOT well, however, as this world they had inexplicably ended up on (no one awake to explain, no computer working to provide any detail for the situation) wasn't habitable and the clock was ticking. There was one hope: with what could be salvaged from the wreckage, they could rig a launcher that could propel some of their crew and machines to the THIRD planet, which looked like it could sustain life.

The first test was a success... The trip there was grueling for the single Dralasite chosen, atmospheric entry was unbearable and suffocating, and when it finally unsealed the travel tube—COOL AIR—it found disgusting, unsettling THINGS crawling around the crash site. Awkward, primitive, sticklike limbs...unchanging. HIDEOUS! It radioed back to the survivors and communicated what it had seen so far of this INHABITED world; the orders that came back were unambiguous: Get your machine up and start wiping them out. We're already launching the next tube.

Ultimately the crash survivors are able to launch only a half-dozen or so cylinders before the launcher itself fails and annihilates the crash site, the wreckage, and the remaining survivors completely. Already weakened by radiation, hunger, stress, and shock from the journey and subsequent mishap, the ones who made it to the third planet of the system succumb to an unknown illness and perish after wreaking havoc on the utterly unprepared Humans they had unwittingly invaded.

The government of the nation state which bore the brunt of the invasion decides that Humanity is not ready to face the implications of what has happened. The incident becomes the greatest cover-up of Human history; vocal witnesses are silenced, survivors die off, evidence is destroyed. After decades of mostly fruitless study of the machines left when the invaders die, they're dumped into the ocean, and the whole thing becomes a legend, fiction!

Quick recap for anyone trying to keep score, the ingredient list so far for my Beta Dusk casserole:

Space: 1999

Star Wars

Star Trek (The Original Series)

Thunderbirds

ALIEN/ALIENS

Silent Running

a bit of obscure real-life weaponry

and

War of the Worlds + The Tripods (with a sprinkling of "Space Seed" from ST:TOS)

Stay tuned, it's going to...get weirder? Stay as weird? I dunno, I can't gauge this stuff! LOL But there's more!

I had mentioned not having developed Star Law very far...I DID have a direction I in which I was headed.

I'm not sure why, but it clicked into place for me that a Star Law agent's personal craft should be the Thunder Fighter from the Buck Rogers TV series... It's a fine design and comes in two models: a two-seater (the one you see most often on the show) and a four-seater version, which I felt gave it some flexibility for use as a 'squad car' kind of vehicle. I jumped from there to deciding that the 'desk job' personnel in Star Law would wear a uniform based on the white Earth Defense Directorate one Buck wears in most of season 1. Agents though...

In my setting, a Star Law Ranger is the absolute highest form of law enforcement there is on the Frontier. There are very few people in the UPF with the power to reign these guys in, UPF military assets are at their disposal, they have TREMENDOUS authority and act autonomously.

They are the law.

So, hell yes, a Star Law Ranger is going to look like Judge Dredd. [Raise your hand if you had a Buck Rogers/Judge Dredd mashup on your bingo card (everyone put your hands down)] ;)

Dredd is so grim and brutal; Buck Rogers was so campy and fun...there's something delightful to me in making a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup out of those two insanely different things, but—at least in my head—it works fantastically and fits seamlessly against the SF backdrop. <shrugging> I am, quite possibly, completely bonkers...?

Also getting pulled in from the 25th Century was the Twiki robot design, which you would see in my world as a service robot in shops, hotels, casinos, etc...

The show was ridiculous (I still loved it), but had a ton of great designs, costumes, etc., so I'm sure more was going to end up getting pulled in [in fact, I already had an adventure idea based on a BR episode that mashes BR, ST:TNG/DS9 (Ferengi!), Dracula/Nosferatu, and Palladium Books' Rifts (Vampire-overrun Mexico!)].

In my intro doc's section on the UPF Military, I had a note to the players that basically said "this isn't that" as means to (again) differentiate SF for folks who were used to Trek… At least in my setting, the UPF military exists to prevent the Frontier from being murdered by worms (and they accomplish this by being ready to break things and kill people, with a dash of patrolling for pirates to stay practiced).

But I decided that I DID want to have an exploratory, science-focused organization operating in the Frontier, and that I would draw from ST to create it. I'm in that minority that likes The Motion Picture (yes, it's long and slow, but not everything needs to be all car chases and explosions) and that era of Starfleet is one I constantly wish that we would have had more of…

So! ASTRA (Academy of Scientific and Technological Research and Advancement) is my science outfit. It's basically a hands-on school, where the 'lower ranking' members are students, the 'officers' are instructors, and 'command' are the administrators. The uniforms are based on TMP-era Starfleet (I can't get enough of that grey, beige, and brown! LOL) and the ranks are academic instead of based on naval/military (think 'Assistant Researcher' instead of 'Ensign,' 'Professor' instead of 'Captain,' and 'Provost' instead of 'Admiral'). Their ships/crews would be armed, but lightly and strictly for self-defense.

