3DIon Drive Mars Ship (realistic space)

Tea Monster

I'm making this as a sort of semi-realistic Mars ship. It uses ion engines and the main hab module is a Bigelow Aerospace inflatable module.

The lander is the old Mars Excursion Module as envisioned by NASA.

-=sAs=-

Nice to see another realistic space stuff!
Nice job so far. You plan animate this?

Tea Monster

No plans as such to animate it. I've been looking over some threads over at nasaspaceflight.com where they were talking about new ion engines and solar panels that they are developing and I thought I'd see what it would look like in flight.

I might develop a cargo version without the bigelow hab but with two Mars cargo landers.

I might develop the MEM a bit more as well. Not sure yet.

evil_genius_180

That's really cool. It looks like a concept for something that any of the world's space agencies could be considering sending to Mars.

-=sAs=-

I would like to see MEM too. :P

Stormcloud

looking good - but you might consider the EM drive for your engines - still slightly futuristic but nasa has now tested it ina vacuum and it still seems to work so starting to look like shawyer isn't a completre fraud afterall - hopefully they will fly it in space soon and finally see for certain if it will work as a space drive

Tea Monster

Yes. I might just develop the MEM a bit. Quite a nice ship she was.

Stormcloud - I'm very excited to see what happens with the EM drive. I'm hoping it will work out as forecast. If it does, space travel will be very very different from what we now imagine it to be. The ships will be very different looking as well. This ship isn't based on that technology though.

Armondikov

A few years back, Howie Day did an Earth-Mars vehicle that's well worth checking out if you're doing this. The thread might even still be around on SFM somewhere: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvXjmUcNWPA http://69.195.124.90/~hedfiles/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/HSM03.jpg

I wouldn't get too excited about the EMdrive. As someone else pointed out "Even if the reported thrusts are genuinely a new phenomenon, this really seems like planning a transatlantic air flight based on a successful test of a paper plane." - and that's still a huge "even if". The only explanation provided is effectively Star Trek jargon and not actual physics, and there are still massive discrepancies and eyebrow-raising issues such as the drive supposedly measuring thrust even when it was deliberately broken (suggesting the measurement is an artefact - contrast with faster-than-light neutrinos for a moment) and the complete lack of proper review in a serious journal. There's a lot of (bad) pop-science wetting itself over it at the moment, but very little actual science.

Stormcloud

i dont think anyone yet knows why they work so intentionally breaking it doesn't really have much relevance - the important factor is that they have now been shown to work in a vacuum - as for mission planning at this stage... i dont know all it would take is one test flight to conclusively prove it works and then its an slightly more powerful version of the ion drive but doesn't require propellant

Tea Monster

Wow, thanks for that link! I'll look that up. The look and feel of that one is amazing though. Nice materials as well

I'm not going to get excited about EM drives until they've been properly proven by flying. Planning missions is (IMHO) premature until they at least figure out how it works