Small cargo ship

[chuck_starchaser]

Possibly for my own mod, if it happens...
Very early shot; not even 5% of it.
Thingy on top is the pilot's quarter, on top of a tower that isn't there yet. The thing below is part of the cargo hull: The pressurized portion. Non-pressurized cargo hulls attach to the sides. Nothing there yet.
The round ring at the back is where the engine will attach. Just one engine, but huge. Actually, the cooling rads will be huge.
There will be a lot of maneuvering jets.



Here's the floor plan:



The horizontal step ladder perhaps warrants an explanation. With no gravity, it serves as something to get a grip. But when the ship is accelerating (almost half the time), it creates artificial gravity that pulls you towards the back. And when the ship deccelerates, it turns around to do so, so the direction of the artificial gravity is always towards the back.



Construction zone.
That door is a pressure safety lock. Closes from both sides. At the top left are heavy gauge ribbon wires for the magnetic grip. The hose on the right is to suck the air inside so the door keeps shut tight. The recessed lever is an emergency override to open it if the automatic system is faulty.

13,200 tris so far; it will probably be 100k tris when it's finished.

Here's the blender file:
http://www.deeplayer.com/dan_w/NewMod/s ... go/wip.zip

[Halleck]

Interesting design. It will be neat to watch this model take shape...

[chuck_starchaser]

This will be no beauty contestant, though; purely "form follows function"

[chuck_starchaser]

Update...
Got 3 chairs from home depot and a TV. Notice the thickness of the front window glass. There will be an armored visor that closes over the window for protection from micrometeorites, when the pilot isn't looking out. On the back window too.

[Ryder P. Moses]

It might be a little late, but from a practicality perspective it may have been better to arrange the crew habitats in a ring around the ship rather than in a tower format. The design of a line of rooms facing forward is an atavism from cars and airplanes, vehicles where forward is perpendicular to the direction of movement rather than parallel. It's got some serious problems in space, not the least of which is the inherent risk of falling during a thrust. Not just people, either, but any object, and since unsecured stuff tends to float around in zero G the risk of that is extremely high.

Sure, you can instill security protocols out the arse for that, but if you've got frequent space travel sooner or later someone is going to forget to tie down a crescent wrench or something and next thing you know it's fallen down the central shaft at 3-5G, punched through the rear wall, depressurized the hull and killed the crew, and you've got thousands of tons of out-of-control cargo ship ready to plow into whatever inhabited location the thing was headed for at some ridiculous speed. These things generally have to be designed with the assumption that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and it'll all go wrong simultaneously.

A possible alternative might be to design your craft something like this:
[img]http://www.penguinbomb.com/donate/vs_mo ... pschem.jpg[/img[

The 'donut' rotates fast enough to provide 1G of acceleration, with a padded accessway that leads to a hall in the center of the ship from which you can safely reach the gravityless portions of the vessel. In addition, launch chairs, consoles, and anything else you particularly need to always be upright are mounted inside the donut on ring bearings perpendicular to the donut and aligned with the line of thrust (parallel to the red bits, say). That way, when the ship is thrusting, all these objects smoothly pivot to face the new 'down', which is now backwards rather than at a 90* angle to the ship. This is a much safer and more convenient mode of travel; there's always gravity of a sort, good enough to allow for extended periods of travel, unsecured objects will simply slide along the smooth inner wall along with everything else and not provide significant safety hazards (although large objects might still be dangerous), there's nowhere for things to fall to. This also allows for a more even distribution of weight- everything's arranged evenly from the center point of the ship, and if there is any serious misdistribution of hardware in the habitat the rotation will help compensate for that. It also has one really important advantage over the 'tower' layout if you're flying a nuclear-powered ship of any description- with the crew section of the ship low down into the profile of the vehicle, the radiation shield is much more effective and doesn't have to be nearly so large, and that is a big chunk of your mass right there.

[chuck_starchaser]

A possible alternative might be to design your craft something like this:

Good idea there; my next cargo ship will be like that.
Points well taken, but I'll forge ahead with this ship as is. There's ways to defend it:
1) Having a longitudinal arrangement minimizes frontal cross section, which minimizes probabilities of hitting a micrometeroite. Sure, micrometeorites could come from any direction, but their speeds are well within the range of 100 km / sec. This ship, after accelerating continuously for a week, will be going a lot faster than that. Let's see: at 0.3 G, or 3 m/s^2. There's 3600 seconds in an hour; 86400 in a day; 604,800 in a week; so times 3 = 1.8 million, so 1800 km/s. Micrometeorites hit pretty hard front-side, at that speed.
2) The forward cabin seat is where you sit when you're leving port and the tugs are pushing you at 0.001 G, and you may need to smile for a pic, or impress some chick. After that, you let the autopilot do its thing and watch TV, read books, or do advanced trading and itenerary planning while sitting comfy in the living room.
3) Spinning the ship to create artificial gravity is good; and like I said, next ship will be like that; but this ship is a speedster: Has a huge engine that can push it at 0.3G continuous, so that's enough gravity in this case. Only around the middle of the trip the engine turns off, the ship spends a few days turning around, and then turns the engine on again, to deccelerate for the second half of the trip. So, there's artificial gravity most of the time.
4) The engine being huge, it takes a couple of hours to ramp up to full thrust, so loose things will fall very gradually. and there are sliding doors built into the walls, even where the depressurization safety lock doors are. And those sliding doors are made of a translucent, tough plastic. The windows' glass is 50 cm (2 feet) thick.
5) Shielding mass is proportional to the area that needs to be covered. Anyhow, only the bedroom and living room need heavy shielding.
6) There will be construction-crane-looking things with weights that can slide up and down and horizontally to compensate any imbalance in the ship's moment of inertia.

