In fact you have inspired me to dust this old thing off...
That's one heck of an intricate model, and a great design! I'd love to see some other angles of the ship, it's definitely worth putting textures on and rendering it in some scenes.
Finally, because I thought it was a bit of fun (if very low effort): When I rotated an earlier render to portrait, I thought it looked like a poster, so I slapped a title on the top of it haha
In terms of real-space systems, I was thinking that if two statite solar-sails were tethered to the ground such that their cables formed the letter X, the simple act of the solar sails tacking towards or away from each other means the intersection of the X can be raised or lowered…perhaps spinning up a windlass that looks a bit like this: http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2020/05/water-disk-rocket.html?m=1
That windlass has a third tether that points straight down between the “uprights” such that as the sails tack towards or away from each other, the windlass can pull an object into space with no rockets, or deposit said object on the surface. An asteroid passing between the two main cables could hit a net on the far side of the Sunlifter’s two cables…dragging a fourth cable hooked to a heavy payload into space perhaps.
Such a system would make for great space art at least—and might actually be doable.
Shuttle doesn't look so lonely now. Maybe the second lander could be solely a tanker to get both back up into orbit out of some of the deeper gravity wells. Great work like this fires my imagination.
And now I have this sudden urge to play a round of Surviving Mars.
I've never played that game, (not a big game player) however, for some reason I find that going on youtube and putting on a no-commentary Let's Play of Surviving Mars to be very relaxing - so long as there aren't any meteor strikes or food shortages!
These are the last two images for this pre-Enterprise era project (it's been a long road, gettin' from there to here...)
I got a bit burnt out towards the end, but I'm pretty happy with the collection of images produced. Looking forward to doing something different now!
Posts
Here are some diagrams for both ships:
One last render with Mars as a backdrop:
Finally, because I thought it was a bit of fun (if very low effort): When I rotated an earlier render to portrait, I thought it looked like a poster, so I slapped a title on the top of it haha
http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2020/05/water-disk-rocket.html?m=1
That windlass has a third tether that points straight down between the “uprights” such that as the sails tack towards or away from each other, the windlass can pull an object into space with no rockets, or deposit said object on the surface. An asteroid passing between the two main cables could hit a net on the far side of the Sunlifter’s two cables…dragging a fourth cable hooked to a heavy payload into space perhaps.
Such a system would make for great space art at least—and might actually be doable.
Thanks, there's still a fair amount of stuff to do with this to make it work a bit better. It's all CGI, I created a crater displacement map:
Then there are procedural displacement maps that plug into it.
And now I have this sudden urge to play a round of Surviving Mars.
I got a bit burnt out towards the end, but I'm pretty happy with the collection of images produced. Looking forward to doing something different now!
Here's the gallery of final images:
https://forums.scifi-meshes.com/discussion/10001171/pre-enterprise-era-project-final-images#latest
Beautiful work!