The ebook and paperback versions of K’nat Trap are now both available on Amazon. If you pick up the paperback, you get the ebook free! Can’t beat that!
As always, please leave a review when you finish reading it. Authors live or die on reviews. The more we get the better off we do and the more likely we will be able to write you more of the stories you love. So if you loved K’nat Trap, tell everyone about it with a quick review on Amazon.
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Looking for a quick, fun read this summer? Then get yourself a copy of K’nat Trap. It’s loaded with starfighter fights, carnivorous alien squids and Special Forces Pravda. How can you miss with all of that? So go and order yours today so it’s automagically on your Kindle or Kindle app on the 18th. If you can’t wait until then, order your paperback copy now and be reading it in just a few days shipping time.
Here’s the cover blurbage:
Starstrikers agents Kiloe and Tamia team up to capture a new Votainion starfighter with NexGen technology.
On a remote, enemy held planet, a K’nat starfighter has crash landed intact. Commander Kiloe is sent on a one way mission to repair it and fly it to a nearby Alliance cruiser where Tamia is waiting to help recover the enemy starfighter. But more than just the Votainions are preventing him from recovering the starfighter. He also has to deal with a sentient alien who has an insatiable appetite. Can the Special Forces team recover the secret enemy fighter or will their efforts be thwarted by a vicious alien and best efforts of the enemy?
Here are some of the cool ships featured in K’nat Trap. You can find complete build pages in the Model Builds page of this site.
As you may have noticed by now, you can actually order the K’nat Trap paperback before the ebook launches on the 18th of July. But if you’d rather wait for the ebook, that’s fine too, just get your pre-0rder in so it will appear on your Kindle when is releases. If you’re like me you will forget about purchasing it and then bingo, there it is in your reader and you’ll be able to dig right in on it.
Remember, K’nat Trap takes place in the second trilogy of the Star Saga, right after Starstrikers. So if you haven’t read Starstrikers yet, now would be a great time to knock that one out and then you’ll be ready to tackle K’nat Trap.
In other random news… It looks like Amazon has updated the covers for two more of my novellas, Devon’s Blade and Corvette, to include the “A Star Saga Story” subtitle. So now it’s more clear to the casual reader that they are part of the series. Each of the novella’s come in between the numbered novels of the series.
Corvette is book one of it’s own mini series withing the Star Saga, set before the Great War with Voton. But I’ll make that more clear as the next Corvette launches in late summer.
Happy reading!
Every book I release has a cover that is produced by myself and my graphic designer brother, Byron. Since we are working in the Sci-Fi, Space Opera genre and in one particular universe, we try and have starships on the cover to get that fact across to future readers. We also have a certain style that we carry over from book to book so that readers get a visual clue that this new novel fits into the same universe as the last one they may have read. Being consistent with the branding helps readers find you and stick with you throughout your series.
All the covers start out with a concept doodle, by either myself or Byron. For K’nat Trap the original idea was mine and I imagined a K’nat starfighter being targeted by another fighter’s computer system or heads up display.
I didn’t have in mind any particular color but knew that the star field had to be blurred to suggest speed and that there had to be some kind of target reticule. The book’s title would be in the same font as the other series books and so would the author name.
The first thing I had to do was build the model of the K’nat Trap. That was already underway and after it was finished, I photographed it against a black felt background and sent the high definition image to Byron. He sucked it into his series book template in Photoshop and then added the text. He used a stock image for the target graphic while he worked on doing his own original version.
The green color was striking and it would stick with us for the whole process. I had a few suggestions for this version; punch up the brightness of the stars and the target. Also, we needed to start adding subtitles that declared the book to be a Star Saga story.
Now we’re getting somewhere! The image popped and the color was still working for us. Now to take out the stock image target and add Byron’s original version.
At this point I decided to try another color. The resulting experiment turned out to be too red and green or Christmas-like.
We tried again, this time going all red. The font changed to what we refer to as the bad guy font or Votainion font and it appears on the Devon’s Blade and The Blood Empress covers. Unfortunately, we felt it didn’t have the right impact so we went back to the regular series font. Byron also added some engine flare in blue.
