When I was younger I wanted to make a film based on The Warriors, a short story by Larry Niven. I even wrote a letter to Niven and got his permission to do it. Making the film wasn't possible with the resources I had at the time, but if I had today's technology I think I could have pulled it off. Now that I'm having so much fun making model kits, I have the chance to visualize the story in another way.

In designing the ships, I tried to stick to the descriptions given in the book as closely as possible, while making them as interesting as I could. They not only had to look right, but had to feel right for their roles in the story. The alien ship is bristling with weapons, and looks like it would hurt just to touch it, while the human ship looks harmless and peaceful. Why did I put the Angel's hydrogen ramscoop in the back, instead of the front where you would expect it? Simply because the story mentioned a finned craft at the nose of the ship, right where a ramscoop would traditionally be. The text never described the scoop itself, just that it had one, so there's a chance for some unusual engineering. The dish could project a vast electromagnetic field to guide stray atoms into the horn-like structures at the hub of the dish, while protecting the body of the ship at the axis. The concept of ramscoops were common in science fiction until scientists supposed that such a thing would introduce drag, so might not be worth the effort, depending on the situation, so it's one of those retro sci-fi tropes that turned out to be impractical. But it's there in the story, and it needed to be represented in the model. The Kzinti ship doesn't have engines in the traditional sense, which was an important point brought up in the story. It's method of propulsion is a 'gravity planer', and who knows what that could possibly look like? So an interesting array of fins and spires ought to do. The Angel's engine is a colossal laser, and when presented with the alien threat, I think you can see where this story is going.

I'm offering STLs of these on CGTrader, and my Patreon https://patreon.com/modelprint . Both models are bundled together in this kit. I test printed them extensively to ensure that everything fits together properly. Assembly instructions are included, and also the parts as pre-supported plates ready to be sliced to help speed things along. These are the plates from my last successful print, and may or may not work for your printer, so if you have any issues, the parts are available separately so you can set them up the old fashioned way. I investigated providing downloadable decals, but actually making them is a pretty gnarly proposition for the end user, and most people don't even have the equipment to do it right. So I'm working with Jim Botaitis of JBOT Decals https://www.jbot.ca/ to develop printed decal sheets that will be available through his site for purchase separately in the near future.