With little more than a stone pickaxe and a crafting bench, Steve began his quest to reach the stars and meet the legendary Winged Ones. Steve used his years of knowledge in trans-dimensional portals to design a device capable of breaking down the walls between dimensions in order to cross the vast distances of outer space. After weeks of crafting the Whitestone was launched.

The Whitestone is designed to be a space exploration vehicle. It has two main parts, the stardrive and the main hull. To tear a hole in the universe big enough for a starship, Steve built the redstone reactor. A handful of redstone dust has enough energy to power an entire city; it's energy capacity is nearly unlimited. The reactor combines redstone with crushed obsidian to generate raw portal energy. The portal energy is channeled into the amplifier ring which generates a field big enough to encompass the entire ship and "fast travel" through space.

Once in stable orbit over the destination planet, the stardrive is separated from the ship. The main hull is designed to enter the atmosphere and make a smooth landing on water. The ship can then be sailed using conventional methods until the mission is complete. When it is time to leave the planet the power of redstone and gunpowder fueled rockets. Once in orbit it re-docks with the stardrive.

The Design

This starship is being built for the PMC to the stars contest. I wanted to build something sleek and as smooth as Minecraft would allow and still be small enough to complete in three weeks (I have difficulty completing projects sometimes). I have included as many redstone features as possible. I've been doing a lot of Star Trek style warp cores so for this build I made the engine horizontal and used pistons instead of lights (that helps with the lag too).

I chose for the ship to primarily white because that color is most common for real spacecraft (to reflect heat I guess). The trim is blue and cyan to match Steve's outfit. The interior is built to be a home away from home for Steve and has living areas that wouldn't look out of place in a modern apartment.

Redstone Devices

Most of the redstone is used for lighting. Every light on the ship can be turned off. There is a bug in the lighting engine that turns glass panes into light sources, but hopefully that will be fixed in a future Minecraft update.

There are six airlocks on the ship. Two are at the aft of the stardrive, one goes outside and the other to the aft shuttlepod bay. There is a regular airlock on Deck A, and an escape hatch airlock by the cockpit and one to the main shuttlepod bay. The final airlock is between the main body of the ship and the stardrive. Each airlock only allows one door open at a time and has space suit storage.

The Rocket engines can be activated from the cockpit with the lever in front of the chair. There is also a button in the cockpit that will activate a teleport to an outside view (with a double click). Turning off the lights in the cockpit changes the teleport to send you to the back of this ship to view the rockets.

I hope you enjoy the redstone features. The most difficult part was getting all the wiring to fit and not interfere with other circuits.

For those of you who read all the way through to the end here is a little secret. There is a hidden door located in the redstone lab on the bottom deck. Place a lever under the picture of a lever and toggle it.