It wouldn't be a huge organization, so not a giant fleet of ships (aren't all schools perpetually under-funded…?), but their ships would be named after Federation vessels… Enterprise and Reliant at least ;)

I further pondered what Yazirian-designed stuff would look like after that last post and realized I had already hit on it in my intro doc... On the Yazirian profile, I made an image with some trees and two views of the 'Ultra Probe' from Space: 1999 (which shares a lot of design cues with the Eagle)...

The image was meant to evoke a sentiment of "Once we could only glide in the distances between tall trees; now we grow tall trees of titanium and ceramic from seeds of math and fire, and soar in the spans between stars..."  But there it is: THAT kind of hardware is exactly what my Yazirians build, so the Eagle in the BD universe is a Yazirian design. It's basically just the parts it needs to function held together with scaffolding, and that's the philosophy I had in mind—all function, no thought given to form.

So they built the "Elastic Assignment [direct translation, a more Human way of saying it would be 'multi-purpose'] Low Gravity (EALG) Transport—Model 1999," and Human crews starting calling them 'Eagle' instead, then the nickname stuck. ;)

I started doing illustrations of my Buck Rogers-style Star Law uniforms... These are the duty uniforms worn by non-Ranger personnel (and I guess by Rangers working in the office LOL).

Dralasite:

Human:

Vrusk:

Yazirian:

And the dress uniforms (again, borrowed from Buck Rogers)! All Star Law personnel can wear the dress uniform, but only Rangers wear the sash (and the color is based on the color of the species' shed blood, so H & Y are red, V is blue, and D is purple). The stripes on the sleeves (or breast for Dralasites) are awarded for every five years service.

Dralasite:

Human:

Vrusk:

Yazirian:

Here's the Judge Dredd-inspired Ranger uniform! These are skeinsuits/body armor as well as spacesuits, so Rangers can operate in any environment. The belt houses whichever screen the Ranger chooses based on mission requirements (or personal preference). The helmet provides 'Terminator vision' data to the wearer via tiny projectors located where the visor trim X's out over the nose, and eye-tracking sensors mounted right next to the projectors automatically detect what the Ranger is focusing on and can provide pertinent data such as range-to-target, facial recognition/identification for criminal records, etc...

Human:

Human (with mask worn for environmental protection):

Vrusk:

Vrusk (with Mask, though this one is just for sealing the suit and voice amplification since breathing functions are all under the abdomen):

The only emblem I've seen for Star Law was in a Dragon article, and looked like the Starfleet arrowhead from Star Trek with a star slapped over it... Since I've already got plans for THAT logo in my universe, I needed a new one.

Blake's 7, in case you've never seen it, is kind of an anti-Star Trek; that space is also governed by a Federation, but it's a totalitarian, 1984-esque outfit. Since my Rangers look like Dredd, the dystopian angle pairs nicely, so MY Star Law insignia is the Blake's 7 Federation logo (with a star slapped over it). LOL  And in keeping with my '80s in Space' theme, I went colorful with it (to include an in-universe meaning behind the colors/symbols).

Here's the Ranger badge:

Dredd-sized and shaped, with the same emblem (Star Law insignia with laurels) that all Star Law personnel wear with 'Ranger' (in my version of PanGal) added at the bottom and 'Star Law' above.

When I was a kid there was this candy company that sold sugar + food coloring in powder form in containers shaped like space ships (I've since done some digging and discovered that the company was the Ce De Candy Co., and the product line was called 'CD Space Fleet 2000').  The ships had studs and sockets (sockets were the same size as the opening to the container, making that another socket) that allowed you to plug them into each other... At one point I had a mass of these things, but only a few left now. Anyway, there's a nostalgic place for them in me, so there's a place in the BD universe for them as well. LOL

So here are the real things:

And the 'import' version of the Arcturan Freighter:

And the Cygnus Probe/Ion Missile:

Both still need engines attached (struts off of the engineering sections, engines on the struts). If I ever had a reason to use the designs for anything, I'd whip up full deck plans and add a lot more surface detail to the exterior illustrations.

Candy-related toys aren't the only ones safe from absorption, of course. My older brother had the StarBird Avenger (I got the smaller, evil StarBird Intruder) and for a Milton Bradley toy, that's actually a good-looking ship, one that wouldn't look out-of-place at all sitting next to a Y-Wing in a hangar on Yavin IV.

