Weston Spacecraft From Out Of The Silent Planet.

Here are some more images of my scratch built 1/72 scale Weston Spacecraft from the C.S. Lewis novel "Out of the Silent Planet". Based off the 1965 edition book cover by Bernard Symancyk. with some slight alterations of my own.

From Wikipedia"

Out of the Silent Planet is the first novel of a science fiction trilogy written by C. S. Lewis, sometimes referred to as the Space Trilogy, Ransom Trilogy or Cosmic Trilogy. The other volumes are Perelandra (also published as Voyage to Venus) and That Hideous Strength, and a fragment of a sequel was published posthumously as The Dark Tower. The trilogy was inspired and influenced by David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus (1920).

According to biographer A. N. Wilson, Lewis wrote the novel after a conversation with J.R.R. Tolkien in which both men lamented the state of contemporary fiction. They agreed that Lewis would write a space-travel story, and Tolkien would write a time-travel one. Tolkien's story only exists as a fragment, published in The Lost Road and other writings (1987) edited by his son Christopher.

The Space Trilogy, Cosmic Trilogy or Ransom Trilogy is a trilogy of science fiction novels by C. S. Lewis, famous for his later series The Chronicles of Narnia. A philologist named Elwin Ransom is the hero of the first two novels and an important character in the third.

The books in the trilogy are:

• Out of the Silent Planet (1938), set mostly on Mars. In this book Elwin Ransom voyages to Mars and discovers that Earth is exiled from the rest of the solar system due to its fallen nature and is known as "the silent planet".
• Perelandra (1943), set mostly on Venus. Also known as Voyage to Venus. Here Dr Ransom journeys to an unspoiled Venus in which the first humanoids have just emerged.
• That Hideous Strength (1945), set on Earth. A scientific think tank called the N.I.C.E. is secretly in touch with demonic entities who plan to ravage and lay waste to planet Earth.

In 1946, the publishing house Avon (now an imprint of HarperCollins) published a version of That Hideous Strength specially abridged by C.S. Lewis entitled The Tortured Planet.

Moon Train - From The Earth To The Moon

Here are some more images of my scratch built model of the Moon Train from the Jules Verne novel "From the Earth to the Moon". Based off of the 1865 etching.

From Wikipedia"

From the Earth to the Moon (French: De la Terre à la Lune, 1865) is a humorous science fantasy novel by Jules Verne and is one of the earliest entries in that genre. It tells the story of the president of a post-American Civil War gun club in Baltimore, his rival, a Philadelphia maker of armor, and a Frenchman, who build an enormous sky-facing Columbiad space gun and launch themselves in a projectile/spaceship from it to a Moon landing.

The story is also notable in that Verne attempted to do some rough calculations as to the requirements for the cannon and, considering the comparative lack of any data on the subject at the time, some of his figures are surprisingly close to reality. However, his scenario turned out to be impractical for safe manned space travel since a much longer muzzle would have been required to reach escape velocity while limiting acceleration to survivable limits for the passengers.

Influence on popular culture

The novel was adapted as the opera Le voyage dans la lune in 1875, with music by Jacques Offenbach.

In H. G. Wells' 1901 The First Men in the Moon (also relating to the first voyagers to the Moon) the protagonist, Mr. Bedford, mentions Verne's novel to his companion, Professor Cavor, who replies (in a possible dig at Verne) that he does not know what Bedford is referring to. Verne returned the dig later when he pointed out he used guncotton to send his men to the moon, and one could see it any day. "Can Mr. Wells show me some "cavourite"?", he asked archly.

The novel (along with Wells' The First Men in the Moon) inspired the first science fiction film, A Trip to the Moon, made in 1902 by Georges Méliès. In 1958, another film adaptation of this story was released, titled From the Earth to the Moon. It was one of the last films made under the RKO Pictures banner. The story also became the basis for the very loose adaptation Jules Verne's Rocket to the Moon (1967), a caper-style British comedy starring Burl Ives and Terry-Thomas. The 1961 Czechoslovak film The Fabulous Baron Munchausen combines characters and plot elements from the Verne novel with those of the stories of Baron Münchhausen and Cyrano de Bergerac.

The novel and its sequel were the inspiration for the computer game Voyage: Inspired by Jules Verne.