I showed this one and a green one to some folks at work and they all seemed to prefer the old font an the green color. More comments indicated that the white lines in the target were distracting. So we changed things again, going back to green.
After studying this version I decided to call it done. It was eye-catching and it looked sharp. We could have kept tweaking but at some point you just have to pull back and let it be. This whole process took about a month for us to finish but of course building the model took many months and so did writing the book.
The second release of 2017 is ready for pre-order at Amazon. Here’s the cover art in all it’s glory. Another stellar effort from my brother, Byron!
Go forth and purchase if you must. It will be delivered on Tuesday, 18 July 2017.
Over the past few years I’ve created models of just about every ship mentioned in the upcoming novella, K’nat Trap. In this post I’ll show you the major ships of both the Votainion and Alliance fleets. The only ship that I have not built from this novella is the GCU Thrusher. the command ship of the Starstrikers. One of these days I’ll build that one. The other ship I have not built or started to build is the Acron fighter. Again, not enough time or resources to do them all. Maybe someday.
You can click on the links below to get to the page of the blog where that model is featured and see how I built it.
GCU Sherman – This is the battle hardened cruiser that Tamia joins and that Kiloe’s recovered K’nat fighter needs to get back to Alliance space.
K’nat Fighter – The title fighter is actually the latest Votainion starfighter to enter the war. It has the ability to make small jumps in space/time.
Spearon Fighter – The principle Alliance starfighter and the preferred ride of Tamia. This model is still on my bench unfinished. Other things keep getting in the way. It started out as a 1/32 scale model and has wound up a 1/24 scale model.
Terrox Fighter – This is an older Votainion fighter and it’s featured prominently in the story.
My next novella will drop in July. So I’m introducing it early to generate some interest. The idea is to get folks to go buy it on pre-order so that it has a big first day when it finally comes out.
First things first. How do you pronounce K’nat? I pronounce it with a short a like in “bat” but a silent “K”. It’s spelled like gnat, with a Votainion “K” instead of a “G”. Make sense? Okay then.
So what is it?
K’nat fighters are the NexGen or Next Generation of starfighters built using the same technology that the Eclipse had in Book Four – Starstrikers. So if you have not read Starstrikers yet, you might want to read that one first. K’nat Trap takes place chronologically a few years after Starstrikers and features two Starstriker agents, Kiloe and Tamia on a secret mission to recover a downed K’nat fighter on a bog planet. If that premise seems vaguely familiar to you, you might be an aviation buff.
The source material for this novella is the Japanese Zero that crashed on an island in the Aleutians at the start of WWII. American forces recovered it and took it to California where they got it flying again and then learned the airplane’s secrets. The F6F Hellcat from the Navy was designed to specifically defeat the Zero fighter based on what we learned from the captured Aleutian plane. I used the name of that island as the name of the planet where my K’nat fighter crashed – Akutan.
Below is the model I built of the K’nat fighter. It was constructed of plastic and scaled to 1/32. There are lights in the headlights and engines.
This model was used for the book’s cover which hasn’t been revealed yet. Stay tuned next week for that! If you want to see some detailed pictures and commentary on the making of this model, you can check it out here.
It was even rendered as a 3D mesh by my son using Blender. His is sleeker, I suspect. 
The design was crazy complicated to work out, so I built a cardboard model of it first. Here’s that model along side stablemate Votainion starfighters from the same era.
Here’s a size comparison with a P-51 fighter from WWII. Just about the same wingspan as the legendary American fighter.
I needed to address the uneven PVC tubes and decided to just use fillers to even things out. I then proceeded to build the main super structure with sheet styrene. This model didn’t require a sturdy frame underneath as the boxing in of the super structure would not be too large to support the model.
I had to cover the front edges of the bottom of the PVC pipes with styrene as you can see in the below image.
