3DRealistic Ship Design

kedamono

This is my work in progress. A realistic, well, more realistic spaceship. The habs rotate and I will be adding a second counter rotating set for "balance". The leading side of each Hab has a Whipple shield. As I think about it, I'll have to add a second set of Whipple shields for when the ship is decelerating.

More future plans:

• An Engine section.
• Radiators. This also means coming up with a texture for when the radiators are in use.
• More Greebles.

LockeFP

If I were you, I would check out the ship from Defying Gravity, a one-season show that took a realistic viewpoint on space travel in the near future. The ship itself was done very well, and adheres to physics closer than any other ship I have seen in a TV series.

So far your work looks pretty good!

kedamono

Thanks LockeFP! I tried watching Defying Gravity and switched it off when they brought out the magnetic hair spray. I prefer the Discovery from 2001, the Venture Star from Avatar, and the Pegasus from Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets. These are much more realistic designs than the ship from Defying Gravity. Instead of putting everything into the Habs, they had the boat deck where everyone can walk around like it's a boat on water. The decks were parallel with the ship's line of thrust! First time they fire it up, everything hits the back wall of habs!

I understand that wire work is a pain, but a well designed ship doesn't need a bridge, just a place with to strap down for high G burns and you can run the ship from your handy hand-held device. They could have had two sets built like a multi-story building for the two habs.

Ah well, something I have to keep an eye out for.

kedamono

I've added most of the Whipple shields for the access tubes and for decel. Then I duplicated the rotating section, praying that Bryce doesn't crash because I had forgotten to save my work beforehand, and then I added it to the ship. :cool:

I still need to make one more Whipple shield for the nose of the ship. I'm debating on changing the textures on the fuel tanks. We'll see.

Falin

I started one of these once,lost the files i had on it, was a cross between the 2001 Discovery and several other designs, I made 2 large rings that counter spun to counter the inertial force of one as the Living rings. I still think a Command center is appropriate for being able to monitor several things at once. sure you could carry a pad around,m but what if you needed to watch 3 or 4 different systems at one time and/or the wireless link was down? command centers don't have to be manned 100% of the time, but they are useful things to have in emergencies.

publiusr

Yours actually makes more sense than Discovery, what with the thin spine. A ship is going to have to be mostly fuel and tankage to be truly realistic. Not sexy, no--but there it is.

Armondikov

LockeFP wrote: »

If I were you, I would check out the ship from Defying Gravity, a one-season show that took a realistic viewpoint on space travel in the near future. The ship itself was done very well, and adheres to physics closer than any other ship I have seen in a TV series.

I'm sure it was Howard Day that did something very, very similar, the Earth-Mars Transport Vehicle. But I can't find it anywhere on SFM. If anyone can track it down, it's an excellent piece to look at for all the little details that really sell a near-future and realistic space-craft.

A thin spine would still be flimsy. While the ship wouldn't have weight if it was in orbital free-fall, it would still have mass, and quite a bit judging by the size of those tanks. You still require force to move mass which puts stress on the joints regardless of whether it's in a vacuum or a weightless environment or not.

LockeFP

The reason I think the ship from Defying Gravity was well-constructed is that it made sense, especially when you think about what they were doing. Their whole purpose was to get from Earth to Venus, on a months-long journey. In this case, you would only fire the engines once during departure from Earth orbit, then once when leaving Venus orbit. The rest of the trip is spent in free-fall, just like the Apollo missions. And I'm fairly sure the astronauts would be trained to secure all objects before initial thrust.

Of course, if your ship is interstellar, you would need to make course corrections, and for that you would need to use the engines multiple times. But you could still have everything secured prior to ignition.

Falin

publiusr wrote: »

Yours actually makes more sense than Discovery, what with the thin spine. A ship is going to have to be mostly fuel and tankage to be truly realistic. Not sexy, no--but there it is.

Actually Discovery made quite a bit of sense considering it's mission was to go from earth to Jupiter, the living section was up front, the engines were in back with their fuel tanks and in between was a long tube with cargo pods attached. Defying Gravity did the same thing, except they had the pod rotatable around the axis to a singular access point from within. Both ships were designed for a singular engine push to get going and then a singular engine push to return, you wouldn't need a lot of fuel for that. pretty much any ship like this is going to be intersystem, go from point Earth to Point B and back. There's really no way to make a realistic ship with modern tech that can go between systems. we just don't have the tech to really handle that yet.

kedamono

Falin wrote: »

I started one of these once,lost the files i had on it, was a cross between the 2001 Discovery and several other designs, I made 2 large rings that counter spun to counter the inertial force of one as the Living rings. I still think a Command center is appropriate for being able to monitor several things at once. sure you could carry a pad around,m but what if you needed to watch 3 or 4 different systems at one time and/or the wireless link was down? command centers don't have to be manned 100% of the time, but they are useful things to have in emergencies.

