interesting. those striped windows remind me, a bit, of the scanning eye on a cylon. i would suggest scaling down the bridge section(on all three axes equally) and lengthening the propulsion section, in sketchup i would "push-pull" out the face on the back of the rearmost cone, i'm not sure what the right term would be in your software. would also suggest adding more detail to those torus sections.
spindly structures are to be expected on starships, with any normal rocket engine powered non-military vessel you want to minimize mass as much as possible(military ones needing armour and stronger structures to withstand greater accelerations). it might be hard to model but spindly stuff will look great once completed, just look at the ship in the first few minutes of avatar. with your use of toruses for holding the fuel, i think it would make sense to have something inward of the tanks, otherwise you are making part of the craft larger than needed which would mean extra mass if structure. you could put some extra habitation or cargo modules inward of the tori. as for solar sails i could pint you to a really great concept image of one, it's not a hard sci-fi design but it looks great. unfortunately i can't find the pic online but i know it appears in a guiness book of world records from some time in the last ten years, i remember seeing the image long ago.
It's similar only in that it shields the habitat section from hazardous radiation or whatever destructive forces that the drive unit generates. No nukes going off and no chemical reactions.
Yeah, I suppose it could be a colony ship. I was having a hard time to think what this one was for, and was just using a really generic description. I wasn't expecting the terraces until they happened. I guess I need to change the size of the ship, now.
I spent the last few days - on and off trying to get a hex pattern to work on the tanks - and it ends up looking like snake skin. Hopefully, a few adjustments will help.
And since there was talk about a stellar sail. (Wouldn't a solar sail have to be from Sol?)
Tag: 0000 033073-4473750
Type: stellar sail / CIB (Civilization in a Bottle)
Status: cruising (0.028c)
Location: between the Karo Oblaat pre-nova and Coru Septa 11024a / Coru Septa 11037ab systems
(Orion 048.79-03314.22)
Culture: unknown
Est. Age: ~130 years
Size: 84.6 km DIA
Nickname: reticle
i like what you've done with the last ship, it's come out pretty well compared to what i thought it might end up as. as for the next ship, i can see the sail element but none of the rest seems built yet. the hexagon pattern on the sail is cool , is the line along the middle something to do with folding it in? as for where the main hull goes will it hang behind or be pushed ahead of the main sail, to achieve much thrust it needs to be really small in comparison. as an interesting fact about solar sail like devices if you are trying to use one in our solar system to allow for a station to "hover" in space without orbiting ( hence staying on the same line as drawn from the sun to another star) it needs the same sail size per kilogram however far from the sun it is because both the gravitational inward force and the outward radiation pressure drop off as inverse square laws.
I'm thinking a payload of about two kilometers. That will be pretty hard to see. I figure this is the second of two sails. The first carried automated mining and manufacturing equipment to prepare the way and set up a supply depot for the second ship.
The second ship contains the equipment and materials to reconstitute the civilization. No suspended animation. Just genetic material storage and robots to produce and care for, and educate the children.
The sail has a rigid horizontal crosspiece and a rotating bar that opens and closes the sail. An electrical charge help the sail keep its shape.
The payload is now three ~2km long cylinders of doped water ice surrounding and shielding the colony equipment. It shields the equipment during travel, and provides fuel and reactant for the colony start-up.
The sail is probably too small for the payload, but oh, well.
This one's done. It's really hard to get the tension "cables" to show up.
:thumb: Most images of scifi stellar sailors don't even try to scale the sail plausibly. (DS9 Bajoran ship, I'm looking at you. Accusingly.) This image manages to give me a sense of a sail at an astronomic scale. See what I did there?
I remember thinking at the time, the Bajoran sail ship looked... striking. I also wondered how a station commander would have time to build something like that from scratch - even with replicators. And why wasn't it ever mentioned before?
Next:
Tag: 0000 018885-2015702
Type: space station
Status: salvaged, undergoing renovation
Location: Tonoru Vias Alpha
(Orion 020.11-22740.23)
Culture: Veku
Est. Age: 920 years
Size: 285m
Nickname: Tenscore Station
I rewatched that episode recently, and while Sisko was building, O'Brian asked why he wasn't using a power tool to shape a part. Sisko said he wanted to do the whole thing by hand. IMO, that means replicated parts are right out! So it does seem very unlikely he'd have time to build a ship, even if he used up all his accumulated leave time. IRL, people build their own airplanes in their spare time, but it usually takes a few years or more.