In 1889 Verne wrote a second sequel to the novel, The Purchase of the North Pole, which has the gun club members (led by J. T. Maston) plan to use the "Columbiad" to alter the tilt of the earth to enable the mineral wealth of the Arctic region to be put within reach of exploitation.

Among its other homages to classic science fiction, an issue of Planetary involved the Planetary group finding that the Gun Club had been successful in launching the projectile, but that a miscalculation led to a slowly decaying orbit over the decades with the astronauts long dead from lack of air and food.

Barbicane appears in Kevin J. Anderson's novel Captain Nemo: The Fantastic History of a Dark Genius as an Ottoman official whose chief rival, Robur, designs a number of innovative weapons to counteract him, including an attempt to launch a three-man mission to the Moon.

During their return journey from the moon, the crew of Apollo 11 made reference to Jules Verne's book during a TV broadcast on July 23. The mission's commander, astronaut Neil Armstrong, said, "A hundred years ago, Jules Verne wrote a book about a voyage to the Moon. His spaceship, Columbia [sic], took off from Florida and landed in the Pacific Ocean after completing a trip to the Moon. It seems appropriate to us to share with you some of the reflections of the crew as the modern-day Columbia completes its rendezvous with the planet Earth and the same Pacific Ocean tomorrow."

In Back to the Future Part III, Clara Clayton asks Emmett Brown if he believes mankind will ever "travel to the moon the way we travel across the country on trains." Being from the future Doc already knows that doesn't happen for another 84 years, but he affirms they will while quoting a passage from From the Earth to the Moon. Clara calls him out on this, and it's from this encounter that the pair discovers their mutual love of Jules Verne novels.

The Nautilus

Here are some images of the Greg deSantis design Pegasus models 1/144 scale  "The Nautilus' from Jules Verne's "20'000 leagues under the sea".

From The instructions:
Bringing together some of the most talented artist's and designers in the industry, this series offers some the coolest designs ever available in a modeling kit!
The Featured artist is Greg deSantis. Greg is a conceptual designer who's work spans the industrial design, entertainment, corporate and video game industries.
His work has won numerous national and international awards and is included in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution.
Greg is a fan of all things science-fact and science-fiction, especially futuristic and retro vehicles.
His Jules Verne inspired Nautilus combines elements of Civil War era submarines, like the Hunely, with designs reminiscent of Victorian cast-iron architecture.

From Wikipedia"
The Nautilus is the fictional submarine captained by Nemo featured in Jules Verne's novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) and The Mysterious Island (1874). Verne named the Nautilus after Robert Fulton's real-life submarine Nautilus (1800)^{[citation needed]}. Three years before writing his novel, Jules Verne also studied a model of the newly developed French Navy submarine Plongeur at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, which inspired him for his definition of the Nautilus.
The Nautilus is described by Verne as "a masterpiece containing masterpieces." It is designed and commanded by Captain Nemo. Electricity provided by sodium/mercury batteries (with the sodium provided by extraction from seawater) is the craft's primary power source for propulsion and other services.
The Nautilus is double-hulled, and is further separated into water-tight compartments. Its top speed is 50 knots. Its displacement is 1,356.48 French freight tons emerged (1,507 submerged). In Captain Nemo's own words:

“

Here, M. Aronnax, are the several dimensions of the boat you are in. It is an elongated cylinder with conical ends. It is very like a cigar in shape, a shape already adopted in London in several constructions of the same sort. The length of this cylinder, from stem to stern, is exactly 70 m, and its maximum breadth is eight metres. It is not built on a ratio of ten to one like your long-voyage steamers, but its lines are sufficiently long, and its curves prolonged enough, to allow the water to slide off easily, and oppose no obstacle to its passage. These two dimensions enable you to obtain by a simple calculation the surface and cubic contents of the Nautilus. Its area measures 1011.45 square metres; and its contents 1,500.2 cubic metres; that is to say, when completely immersed it displaces 1500.2 cubic metres of water, or 1500.2 metric tons.

