SSC M-882 Plasma Grenade

This is one of those projects that has spent a long, long time in an incomplete state. Coming home from Wonderfest last year inspired me to finish this and several other models. Of course, here it is, March, and I'm just finishing up the one. Par for the course I guess. I've got another one coming along that sort of goes together with this one, but I'm not sure if it will finish in time for the contest.

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Shooting Star

Update: The Shooting Star won a Bronze award at Wonderfest 2012!

The Shooting Star is a near-future, orbital, or supra-orbital fighter that I designed with a goal of realism. There are a lot of elements that make this a distinctive design. The first of which is that I've eschewed the primary tropes of Sci-fi space fighters.

There's no canopy, no streamlining, no wings, no "hyperdrive", and very limited armament. The only two concessions to SF convention I chose to make in the design are a small-scale fusion reactor for power, and the very notion of the reasonablility of a small-scale space-fighter in the first place. In fact, as I was designing this craft, the first problem I decided to solve was the logistics of how a fighter would be transported between engagements.

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Pure CSS Icons (aka: Stupid CSS Tricks)

This is something I was toying around with recently. It all started with some new button designs that leveraged a clever combination of pseudo-elements and the CSS border-triangle trick. I started thinking, "What else can we use this for?" The result is pretty cool, if not actually terribly useful (images are much more practical, and real HTML5 techniques are much less brittle on supported browsers), but I'd though I'd share this:

Below is an image of what these look like on supported browsers. Right now, I've only tested them on Firefox and Webkit.

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