I still wanna see cockpit windows..If in battle, your autonav fails, your optical sensors go offline, and backups all get hammered, how do you steer and maneuver if you can't see outside? And how do you find the runway assuming you still have maneuverability or engines after a battle of course? A Star Trek style bridge is fine right up until you actually have see outside to live...At least throw a small cockpit in there as a backup. Not something that gets used much but it's better to have windows and never need them instead of needing them and not have them...Not to get too Trekkie or anything but there was a TNG episode where the ship wasn't damaged but its systems were all locked out, and Riker said.." The only way we even knew we had come out of warp was by looking out a window!"
I can see it now...
FO: It was an honor serving with you captain...We killed those Akula's good didn't we sir?"
CAPT: We sure did...but those damn engineers....even with all our battle damage...if I could just see outside to find the damn runway...we'd live to brag about it!"
But even without the design is looking more and more beautiful with every update!
Tovette, yeah i'd like to make a landing & takeoff, animation, to show off all the moving parts. Remember venus wars with its huge ramped runways?
039-issac, that would certainly make it easier for people to copy it:D
sorceress21, noooo, not you again...;) i've never really thought that you fly this ship with a joystick or whatever, you just kinda tell it what to do and it does it for you. i guess you have a point with the dead stick landing scenario but most of the time windows would be useless. orbital or space operations or hypersonic flight, you don't need them. how many landings today are carried out automatically or with instruments?
Ok, you can fly a plane visually of course, well you can, i'd end up in the dirt. but It's really tough to fly a spacecraft by the seat of your pants, you often end up dead one way or another. It's all about numbers, not piloting skill.
Anyway, visually i don't want cockpit windows - they give the ship a face and i think it looks more hightech as a faceless craft. I'm probably sounding like i'm totally up myself, but i think it says something about the society the ship comes from, and that the ship itself might be a character in its own right, perhaps even able to operate autonomously. perhaps the ship even outranks everyone but the command staff. Something well explored in scifi but i've avoided before now in my projects. perhaps because now that really seems to be the way we're going in real life tech.
Pip, i always leave some room for surprises...:D
here are a couple of closeups of the hull, some of these lines are really too loose however and i'll have to go back and tighten them up and remove some of the wobblyness of the panels.
how many landings today are carried out automatically or with instruments?
Not very many. Though autoland is an available system on heavy jets, 98% of the time the last 200ft. is hand flown. The runway and ILS system must be Cat III certified and the aircraft appropriately equipped. Even if the jet has the gear, the ground based equipment is likely not available as only a few airports in the world (few considering the total number) have a Cat III certified ILS approach. And even when I hand fly an ILS approach to minimums..if the boxes ain't working right....they do me no good.
Hmmm...landing 18C at KCLT. Wind 280 @ 15 gusting to 25 kts. Or dead stick an Airbus into the Hudson river....Naww, it's got nothing to do with pilot skill. C'mon Steve...tell that to Sully.
Pilots and pilot skill will be keeping people alive and safe for a long long time into the future.....
Now as far as your artistic reasons for no cockpit windows....can't argue that. Awesome work though..really.
My only furtherance, if I was an Akula Captain, and I knew i was going up against a crewed Ionia I'm going to focus my battle tactics of denying you use of your electronic eyes. Once those are eliminated, because my helmsman can still see out the window, no matter how much damage my ship has taken...as long as I have some weapons and maneuvering.....I win.
Side bar: Not very many. Though autoland is an available system on heavy jets, 98% of the time the last 200ft. is hand flown. The runway and ILS system must be Cat III certified and the aircraft appropriately equipped. Even if the jet has the gear, the ground based equipment is likely not available as only a few airports in the world (few considering the total number) have a Cat III certified ILS approach.
well thats today, and commercial aviation. talking a hundred, two hundred years... would you have a job? if so, would it not be totally different. not to mention that military are flying completely autonomous craft today. and whatever secret craft that could be 20+ years ahead of what we're used to.
Hmmm...landing 18C at KCLT. Wind 280 @ 15 gusting to 25 kts. Or dead stick an Airbus into the Hudson river....Naww, it's got nothing to do with pilot skill. C'mon Steve...tell that to Sully.
i said you have a point about that type of landing. the numbers thing was about orbital and outerspace navigation.
and this thing would eat birds for lunch, vapourise em and spit them out the back. barely even burp.;)
rofl!!! BTW, I really like the idea of the Ionia being an UCSV.
uhhh... Unmanned Combat *something* Vehicle?