”

The Nautilus uses floodable tanks in order to adjust buoyancy and so control its depth. The pumps that evacuate these tanks of water are so powerful that they produce large jets of water when the vessel emerges rapidly from the surface of the water. This leads many early observers of the Nautilus to believe that the vessel is some species of whale, or perhaps a sea monster not yet known to science. To submerge deeply in a short time, Nautilus uses a technique called "hydroplaning", in which the vessel dives down at a steep angle.
The Nautilus supports a crew that gathers and farms food from the sea. The Nautilus includes a galley for preparing these foods, which includes a machine that makes drinking water from seawater through distillation. The Nautilus isn't able to refresh its air supply, so Captain Nemo designed to do it by surfacing and exchanging stale air for fresh, much like a whale. The Nautilus is capable of extended voyages without refuelling or otherwise restocking supplies. Its maximum dive time is around five days.
Much of the ship is decorated to standards of luxury that are unequalled in a seagoing vessel of the time. These include a library with boxed collections of valuable oceanic specimens that are unknown to science at the time, expensive paintings, and several collections of jewels. The Nautilus also features a lavish dining room and even an organ that Captain Nemo uses to entertain himself in the evening. By comparison, Nemo's personal quarters are very sparsely furnished, but do feature duplicates of the bridge instruments, so that the captain can keep track of the vessel without being present on the bridge. These amenities however, are only available to Nemo, Professor Aronnax and his companions.
From her attacks on ships, using a ramming prow to puncture target vessels below the waterline, the world thinks it a sea monster, but later identifies it as an underwater vessel capable of great destructive power, after the Abraham Lincoln is attacked and Ned Land strikes the metallic surface of the Nautilus with his harpoon.
Its parts are built to order in France, the United Kingdom, Prussia, Sweden, the United States and elsewhere. Then they are assembled by Nemo's men on a desert island. The Nautilus most likely returned to this island and later helped castaways in the novel The Mysterious Island. After Nemo dies on board, the volcanic island erupts, entombing the Captain and the Nautilus for eternity.

Discovery Dragonfly Composite.

Here is another composite image of my scratch built model of the Discovery Dragonfly, based off of the novel 2001 A Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke.

Images of the model can be seen here, here, and here.

Out Of The Silent Planet Composite

Here is my composite image of my 1/72 scale scratch build Weston Spacecraft from C.S. Lewis's novel "Out Of The Silent Planet"leaving the Earth's influence.

Images of the model can be seen here.

The Songs Of A Distant Earth

Here are some images plus a composite of my scratch built model of the Colony Ship Magellan based off of Philippe Bouchet AKA "Manchu" illustration art for Arthur C Clarke's "The Songs Of A Distant Earth".

From Wikipedia"

The novel is set in the early 3800s and takes place almost entirely on the faraway oceanic planet of Thalassa. Thalassa has a small human population sent there by way of an embryonic seed pod, one of many sent out from Earth in an attempt to continue the human race's existence before the Earth is destroyed.

It starts with an introduction to the native Thalassans – the marine biologist Mirissa, her partner Brant and other friends and family. Their peaceful existence comes to an end with the appearance of the Magellan, a spaceship from Earth containing one million colonists who have been put into cryonic suspension.

In a series of descriptive passages the events leading up to the race to save the human species are explained. Scientists in the 1960s discover that the neutrino emissions from the Sun – a result of the nuclear reactions that fuel the star – are far diminished from expected levels. Less than a decade later, it is confirmed that the problem is not with the scientific equipment: the Sun is calculated to go nova around the year AD 3600.

The human race's technology advances enough for various factions to send out pods containing human and other mammalian embryos (and later on, simply stored DNA sequences), along with robot parents, to planets that are considered habitable. Sending live humans is ruled out due to the immense amount of fuel that a rocket-propelled spacecraft would have to carry in order to first accelerate to the speeds required to travel such great distances within an acceptable time, and then decelerate upon approaching the destination. However, less than a hundred years before the Sun is set to go nova a scientific break-through allows construction of the quantum drive, which bypasses this problem. There only remains enough time to build and send to the stars a single quantum-drive ship: the Magellan.

Thalassa's only connection with Earth (and anywhere else) was a single communication dish, which was destroyed during a volcanic eruption 400 years ago and never repaired, thus leaving the Thalassans unaware of later developments on Earth. The Magellan stops at Thalassa to replenish the mammoth ice shield that had prevented micrometeors from damaging it during its interstellar journey. Thalassa is the obvious choice for this operation, as 95% of the planet's surface is covered by water. At the end of the novel the Magellan continues on to its destination, the planet Sagan 2.

