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.
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So far your work looks pretty good!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.