Its kind of like a HAL/discovery combination, it's meant to be crewed, but everything is run by the AI, which is *usually* fiercely loyal to its crew - which it would rely on for maintaining it - and again like a HAL, take over and make its own decisions to complete the mission if the command crew are incapacitated.
"Crew? Hello crew... Hi there, this EDI your shipboard computer. Sorry about that last bump guys, but there's a hole in my hull and I need you to fix it. Awww come on, I only vented the hull into space last week as a practica joke... If you fix me, I'll make you dinner tonight, I promise! Yes I know I've locked up all the galleys for the last three months, and ejected half the crew, but I meant it when I said we needed to conserve supplies. And guys? Would you mind repairing the port fusion reactor before it goes supercritical? Seriously, I'll throw in some cookies."
Little more irritating than an apologetic computer.
Nate, i can just imagine your avatar rocking out to that cheezy soundtrack;)
sorceress, hope you brought enough for everyone;)
Sandman, thanks.
here's some work on an engine nozzle, it has some thrust vectoring to offset the loss of an engine on the opposing side and something thats ended up looking a little like a roller blade, which is intended to stop the fins and nozzles impacting the groud on takeoff or landing.
God I thought I had the scale of this beast worked out to be slightly larger then a C5 galaxy, but seeing that little dude standing shorter then 1 wheel height has just made me think it's about 5 times the size of a C5 Galaxy
Very nice work Steve, I was browsing through concept ships - Index page for some modeling ideas and noticed this ship below, looks sorta similar in the rear end to yours
100 meters. Cool, that's almost the exact size of the largest version of the Russian Lun, the missiles actually look spot on for a supersonic long range missile (again the Russian Moskit is a good analogy).
My only furtherance, if I was an Akula Captain, and I knew i was going up against a crewed Ionia I'm going to focus my battle tactics of denying you use of your electronic eyes. Once those are eliminated, because my helmsman can still see out the window, no matter how much damage my ship has taken...as long as I have some weapons and maneuvering.....I win.
Look out of the window while nuclear warheads are going off left and right, and high-energy lasers are reflecting off every surface, and the last thing your helmsman will ever see will be a brief, bright, retina-searing flash! And why would anyone be engaging at visual ranges anyway (except on silly TV shows where they think we'll forget what's going on if they don't put all combatants on the screen at one time... :rolleyes: )?
theoretical space combat could happen any where from a few km away to a light week (181,314,478,598,400 m)(i would convert to km but im lazy:))
kinetic slugs can conceivably go on forever, until they hit something or get slowed by a gravity field(or for that matter sped up) lasers or mazers have a finite range based on the inverse square law(the more power in it the further it will go/how much power/radiation it will transfer/inflict to the target), missiles are the same as a kinetic slug, once the run out of fuel
and because of newtons laws it doesn't need to explode to kill you in space just has to punch through the hull and hit something critical(read:explosive:devil:)
but explosive gives you a sphere of damage that increases your odds of hitting your target
a single projectile hitting something 100m across from 1000km is like trying to drop a pin on a certain bit of dust, the math involved is very complex,add in a gravity field like in a orbital battle and it gets even harder, hopefully the ai or supercomputer can handle those calculations in enough time
just to point out the average human mark1 eyeball can realistically only percieve things out to 1000km in space, so visually acquiring a target that looks like a very small moving dot(hopefully black(read:stealth mode)) on a largely black environment, you have more odds of winning the lottery
just to give you lot an idea for scale
a 308 hunting rifle will put a round about a km down range before gravity makes it hit the ground
Great work Steve. Your ships always appears to be real ones.
When I see them, books like "Starships from 2000 to 2100", "TTA" and others from Steven Caldwell, always comes to my mind. What do you think about an illustrated book in that stylle? For sure, I would buy one of them.
lasers or mazers(sic) have a finite range based on the inverse square law(the more power in it the further it will go/how much power/radiation it will transfer/inflict to the target),
Well, not quite. Lasers and masers are coherent light, so they are not subject to the inverse square law. However, they are subject to diffraction. Diffraction reduces the power density of a laser somewhat more mildly than does the inverse square law, and becomes even milder as the frequency of the laser light goes up. The gritty equations are here: Atomic Rocket: Space War: Weapons
There is also the problem of lightspeed lag, meaning that if you are one light-second away from your target, you are seeing where the target was one second ago, NOT where it is now. If the target is dodging, this makes it more difficult to hit.