Well, the way I look at it, if you're flying a cargo or passenger ship, you really don't need a bridge, just a really good workstation. Most ships would be highly automated and unless you really needed to run your ship by hand, (good luck on that too), the control interface is pretty much point and click. Looking at modern "glass cockpit" designs, the path is to reducing unnecessary information and only presenting important of needful information.



Too much information can overload an operator. Letting the ship's computer prioritize the information can reduce the overload and present the really important information. You only need a decent workstation anywhere on the ship to run the ship.

LockeFP

Glass cockpits don't necessarily remove any information that isn't present in something like a B-24 cockpit. They just reduce the number of instrument panels needed to show you what is what. Fly-by-wire has reduced some of the actual controls, but as for the instruments, they are all there at the touch of a button. Especially in commercial jetliners and cargo aircraft with glass cockpits. There is no way we will ever truly give up control of our deaths to a computer. Just as even the most sophisticated automation systems can be overridden, you're always going to need the ability to fly by the seat of your pants. Even in space.

Falin

kedamono wrote: »

Well, the way I look at it, if you're flying a cargo or passenger ship, you really don't need a bridge, just a really good workstation. Most ships would be highly automated and unless you really needed to run your ship by hand, (good luck on that too), the control interface is pretty much point and click. Looking at modern "glass cockpit" designs, the path is to reducing unnecessary information and only presenting important of needful information.

Too much information can overload an operator. Letting the ship's computer prioritize the information can reduce the overload and present the really important information. You only need a decent workstation anywhere on the ship to run the ship.

well not saying the command center has to be the size of the Bridge on an Imperial star destroyer, but you'll need a central interface room to handle emergencies in a more expedited way. most likely on these long range, direct path ships, it wouldn't need a lot. if you add a "lander" to the ship to be used when you get to your location, you might want a Mission control room to handle the more complex operations. the one on Defying Gravity was a bit large, the one in 2001 was about right for the tech of the time. what I love about the discovery the use of the Cargo containers along the spline and the crew was really only in a fraction of the ship, the one in defying gravity used this approach too, but made the spine fatter and a corridor and had the cargo pods rotate around it and accessible from within. a little more complex and as they say, the more moving parts, the more risk of failure, especially with thsie airlocks to the cargo containers.

I do like thinking about near future designs and what would be entailed.

kedamono

OK, and I just started on the ship's engine. I'm basing it on a design from the Atomic Rocket's Engine Page. I'm not sure if it's going to be high thrust engine. If it is, then I have to add gimbals to the rotating arms. You want the floor of the habs to be at right angles to the perceived acceleration.

Armondikov

The engine is looking good. You've definitely found the right place for inspiration, that is the hardest of the hard when it comes to sci-fi.

Falin

Nice site, whenever I flop back to realistic, I like to look at This Site, he's got some really cool designs and lot's of details for Near future stuff, good inspirations

kedamono

Some more work on the engine bits. Just following the basic design I've seen elsewhere.

kedamono

More work on the engine, though it's not lining up exactly right. I may have to fiddle.

tonygardner

Looks good so far, I love this near future kind of stuff. And I agree the Pegasus from Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets is way better than the ship from Defying Gravity.

SKP

How refreshing to see something not based on sea going ships or dragonflies or lobsters or whatever.
A couple of the cool ideas about Avatar's Venture Star are, 1) that instead of the motors pushing, which would require a lot of compression stability in the spinal truss, they pulled and for a large structure there is a lot of advantage to using tension instead of compression, and 2) that the debris shields were swapped from the front to the back at midpoint turnover, so saving mass and therefore energy, though I guess the debris shields stayed where they were and the ship turned over behind it.

kedamono

I love seeing spaceships that are not flying boats. USS Enterprise? Boat. Battlestar Galactica? Boat. Human vessels in Babylon 5? Mostly spaceships with the aliens flying boats.

And by boat, I mean that the decks of the ship are laid out like it was a boat, parallel to the thrust of the ship, instead of at a right angle to the thrust. Oh, and they love to put port holes on battleships.

You know what a porthole is, beside a structural weak spot? It's a hole in your armor for lasers to get through.

SKP

You're right about deck orientation though I suppose trekkies et al will claim "of course the crew don't hit the back wall when the ship accelerates because the gravity realignment field takes care of that" or some such script-writerese. Must be great to have an unlimited energy supply from some elemental source not yet featured in the periodic table. But lasers, weapons in general, and armour? What interplanetary or interstellar ship is going to be able to afford that in their energy budget? If we ever see such vessels they will inevitably be almost flimsy by our earthbound intuitive standards, though possibly with a small hardened refuge for crew protection during solar flares and other emergencies.

And another thing. Space battles with ships in the sort of proximity you'd have had between wooden square riggers shooting iron cannonballs? Please... We already have out-of-sight fire-and-forget munitions.