As a kind of sub-plot it is revealed that beneath Thalassa's oceans there live sentient beings similar to the sea scorpions of Earth, only much larger. They are discovered – and named Scorps – when it attracts attention that robots designed to seek out fish frequently go missing. The Scorps gain the robots' metal in order to make bands of honour and rank. The Scorps are proven farmers; they have created their own village out of underwater rock caves.

Some of the crew aboard the Magellan begin to consider mutiny, wanting to stay in the secure environment of Thalassa rather than make the journey on to an unknown planet that may indeed be habitable, but just as well not. The situation is solved just before take-off – the mutineers are left with the Thalassans, while the bulk of the crew and passengers continue on to Sagan 2.

The book finishes with Mirissa sending messages to her lover, Loren Lorenson aboard the Magellan, showing him their son. Loren is not going to see the child until long after its and Mirissa's death. Mirissa's last clear sight when she is old is of the fading star in the Thalassan sky that is the Quantum drive of the Magellan.

Manchu Torchship

Here are some images plus a composite of my scratch built model of Robert A Heinlein's Torchship based off of the art work (seen below) and design of Philippe Bouchet AKA "Manchu".

Philippe Bouchet is a well known artist amongst the science fiction community and in my opinion one of the best artists I have seen and a very fine model builder as well. His creativity and imagination beyond compare.
So on that note why not visit his web site at http://manchu-sf.blogspot.com/ and be prepared to be amazed.

Here is the Wikipedia article of Philippe. This is a French to English translation using Google Translate so the conversion is not the best but you'll get the general jist of it.
"Philippe Bouchet, born March 19, 1956 in Cholet (Maine-et-Loire), better known under the pseudonym of Manchu is an illustrator of science fiction.
12 years old at the film by Stanley Kubrick, 2001, A Space Odyssey, and 13 years during the first steps of Neil Armstrong on the moon, it would first be an astronaut.
Returned to more moderate ambitions in the years following, he began drawing animation after a CAP in advertising design resulting from its formation three years at the School Brassart. He participated in the realization of cartoons Once upon a time ... Space and Ulysses 31.
He comes to illustrating science fiction in 1984, when he met with Gerard Klein, who offered to illustrate the volumes of the Anthology of Great science fiction for The Pocket Book, which will make the half of the cover illustrations. This collaboration will last fifteen years, during which he illustrated more than two hundred books.
His influences are varied: Robert McCall, Chris Foss and Chesley Bonestell

From The Earth To The Moon Composite

Here is my composite image of my scratch built "Space Train" from Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" orbiting the Earth.

Images of the model can be seen here.

Torchship Composite

Here is my composite image of my scratch built model of a Torchship based off of the Clifford Geary cover of Robert .A. Heinlein's "Time for the Stars".

Images of the model can be seen here.

Torchship

Here are some images of my scratch built model of a Torchship based off of the Clifford Geary cover of Robert .A. Heinlein's "Time for the Stars".
Not a difficult model to make by any stretch but in the science fiction world a very important one.
From Wikipedia" Torchship (or torch ship) is a term used by Robert A. Heinlein in several of his science fiction novels and short stories to describe fictional rocket ships that can maintain high accelerations indefinitely, thus reaching speeds that approach the speed of light. The term has subsequently been used by other authors to describe similar kinds of fictional spaceships.

In his 1950 novel Farmer in the Sky, Heinlein describes a "mass-conversion ship" that derives its motive power from the complete conversion of mass to energy. The narrator of the novel, who is traveling to Jupiter in a mass-conversion ship called The Mayflower, describes it as follows:

The Mayflower was shaped like a ball with a cone on one side — top-shaped. The point of the cone was her jet — although Chief Engineer Ortega, who showed us around, called it her "torch".

Later in the novel, Ortega is quoted as saying

"The latest development is the mass-conversion ship, such as the Mayflower, and it may be the final development — a mass-conversion ship is theoretically capable of approaching the speed of light."

The scientific advance that permits this efficient conversion of mass to energy is called the "Kilgore equations".

In later novels and stories, including "Sky Lift" (1953), Time for the Stars (1956), and Double Star (1957), Heinlein refers to mass-conversion ships as "torchships" and to their pilots as "torchship pilots". In Have Space Suit - Will Travel (1958), the protagonists are kidnapped by hostile aliens and taken to Pluto aboard a space ship that accelerates at more than one gravity for days at a time, although the ship is never explicitly referred to as a "torchship".