But your main point is sound: spacecraft combat ranges are such that you probably could not see your opponent without a telescope. The TV Troups site calls this the Old School Dogfighting fallacy and the See The Whites Of Their Eyes fallacy.
We Now Return You to Your Regularly Scheduled Programming Still In Progress: Ionia Class - Allied Hunter/Killer
SLy, Melak, I'm certainly familiar with it, Thats Craig Clarks model, it's very nice and pretty well recognised, been around for many years now. It was used in the video for 'sing for absolution' by muse.
I've said before you could find any number of winged designs that have some similarity, real and fictional. if you compare the engines, they're totally different, that ship - its actually a shuttle on a detachable drive section - has a russian soyuz rocket look to it from behind.
As reference i tend to look at real world things and try to build an interesting form thats never been seen before but has an element of reality to it.
Meph, i'd probably lose the smoke trail, since it would be a real pain to do - looks cool - but these are fusion power hypersonic missiles and are probably too efficient to produce anything other than plasma. the current missile design is very simple but always seemed about the right size. and it'll probably be replaced with something like a hypersonic waveriding cruise missile. If i can figure out how that should look.
039-issac, Akima, I think you have many of the problems you have today... electronics would need to be hardened to resist EM pulses... eyeballs are not terribly useful in outer space combat and you're right that engagement distances would surely be gigantic in most circumstances. I think on tv & movies, the ranges are shown to be much smaller so thats where sorceress is coming from. Nothing wrong with that, thats what we're used to and it makes for more exciting battles.
It's all George lucas' fault . Coreographing his battles with WW2 clips. but i think whats overlooked is that when you have spacecraft capable of FTL by warping space, or using different dimensions then you instantly lose the need for days of tense manuvering and waiting.
Starship, yep thanks, i'd love to do something like that.
here's a really boring update showing how the intake splits to feed upper and lower engines sets... I should really have some kind of system of ramps to change the amount of gas allowed into the inlet, and also an armoured/heatsheild-ed covering that can be deployed but i can probably get away with not adding it, if i don't mention it on SFM... oh wait, damn.
well i had another update ready, most of the panelling finished on the side and about to post it on sunday and my comp powered down. I tried booting it and it switched off halfway through loading windows - at least my hd's seemed to working. Upon inspection it seems that the CPU cooler assembly became unexpectedly detached and the machine shut itself down to stop it setting on fire or something.
Since the part i need is apparently difficult to get hold of, and the mainboard (the faulty part is part of the board, not the cooler) is pretty old, nearly 3 years, its time for an upgrade so i've got some new parts ordered for midweek and until then i'm on my backup machine, which is awful and slow and probably wouldn't even load the mesh.
well i had another update ready, most of the panelling finished on the side and about to post it on sunday and my comp powered down. I tried booting it and it switched off halfway through loading windows - at least my hd's seemed to working. Upon inspection it seems that the CPU cooler assembly became unexpectedly detached and the machine shut itself down to stop it setting on fire or something.
Since the part i need is apparently difficult to get hold of, and the mainboard (the faulty part is part of the board, not the cooler) is pretty old, nearly 3 years, its time for an upgrade so i've got some new parts ordered for midweek and until then i'm on my backup machine, which is awful and slow and probably wouldn't even load the mesh.
At least your data wasn't corrupted (I hope so)! Last year I built a new machine from scratch. It took me about three month to realize that there was a nasty incompatibility between the RAM moduls and the mainboard that caused erratic data loss during hdd operations. Everytime I saved some of the files that were written to hdd became corrupt... and I saved lots of 3D data during that period.
I'm not so bothered about old parts breaking, though its an inconvenient time. but yeah data loss is what hurts the most, i don't think l'll have lost anything on the internal drives, but everything like this project is backed up on external drives so i should hopefully be ok.
Well, my components were meant to be delivered today, but they apparently forgot to order the parts...! I hope they turn up tomorrow as promised.
Anyway, i can model on this machine - with its mighty geforce 3 graphics card - i think i built a few of my older models with this. had an idea for a hypersonic fighter, could potentially be carried on board.. somewhere, figure that out later...:devil:
Posts
I can see it now...
FO: It was an honor serving with you captain...We killed those Akula's good didn't we sir?"
CAPT: We sure did...but those damn engineers....even with all our battle damage...if I could just see outside to find the damn runway...we'd live to brag about it!"
But even without the design is looking more and more beautiful with every update!