As for why it was never mentioned before, Sisko said the plans were about 800 years old. If our world was trying to rebuild after decades of occupation, how much attention would we pay to plans for a ship from 1200?
I meant why hadn't Sisko ever talked about his project? A guy I worked with was restoring a 50-something Mustang (well, it was a 20th century one, a least), and he went on, and on about that thing. People love talking about their hobbies.
I meant why hadn't Sisko ever talked about his project? A guy I worked with was restoring a 50-something Mustang (well, it was a 20th century one, a least), and he went on, and on about that thing. People love talking about their hobbies.
Same reason Garabaldi never talked about his motorcycle except the one episode of Babylon 5 that it appeared in: the (sub)plot required it.
must have failed to post last time i tried, so:
regarding the solar sail and your description on the previous page
electrical charge would be advised against, there are enough magnetic fields and cosmic rays in some parts of space that having a large charge on your ship would make it part of some complex "circuit" with nearby objects, bad for navigation, bad for electronics, bad for more or less anything else. all the rest of that makes really good sense though. a 2 stage colonisation process with two ships, logical. not carrying any living cargo, sensible. rotating bar to open the sail, good idea. one thing you might want to consider is the light source behind the sail because although solar sails can work a laser sail would be more effective if the civilisation launching it could spare the power.
now it's finished the sail looks good, can we see a more close-up shot of the habitation/cargo/payload modules or didn't you model them in much detail?
with the new ship, it's nice to see a station for once rather than a ship. it could use being a bit more "messy" though, imagine something built as a core and then new stuff stuck on later when needed, like a real port or settlement rather than a perfect plan.
Added a bajillion windows to the top deck, which is a park. The green areas are apartments and common areas. The large discs are support, storage, light manufacturing and commercial areas. The round things are emergency shelters.
Posts
(The hazy bit is the fuel tori, with the transparency turned up to max, to keep them out of the way.)
I have a basic design for something that could either be a stellar sail or a stellar collector power station. Never decided which.
I was thinking it would be hard to do, because it would be relatively small structures spread over a large area by other spindly structures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
And since there was talk about a stellar sail. (Wouldn't a solar sail have to be from Sol?)
Tag: 0000 033073-4473750
Type: stellar sail / CIB (Civilization in a Bottle)
Status: cruising (0.028c)
Location: between the Karo Oblaat pre-nova and Coru Septa 11024a / Coru Septa 11037ab systems
(Orion 048.79-03314.22)
Culture: unknown
Est. Age: ~130 years
Size: 84.6 km DIA
Nickname: reticle
The second ship contains the equipment and materials to reconstitute the civilization. No suspended animation. Just genetic material storage and robots to produce and care for, and educate the children.
The sail has a rigid horizontal crosspiece and a rotating bar that opens and closes the sail. An electrical charge help the sail keep its shape.
The sail is probably too small for the payload, but oh, well.
This one's done. It's really hard to get the tension "cables" to show up.
Next:
Tag: 0000 018885-2015702
Type: space station
Status: salvaged, undergoing renovation
Location: Tonoru Vias Alpha
(Orion 020.11-22740.23)
Culture: Veku
Est. Age: 920 years
Size: 285m
Nickname: Tenscore Station
As for why it was never mentioned before, Sisko said the plans were about 800 years old. If our world was trying to rebuild after decades of occupation, how much attention would we pay to plans for a ship from 1200?
Same reason Garabaldi never talked about his motorcycle except the one episode of Babylon 5 that it appeared in: the (sub)plot required it.
regarding the solar sail and your description on the previous page
electrical charge would be advised against, there are enough magnetic fields and cosmic rays in some parts of space that having a large charge on your ship would make it part of some complex "circuit" with nearby objects, bad for navigation, bad for electronics, bad for more or less anything else. all the rest of that makes really good sense though. a 2 stage colonisation process with two ships, logical. not carrying any living cargo, sensible. rotating bar to open the sail, good idea. one thing you might want to consider is the light source behind the sail because although solar sails can work a laser sail would be more effective if the civilisation launching it could spare the power.
now it's finished the sail looks good, can we see a more close-up shot of the habitation/cargo/payload modules or didn't you model them in much detail?
with the new ship, it's nice to see a station for once rather than a ship. it could use being a bit more "messy" though, imagine something built as a core and then new stuff stuck on later when needed, like a real port or settlement rather than a perfect plan.
I didn't get into much detail for the stellar sail payload. Mostly just some cylinders stuck together.