The "torch" is said to work with any matter as fuel; in Time for the Stars, the ship refuels by landing in water, or in one case liquid ammonia.

The term "torchship" was adopted by a number of other science fiction authors, including

• Norman Spinrad in Riding the Torch (1975)
• Dan Simmons in Hyperion Cantos (1983-1999)
• David Brin and Gregory Benford in Heart of the Comet (1986)

Time for the Stars is a science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein published by Scribner's in 1956 as one of the Heinlein juveniles. The basic plot line is derived from a 1911 thought experiment in special relativity, commonly called the twin paradox, proposed by French physicist Paul Langevin. The story bears many similarities in plot and concepts to Variable Star written by Spider Robinson from an incomplete outline created by Heinlein around the time this book was written, and published in 2006.

From The Earth To The Moon

Here are some images of my scratch built model of the Moon Train from the Jules Verne novel "From the Earth to the Moon". Based off of the 1865 etching.

From Wikipedia"

From the Earth to the Moon (French: De la Terre à la Lune, 1865) is a humorous science fantasy novel by Jules Verne and is one of the earliest entries in that genre. It tells the story of the president of a post-American Civil War gun club in Baltimore, his rival, a Philadelphia maker of armor, and a Frenchman, who build an enormous sky-facing Columbiad space gun and launch themselves in a projectile/spaceship from it to a Moon landing.

The story is also notable in that Verne attempted to do some rough calculations as to the requirements for the cannon and, considering the comparative lack of any data on the subject at the time, some of his figures are surprisingly close to reality. However, his scenario turned out to be impractical for safe manned space travel since a much longer muzzle would have been required to reach escape velocity while limiting acceleration to survivable limits for the passengers.

Influence on popular culture

The novel was adapted as the opera Le voyage dans la lune in 1875, with music by Jacques Offenbach.

In H. G. Wells' 1901 The First Men in the Moon (also relating to the first voyagers to the Moon) the protagonist, Mr. Bedford, mentions Verne's novel to his companion, Professor Cavor, who replies (in a possible dig at Verne) that he does not know what Bedford is referring to. Verne returned the dig later when he pointed out he used guncotton to send his men to the moon, and one could see it any day. "Can Mr. Wells show me some "cavourite"?", he asked archly.

The novel (along with Wells' The First Men in the Moon) inspired the first science fiction film, A Trip to the Moon, made in 1902 by Georges Méliès. In 1958, another film adaptation of this story was released, titled From the Earth to the Moon. It was one of the last films made under the RKO Pictures banner. The story also became the basis for the very loose adaptation Jules Verne's Rocket to the Moon (1967), a caper-style British comedy starring Burl Ives and Terry-Thomas. The 1961 Czechoslovak film The Fabulous Baron Munchausen combines characters and plot elements from the Verne novel with those of the stories of Baron Münchhausen and Cyrano de Bergerac.

The novel and its sequel were the inspiration for the computer game Voyage: Inspired by Jules Verne.

In 1889 Verne wrote a second sequel to the novel, The Purchase of the North Pole, which has the gun club members (led by J. T. Maston) plan to use the "Columbiad" to alter the tilt of the earth to enable the mineral wealth of the Arctic region to be put within reach of exploitation.

Among its other homages to classic science fiction, an issue of Planetary involved the Planetary group finding that the Gun Club had been successful in launching the projectile, but that a miscalculation led to a slowly decaying orbit over the decades with the astronauts long dead from lack of air and food.

Barbicane appears in Kevin J. Anderson's novel Captain Nemo: The Fantastic History of a Dark Genius as an Ottoman official whose chief rival, Robur, designs a number of innovative weapons to counteract him, including an attempt to launch a three-man mission to the Moon.

During their return journey from the moon, the crew of Apollo 11 made reference to Jules Verne's book during a TV broadcast on July 23. The mission's commander, astronaut Neil Armstrong, said, "A hundred years ago, Jules Verne wrote a book about a voyage to the Moon. His spaceship, Columbia [sic], took off from Florida and landed in the Pacific Ocean after completing a trip to the Moon. It seems appropriate to us to share with you some of the reflections of the crew as the modern-day Columbia completes its rendezvous with the planet Earth and the same Pacific Ocean tomorrow."