039-issac, that would certainly make it easier for people to copy it:D
sorceress21, noooo, not you again...;) i've never really thought that you fly this ship with a joystick or whatever, you just kinda tell it what to do and it does it for you. i guess you have a point with the dead stick landing scenario but most of the time windows would be useless. orbital or space operations or hypersonic flight, you don't need them. how many landings today are carried out automatically or with instruments?
Ok, you can fly a plane visually of course, well you can, i'd end up in the dirt. but It's really tough to fly a spacecraft by the seat of your pants, you often end up dead one way or another. It's all about numbers, not piloting skill.
Anyway, visually i don't want cockpit windows - they give the ship a face and i think it looks more hightech as a faceless craft. I'm probably sounding like i'm totally up myself, but i think it says something about the society the ship comes from, and that the ship itself might be a character in its own right, perhaps even able to operate autonomously. perhaps the ship even outranks everyone but the command staff. Something well explored in scifi but i've avoided before now in my projects. perhaps because now that really seems to be the way we're going in real life tech.
Pip, i always leave some room for surprises...:D
here are a couple of closeups of the hull, some of these lines are really too loose however and i'll have to go back and tighten them up and remove some of the wobblyness of the panels.
Not very many. Though autoland is an available system on heavy jets, 98% of the time the last 200ft. is hand flown. The runway and ILS system must be Cat III certified and the aircraft appropriately equipped. Even if the jet has the gear, the ground based equipment is likely not available as only a few airports in the world (few considering the total number) have a Cat III certified ILS approach. And even when I hand fly an ILS approach to minimums..if the boxes ain't working right....they do me no good.
Hmmm...landing 18C at KCLT. Wind 280 @ 15 gusting to 25 kts. Or dead stick an Airbus into the Hudson river....Naww, it's got nothing to do with pilot skill. C'mon Steve...tell that to Sully.
Pilots and pilot skill will be keeping people alive and safe for a long long time into the future.....
Now as far as your artistic reasons for no cockpit windows....can't argue that. Awesome work though..really.
My only furtherance, if I was an Akula Captain, and I knew i was going up against a crewed Ionia I'm going to focus my battle tactics of denying you use of your electronic eyes. Once those are eliminated, because my helmsman can still see out the window, no matter how much damage my ship has taken...as long as I have some weapons and maneuvering.....I win.
well thats today, and commercial aviation. talking a hundred, two hundred years... would you have a job? if so, would it not be totally different. not to mention that military are flying completely autonomous craft today. and whatever secret craft that could be 20+ years ahead of what we're used to.
i said you have a point about that type of landing. the numbers thing was about orbital and outerspace navigation.
and this thing would eat birds for lunch, vapourise em and spit them out the back. barely even burp.;)
rofl!!! BTW, I really like the idea of the Ionia being an UCSV....it works without argument or debate!! Fantastic concept!!!
uhhh... Unmanned Combat *something* Vehicle?
Its kind of like a HAL/discovery combination, it's meant to be crewed, but everything is run by the AI, which is *usually* fiercely loyal to its crew - which it would rely on for maintaining it - and again like a HAL, take over and make its own decisions to complete the mission if the command crew are incapacitated.
You feeling ok?
Beer,,,nuff said.
OMG Venus Wars is one of my favorite animes. I even have the soundtrack.
Gotta love hackers.
Little more irritating than an apologetic computer.
Nate, i can just imagine your avatar rocking out to that cheezy soundtrack;)
sorceress, hope you brought enough for everyone;)
Sandman, thanks.
here's some work on an engine nozzle, it has some thrust vectoring to offset the loss of an engine on the opposing side and something thats ended up looking a little like a roller blade, which is intended to stop the fins and nozzles impacting the groud on takeoff or landing.
http://www.igorstshirts.com/blog/conceptships/2009/ca_clark_5.jpg
Sly: Yeah I was reminded of that ship as well
Especially watch the pic where it's firing missiles, that's a good ref for when you're going to do beauty shots
Lun Ekranoplan
kinetic slugs can conceivably go on forever, until they hit something or get slowed by a gravity field(or for that matter sped up) lasers or mazers have a finite range based on the inverse square law(the more power in it the further it will go/how much power/radiation it will transfer/inflict to the target), missiles are the same as a kinetic slug, once the run out of fuel
and because of newtons laws it doesn't need to explode to kill you in space just has to punch through the hull and hit something critical(read:explosive:devil:)
but explosive gives you a sphere of damage that increases your odds of hitting your target
a single projectile hitting something 100m across from 1000km is like trying to drop a pin on a certain bit of dust, the math involved is very complex,add in a gravity field like in a orbital battle and it gets even harder, hopefully the ai or supercomputer can handle those calculations in enough time
just to point out the average human mark1 eyeball can realistically only percieve things out to 1000km in space, so visually acquiring a target that looks like a very small moving dot(hopefully black(read:stealth mode)) on a largely black environment, you have more odds of winning the lottery
just to give you lot an idea for scale
a 308 hunting rifle will put a round about a km down range before gravity makes it hit the ground
When I see them, books like "Starships from 2000 to 2100", "TTA" and others from Steven Caldwell, always comes to my mind. What do you think about an illustrated book in that stylle? For sure, I would buy one of them.
