The protagonists ship

 This first moodboard was done by a friend who had an idea for a space ship

This was his sketch.

I then made a 3d model of it, to refine the idea.

Some silhouette sketches.

This is a second moodboard i put together to refine the idea.

                         

A few idea's trying to incorporate the rotating thrusters. Tried to do a front on view of the bottem right ship but i was unable to see the design weel enough. I quite enjoyed the ship i had made before in maya so went back and refined that.

This is a cruiser sized ship, normally designed to be piloted by a a crew of at least 5 people. This one however has been rigged and programmed to be piloted by just 1-2, albeit stress fully. It is a fairly fast and maneuverable ship even with it's size as it has 3 different tier's of thrusters. A large set of hyper drive engines capable at full power of propelling it between galaxy's, these are however very costly and deplete power cells very quickly. The ship also has after burners fitted for withing system travel, these are the primary thrusters used. Lastly on the tips of the wings are jets primarily used for advance maneuvers while in combat.

Ok well...

further thinking, it's a research ship so not much in the way of guns.

Played with lighting and camera settings, should have rendered it out at a higher resolution.

flipped, hue changed to fit in the scene.

It's not meant to be earth, but a lush planet like it...was ...

Adjusted the lighting, more cloud shadow detail.

Final version, firing the probe down to the planet, all very calm.

Higher contrast.

Playing with the mood and feel of the style.

Like how this turned out, using 3D into a a painting, really sped up the process, especially for hard edge objects. Set up cameras and some lights in maya then did the rest once it was exported into photoshop.