In Back to the Future Part III, Clara Clayton asks Emmett Brown if he believes mankind will ever "travel to the moon the way we travel across the country on trains." Being from the future Doc already knows that doesn't happen for another 84 years, but he affirms they will while quoting a passage from From the Earth to the Moon. Clara calls him out on this, and it's from this encounter that the pair discovers their mutual love of Jules Verne novels.

Out Of The Silent Planet Composite

Here is my composite image of my 1/72 scale scratch build Weston Spacecraft from C.S. Lewis's novel "Out Of The Silent Planet" coming in for a landing on Malacandra (Mars)

Images of the model can be seen here.

From Wikipedia"

The Space Trilogy, Cosmic Trilogy or Ransom Trilogy is a trilogy of science fiction novels by C. S. Lewis, famous for his later series The Chronicles of Narnia. A philologist named Elwin Ransom is the hero of the first two novels and an important character in the third.

The books in the trilogy are:

• Out of the Silent Planet (1938), set mostly on Mars. In this book Elwin Ransom voyages to Mars and discovers that Earth is exiled from the rest of the solar system due to its fallen nature and is known as "the silent planet".
• Perelandra (1943), set mostly on Venus. Also known as Voyage to Venus. Here Dr Ransom journeys to an unspoiled Venus in which the first humanoids have just emerged.
• That Hideous Strength (1945), set on Earth. A scientific think tank called the N.I.C.E. is secretly in touch with demonic entities who plan to ravage and lay waste to planet Earth.
  

In 1946, the publishing house Avon (now an imprint of HarperCollins) published a version of That Hideous Strength specially abridged by C.S. Lewis entitled The Tortured Planet.

Out Of The Silent Planet

"Weston! Weston!" he gasped. "What is it? It's not the moon, not that size. It can't be, can it?" "No replied Weston, "it's the Earth." - From Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis.

Here are some images of my scratch built 1/72 scale Weston Spacecraft from the C.S. Lewis novel "Out of the Silent Planet". Based off the 1965 edition book cover by Bernard Symancyk. with some slight alterations of my own.

From Wikipedia"

Out of the Silent Planet is the first novel of a science fiction trilogy written by C. S. Lewis, sometimes referred to as the Space Trilogy, Ransom Trilogy or Cosmic Trilogy. The other volumes are Perelandra (also published as Voyage to Venus) and That Hideous Strength, and a fragment of a sequel was published posthumously as The Dark Tower. The trilogy was inspired and influenced by David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus (1920).

According to biographer A. N. Wilson, Lewis wrote the novel after a conversation with J.R.R. Tolkien in which both men lamented the state of contemporary fiction. They agreed that Lewis would write a space-travel story, and Tolkien would write a time-travel one. Tolkien's story only exists as a fragment, published in The Lost Road and other writings (1987) edited by his son Christopher.

Here is a fantastic video of an opening title movie credit roll created by David Scherbarth for a non existent movie "Out of the Silent Planet".
Though no movie has been made (Yet). It does give one hope. Enjoy.

out of the silent planet from David Scherbarth on Vimeo.

My God It's Full Of Stars!

Here is my composite image based off of one of Richard McKenna's pre production artwork (above) from 2001 a space odyssey.
In the image it shows an alien tetrahedron in orbit above Jupiter with my scratch built model of the Discovery/Dragonfly parked alongside. As you can see there are stars in the stargate as described in the novel.
The tetrahedron idea was eventually rejected by Kubrick in favour for the black monolith that we are all familiar with.

Images of the model can be seen here.

Discovery Dragonfly

"And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the

harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years." - From 2001 a Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke.

Here are some images plus a composite of my scratch built Discovery Dragonfly from the novel 2001 a space odyssey by Arthur C Clarke. I based this model off the drawing above. Of course as you can see I used a Liberal amount of artistic license for this one.

The Dragonfly configuration very closely matches the description of the Discovery as it was described in the novel.
The wing like appendages are radiators which would dissipate any excess heat produced by the nuclear engine.
Stanley Kubrick eventually rejected this design because well... they looked like wings. Opting instead for the more bone like configuration that we all know and love.
 You'll also note that the pod bay doors are in a vertical position. The idea behind this is that they do open and close horizontally. But once they are closed they rotate 90º to a locking position.