Atomic Rocket: Space War Introduction
Atomic Rocket: Space War: Detection
Atomic Rocket: Space War: Weapons
Atomic Rocket: Space War: Defenses
Atomic Rocket: Space War Warship Design
Atomic Rocket: Space War: Tactics
Go to Google
Type in 181,314,478,598,400 miles in kilometers
Google says:
181 314 478 598 400 miles = 2.91797368 Ã 10^14 kilometers
Well, not quite. Lasers and masers are coherent light, so they are not subject to the inverse square law. However, they are subject to diffraction. Diffraction reduces the power density of a laser somewhat more mildly than does the inverse square law, and becomes even milder as the frequency of the laser light goes up. The gritty equations are here:
Atomic Rocket: Space War: Weapons
There is also the problem of lightspeed lag, meaning that if you are one light-second away from your target, you are seeing where the target was one second ago, NOT where it is now. If the target is dodging, this makes it more difficult to hit.
But your main point is sound: spacecraft combat ranges are such that you probably could not see your opponent without a telescope. The TV Troups site calls this the Old School Dogfighting fallacy and the See The Whites Of Their Eyes fallacy.
We Now Return You to Your Regularly Scheduled Programming Still In Progress: Ionia Class - Allied Hunter/Killer
I've said before you could find any number of winged designs that have some similarity, real and fictional. if you compare the engines, they're totally different, that ship - its actually a shuttle on a detachable drive section - has a russian soyuz rocket look to it from behind.
As reference i tend to look at real world things and try to build an interesting form thats never been seen before but has an element of reality to it.
Meph, i'd probably lose the smoke trail, since it would be a real pain to do - looks cool - but these are fusion power hypersonic missiles and are probably too efficient to produce anything other than plasma. the current missile design is very simple but always seemed about the right size. and it'll probably be replaced with something like a hypersonic waveriding cruise missile. If i can figure out how that should look.
039-issac, Akima, I think you have many of the problems you have today... electronics would need to be hardened to resist EM pulses... eyeballs are not terribly useful in outer space combat and you're right that engagement distances would surely be gigantic in most circumstances. I think on tv & movies, the ranges are shown to be much smaller so thats where sorceress is coming from. Nothing wrong with that, thats what we're used to and it makes for more exciting battles.
It's all George lucas' fault . Coreographing his battles with WW2 clips. but i think whats overlooked is that when you have spacecraft capable of FTL by warping space, or using different dimensions then you instantly lose the need for days of tense manuvering and waiting.
Starship, yep thanks, i'd love to do something like that.
here's a really boring update showing how the intake splits to feed upper and lower engines sets... I should really have some kind of system of ramps to change the amount of gas allowed into the inlet, and also an armoured/heatsheild-ed covering that can be deployed but i can probably get away with not adding it, if i don't mention it on SFM... oh wait, damn.
well i had another update ready, most of the panelling finished on the side and about to post it on sunday and my comp powered down. I tried booting it and it switched off halfway through loading windows - at least my hd's seemed to working. Upon inspection it seems that the CPU cooler assembly became unexpectedly detached and the machine shut itself down to stop it setting on fire or something.
Since the part i need is apparently difficult to get hold of, and the mainboard (the faulty part is part of the board, not the cooler) is pretty old, nearly 3 years, its time for an upgrade so i've got some new parts ordered for midweek and until then i'm on my backup machine, which is awful and slow and probably wouldn't even load the mesh.
At least your data wasn't corrupted (I hope so)! Last year I built a new machine from scratch. It took me about three month to realize that there was a nasty incompatibility between the RAM moduls and the mainboard that caused erratic data loss during hdd operations. Everytime I saved some of the files that were written to hdd became corrupt... and I saved lots of 3D data during that period.
Anyway, i can model on this machine - with its mighty geforce 3 graphics card - i think i built a few of my older models with this. had an idea for a hypersonic fighter, could potentially be carried on board.. somewhere, figure that out later...:devil: