The spaceships were modelled in Extreme 3D 2.0, then pulled into Bryce for tweaking (the bubble cockpit, for example, is a stretched Bryce sphere, and the ships have - invisible - navigation lights and exhaust flares). The scene consists of a ground plane plus a few blocks overlaid with a cloud plane. This plane picks up the light from the exhausts of the spaceships, producing an attractive glow. There are also a couple of lights beneath the cloud plane, just to add to the confusion and unnecessarily increase rendering times.

The image did actually start from the Tori Amos song cited; like most of her songs, it's almost impossible to guess what it's about, so you can make up anything you like. It does seem to have a kind of science-fiction feel to it, though, and the name 'Space Dog' suggested some kind of disreputable space-opera character, which my futile ... I mean, fertile ... imagination extrapolated to the idea of a spacecraft flying fast at low altitude. The original intention was to give an impression of speed, something that the final image entirely fails to do.

The first twenty or so iterations featured blocky spacecraft modelled from Bryce primitives. These didn't look very good, so I finally made some new ones in Extreme 3D.