Before getting too far along with the boxing in I ran some wires down the engine tubes for lights. You can also see some framing for the top of the super structure. There will be a landing bay on one side of the ship and it will have a LED light.
Next came construction of the engine details that will house the LED lights. I kept things simple here. Using a plastic greeblie found at work and the housing for an electric toothbrush. The rest were scrap styrene and a tank wheel to hold the LED.
The top of the model was going to be built entirely out of sheet styrene just like the main super structure. But I found a really interesting printer ribbon cover at work and decided to go with that instead. You can also see the top deck over the super structure.
Next came the top deck creation, again using 0.60″ thick styrene sheets. I followed the original pencil sketch as closely as possible and built it up over the orange printer ink cartridge cover.
I next turned my attention to the head or bow of the starship. Again, I used sheet styrene to box in the basic shape. I built a shelf along the inside so that the top of the head could be removed to add fiber optics. I’m always trying new techniques with each model and this time I used a thinner piece of styrene over the top of a thicker piece to create the hidden attachment of the top piece.
I found some other plastic bits from work that would make perfect gun boxes for the sides of the bow. So I added some model kit parts and thin sheets of plastic and then attached them to the head.
The top of the head is where the bridge is located. All of the ships during this time period had similar bridges, each one being its own variation. Note the whole for fiber optics to run.
The front area of the bridge was often a target for enemy starfighters to attack so it gets extra armor. These are thicker pieces of styrene and some model kit parts.
Fiber optics were then added to the bridge and a top was built. The size of the FO is 1.0 mm.
I started detailing the outside of the head next, in order to decide where the FO would go for portholes. I use a combination of plastic model parts and scrap styrene. It’s important to note that I’ve already established a look and feel for these ships with two other models, so I had to stay true to that style. Even the blue and orange juice bottle caps were used for neck mounts on other starships.
Moving to the bottom of the head I always start by arranging pieces on the model to see if I can achieve the effect I want with what I have on hand. I always try and purchase kits that have details I think I’ll need for each model I build. In this case a 1/72 German tank body fit the bill. With some modifications. You don’t want to just slap parts on in random order. You want to place them as if they actually have some purpose. In the case of the engine halves below, I didn’t use them here but did use them in another location.
See how much the original placement changed over time? I’ve also started adding pieces to the nose. Scoring the panel lines was done BEFORE adding the model pieces. The top deck was scored too with some panels being smaller for interest.
The back and bottom nears complete on the details. Some of the parts are model pieces and some are plastic bits cut and trimmed to simulate machinery. It’s a lost art these days with everything being computer designed. But it’s my favorite part of scratch building.
Next came the sides and that’s where most of the FO portholes were drilled and threaded.
You can also see some battle damage created by my hobby grinder. Once the portholes are places and the FO threaded, I can started detailing the sides. I leave the FO fibers hanging out to be trimmed after it is painted.
The tiny tan pieces are tread links from a 1/35 scale Russian BMP. In another model of this scale I used these as escape pods. So I had to recreate them on this model.
The top of the bridge area also houses some antennas and scanners as well as a big anti-starfighter gun. The gun was a modified destroyer model gun from a 1/350 ship model. I made my own large barrel out of metal tube.
She’s starting to look like a proper starship head now. I particularly love how the nose details turned out.
The completed head is now set aside as I begin to tackle the main body.
Just got the manuscript for K’nat Trap back from my editor. Not much to clean up this time, the story pretty much cruises to the finish. I guess I better start thinking harder about the cover. I’ll probably start up the ebook this week and should be ready for Beta Readers. If you’d like to be a Beta Reader for this novella, join my mailing list and ask to be a Beta Reader. Ya gotta be on the Dispatches team to get on the Beta Team.
In the meantime, here’s a sneak look at the GCU Sherman model coming together on my workbench.
From the model shop this week comes the completed K’nat fighter in 1/32 scale. The finishing touches were done with artist’s pastels in white, gray and black. I’m pretty happy with how this one turned out and it will be featured on the K’nat Trap book cover early next year. I’ll try and postup the build wrap up this weekend.
