In the summer of 1977, when I was 16, I inherited a large stack of 3" x 5" file cards from somewhere. Not being inclined to maintain a box of file cards on some information or other, I set out to find a different use for them. I have enjoyed building models since I was 8, frequently making things out of paper, and so I decided to use the cards to model something. What I ended up doing was building the inside of a starship, deck by deck. I don't know if I ever finished it or not.
At some point, I decided to build a model of the ship itself. I used the file cards for the hull and engine pylons. The engines were just tubes of paper. The whole thing was about 6 inches long. The result was the design you see above and I called it the Galaxy.
Later, around 1978 I think, on paper, I revisited the Galaxy and changed its design to what you see above. The hull became a tapered cylinder, the pylons became more slender and I added a third engine. The large cargo and hanger bay doors were still present on the port side of the ship. There were no interior plans made for this version of the ship.
Then in late 1978 or early 1979, I changed the design again. The cylinder became more tapered, the engine positions were altered, the pylons underwent a design change, the engines received an exhaust port and the port side doors now became a retractable door in the stern taper. The multi-leaved doors slide downward into the lower hull, exposing a landing deck on the stern. With the doors up and closed, the landing deck could be pressurized.
The final design change in this series came with changing the engine design only. They became narrow rectangles instead of cylinders.
I mostly forgot about the ship until 1986, when I decided to come back to it and do a complete set of blueprints for it. I quickly decided that a) I was not entirely happy with the design and b) it would be difficult to figure out the deck sizes inside the cylinder. So I redesigned the entire hull (note how the bow resembles the orginal Galaxy, created the deck plans, designed the shuttles and some other pieces of the ship's technology, created notes concerning certain features and drew up a crew roster. I also renamed the ship the Canadian Research Council Bluenose.
The fictional history of the Bluenose kind of goes like this. Late in the 21st century, a Canadian Research Council scientist, exploring certain mathematical avenues, stumbles upon some formulae which suggest parallel universes. With funding, he manages to develop a drive, which he called the translation drive, which could "translate" an object into a parallel universe. A probe was assembled with the drive and launched. When the T-drive was activated, the probe vanished from all sensors and contact was lost. The T-drive was set to activate for 30 seconds; precisely 30 seconds later, contact with the probe was re-established. Once contact was made, it was discovered that the probe was a considerable distance across the solar system. Further studies of the probe's data showed that it had indeed entered a parallel universe, one with a different spatial scale than ours. The scale being 1:1000. For every 1 meter travelled in the parallel space (P-space) you move 1,000 meters in normal space (N-space).
To make a long story short, Canada realizes that it now has the ability to move through the galaxy in relatively short periods of time. They round up the best people they can find from all over the globe, construct a scientific research vessel and launch it into the universe at large.
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