So, yeah, why not? And doing all the details on the illustration, it really does have a Star Wars look, at least in surface texture. Just needs some dirt, dings, scratches, and maybe a few more small missing panels with exposed parts and plumbing beneath and it could disappear among Rebel fighters. I went ahead and turned the button on the neck into an Astromech slot while I was at it (which also helps give the sense of scale I like it at: it's pretty much the same length as a Y-Wing, with the neck the same width as a Y-Wing's center section, but a little beefier looking. It kinda gives off XB-70-ish vibes with a dash of SR-71, to me. Thumbs up to the original designer, it's a beautiful piece of work. And I think the Avenger version was really an upgrade from the original StarBird, it's got that early 80s TransAm graphic style. :)

So in my setting this would be a heavy fighter/bomber, crew of two (pilot & gunner) with an astromech, and the Avenger version would be an upgraded version of the original base StarBird, upgraded software & avionics, harder hitting weapons, etc.

The SB-405 'Avenger' from StarBird Aerospace Defense:

If some folks who are familiar with this one see this and have a twitching eye because the IRL 'A34-SB' markings are 'A34-SP' in my illustration, please take note: in my made-up PanGal alphabet which I tend to use in graphics I do related to the setting, Bs look like Ps (and Ps look like a 'P' with a dot nestled under the hump).

Here's some of that ASTRA stuff!

First the ranks and departments. These are pretty much lifted directly from ST:TMP (I added three divisions that aren't in the movie and renamed them all to make them more academic, and as above, the 'ranks' are all academic instead of naval). The appearance of the ranks are all either pulled straight from the movie or at least heavily inspired by it.

I've only done Human uniforms so far (man, this is some work since there are five variants! LOL), but here are the Formal, Class A, Class B (long- and short-sleeve), and Class C uniforms for Human (M & F). Again, these are mostly pulled straight from the movie. I opted to not do a V-collar Class A that was in the film, and did the most modification to the Class C, making it more utilitarian/flightsuit-y, even commiting a Trek cardinal sin—a visible zipper! ;)

In order of most dressy to most casual...

Formal:

Class A:

Class B (Long-sleeve):

Class B (Short-sleeve):

Class C:

And I even started work on turning the TMP Enterprise into a SF ship... :) I wanted to pull as much of the structure/detail of the original in as I could, but obviously the saucer doesn't work so I turned it into a sphere. And of course it gets extra nacelles since SF ships rarely have just two engines. It's...weird...but I like it.

ASTRA Enterprise:

I'm keen to work up a SF-style Reliant as well... Enterprise would be the 'general studies' ship, Reliant would be primarily focused on Life Sciences, and Excelsior would be a Technology testbed...

And I'm thinking Enterprise would have a Yazirian captain named 'Kirok' and a Vrusk science officer called 'ZZz'p'k' ;)

Follow-up to my StarBird Avenger post... Here's the Intruder!

This one would be just a straight-up fighter and again I added an astromech slot, so this one is pilot + astromech.

I couldn't resist giving the original Trek uniforms some love as well, so they're part of the ASTRA wardrobe in the form of workout gear...LOL

Shirts in department colors with black pants (administrators, ship captains, and instructors each get a leg stripe in their normal uniform color), no rank worn.

These took a while to finish... I mentioned the TR-5 Harpy and SR-5 Siren from Crusher Joe in my post about borrowing from anime. Here they are, presented in UPF Planetary Forces (Orbital) colors!

Most of my imports I bring in as outdated equipment, but these are just too cool and fit so well that I'm using them as current-gen top-of-the-line equipment. The SR-5 is a capable fighter; the TR-5 is a BEAST. Fast, manueverable, powerfully armed... You do NOT want to go up against these things. And since the two models share so many components, they're economical to operate and maintain.

Since they belong to Orbital, they're used almost exclusively in space, but are atmosphere-capable as well (hence the obvious aero flight surfaces).

I drew up the TR-5 first (it's the more popular of the two, plenty of reference images available, tons of model kits made, etc, and again, BattleTech folks would know it as the original incarnation of the 'SL-25 Samurai' fighter in that universe) and figured the SR-5 would be an easy follow-up...at first glance they're basically the same. Subsequent long looks revealed a host of little differences that took me ages to work out LOL. And I know it isn't just me: who else sees a little bit of inspiration for Spike's Swordfish from Cowboy Bebop in the SR? Not calling it a ripoff by any stretch, but there's some shared DNA present, I feel. And that's another one I can see myself importing... ;)

I'm using the SR as a standard fighter, and the TR in an interceptor role—it's got the smash to get out and greet hostiles while they're still inbound AND bring a gift basket of black eyes when it gets there. A squadron of Harpies will make you wish you had stayed home instead, but if you show up to make trouble, save time and arrive wearing a body bag instead of a spacesuit. :)