If you click on the harpsichord link above it will take you to a piece of music written by Bach which I feel had the movie followed more closely to the novel may very well have been used to play along side the Discovery as this sad melancholy ship moves towards Saturn. I know fanciful thinking but then again isn't that what this is all about?

From Wikipedia"
Although the novel and film were developed simultaneously, the novel follows early drafts of the film, from which the final version deviated. These changes were often for practical reasons relating to what could be filmed economically, and a few were due to differences of opinion between Kubrick and Clarke. The most notable differences are a change in the destination planet from Saturn to Jupiter, the nature of the sequence of events leading to HAL's demise. Stylistic differences may be more important than content differences. Of lesser importance are the appearance of the monolith, the age of HAL, and the novel giving names to various spacecraft, prehistoric apes, and HAL's inventor.

Stylistically, the novel generally fleshes out and makes concrete many events left somewhat enigmatic in the film, as has been noted by many observers. Vincent LeBrutto has noted that the novel has "strong narrative structure" which fleshes out the story, while the film is a mainly visual experience where much remains "symbolic". Randy Rasmussen has noted that the personality of Heywood Floyd is different as in Clarke's novel he finds space travel thrilling acting almost as a "spokesman for Clarke" whereas in the film, he experiences space travel as "routine" and "tedious."

In the film, Discovery's mission is to Jupiter, not Saturn. Kubrick used Jupiter because he and special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull could not decide on what they considered to be a convincing model of Saturn's rings for the film. Clarke went on to replace Saturn with Jupiter in the novel's sequel 2010: Odyssey Two. Trumbull later developed a more convincing image of Saturn for his own directorial debut Silent Running.

The general sequence of the showdown with Hal is different in the film than in the book. HAL's initial assertion that the AE-35 unit will fail comes in the film after an extended conversation with David Bowman about the odd and "melodramatic" "mysteries" and "secrecy" surrounding the mission, motivated because HAL is required to draw up and send to Earth a crew psychology report. In the novel it is during the birthday message to Frank Poole.

In the film, Bowman and Poole decide on their own to disconnect HAL in context of a plan to restore the allegedly failing antenna unit in operation. If it does not fail, HAL will be shown to be malfunctioning. HAL discovers the plan by reading their lips through the EVA pod window. In Clarke's novel, ground control orders Bowman and Poole to disconnect HAL should he prove to be malfunctioning a second time in predicting that the second unit is going to go bad.

However, in Clarke's novel, after Poole's death Bowman tries waking up the other crew members, whereupon HAL opens both the internal and external airlock doors, suffocating these three and almost killing Bowman. The film has Bowman, after Poole's murder, go out to rescue him. HAL denies him reentry and kills the hibernating crew members by turning off their life-support. In the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two, however, the recounting of the Discovery One mission is changed to the film version.

The film is generally far more enigmatic about the reason for HAL's failure, while the novel spells out that HAL is caught up in an internal conflict because he is ordered to lie about the purpose of the mission.

Because of what photographed well, the appearance of the monolith that guided Moon-watcher and the other 'man-apes' at the beginning of the story was changed from novel to film. In the novel, this monolith is a translucent crystal; In the film, it is solid black. The TMA1 and TMA2 monoliths were unchanged.

In the book, HAL became operational on January 12, 1997, but in the movie the year is given as 1992. It has been thought that Kubrick wanted HAL to be the same age as a young bright child, nine years old.

The famous quote that opens the film sequel 2010: The Year We Make Contact - "My God—it's full of stars!" - is actually not in the 2001 film, although it is in the 2001 book.

From Wikipedia"

The spacecraft is founded on solid, if as-yet unrealized, science. One concession was made for the purpose of reducing confusion, and that was to eliminate the huge cooling "wings" which would be needed to radiate the heat produced by the propulsion system. Stanley Kubrick felt that the audience might interpret the wings as meaning that the spacecraft was intended to fly through an atmosphere.

Discovery was named after Captain Robert Scott's RRS Discovery, launched 1901; Arthur C. Clarke used to visit the ship when she was moored in London. It shares its name with a real spacecraft, the Space Shuttle Discovery (OV-103).