[klauss]

Gorgeous interiors... in that they actually look like ship interiors.

I guess your mod will be the first to benefit from walkable ship interiors.
- and autopilot - and complex scripted GUIs.

Perhaps by looking at your mod, people will understand that all that work on GUI stuff is not just eye candy... but also a powerful storytelling/gameplay addition.

[chuck_starchaser]

Glad to hear you like it, klauss. Doing a lot of browsing around for Ion, Pulsed Plasma and VASMIR engine diagrams and pics of prototypes, now. I want the engine's general layout and greebles to be at least inspired in actual technologies.

[Bodo]

I guess your mod will be the first to benefit from walkable ship interiors

It looks more like that would be floatable ship interiors, since the layout suggest's that no artificial gravity is present (I don't like the artificial-gravity-out-of-nowhere anyways, but it'll be hard to do simulate moving around in 0-G)

[chuck_starchaser]

There will be both: zero G flying around, AND artificial gravity; but not out of nowhere; rather out of the engines accelerating the ship forward, or deccelerating the ship, --also "forward", since the ship will have to turn around to point the engine in the forward direction, in order to deccelerate. And it will be either accelerating or deccelerating most of the time, so the "artificial gravity" is there most of the time. That's why there's a horizontal ladder...

[Bodo]

I see... nice thinking.

[chuck_starchaser]

Takin shape ...

[Accu-Accelerated]

Looking nice! But, what are those weird-looking gear shaped things at the very front supposed to be? Are they radiator fins for cooling?

[chuck_starchaser]

Haha.. .. That's the back, sorry; I should have kept the same view as before. Front is towards the right, in this pic.

The gear-like things are twin nuclear fission power plants. No fusion on this ship; it's too small for that. The fins are for cooling of the casing. The tanks hold hydrogen. Hydrogen gas for the bigger one in the middle, liquid hydrogen in the smaller ones. The main hydrogen tank is inside the hull; these tanks are just local storage for pressure stabilization. The piece of metal aching between the tanks and the power plants is a radiation shield. Between the hydrogen tanks and the hull is the deep cooling system, for re-liquifying boiled up hydrogen and cooling it down to about 100 degrees kelvin. The flat facets are active heat radiation devices with better than black body radiation characteristics. They will look like gold when they are cool, but become emissive at the blue wavelength when active. The little greebles are the electronics to control active radiation parameters, I suppose

This ship is not hi-tech; it's like the Harley of cargo ships. The same hydrogen that is used for cooling the superconductors, after it gasifies, is used as fuel for the plasma. Part of it, anyways; and part of it is re-chilled.

I'm just starting on the plasma chamber for the engine proper; I'll post an update once it takes definite shape.

[chuck_starchaser]

Okay, here's the full length of the powerplant AND thruster; and the ship is pointing to the left again.


Hi Rez

Nowhere nearly done though; now I have to install the pumps, the plumbing, the liquid/gas separator centrifugues, solenoids, gauges, and the electrical stuff...

[Halleck]

Links are broken.

[chuck_starchaser]

Some hickup with my server, I noticed; seem to be working now.
Here's the pic again:



Hi Rez

Nowhere nearly done though; now I have to install the pumps, the plumbing, the liquid/gas separator centrifugues, solenoids, gauges, and the electrical stuff...

[Bodo]

Chuck, I absolutely LOVE it!!

[Halleck]

That engine is frickin' huge!

I think you are on to something, this ship just plain looks massive. It feels larger than, say, a clydesdale.

[Bodo]

if you look at the thread title, it's a small one

But this is going into the direction I would have gone if I would have any graphical skills. It just doesn't make sense to breach interplanetary distances in a bloody nutshell, not if you want to stick to achievable technology.

[zaydana]

That is really cool. Now what you need is to put increasingly more detailed radiator fins on in the higher LODs.

[chuck_starchaser]

Haha, a Clydesdale is like 5 kilometers long. This ship is 270 meters long right now, and will be 300 after I add stuff at the front. This will probably be the smallest ship you can buy that can take you to the outer planets within a lifetime. Smaller ships will be chemical, mostly, and larger ones will use fusion energy sources.

Indeed, no matter how you look at it, if you want to be able to go to Pluto you'll end up having to BE 90% engine + fuel; unless future technology ends up being like "magic" and it doesn't seem like things are going in that direction. Most great scientific theories AND inventions happened decades ago. Since then, mostly we've been qualifying and refining and perfecting, but nothing much is really that new. We've got ion engines, now, yes, but the invention dates back to like the 30's.

But also, this is a speedster as cargo ships go. They are low-tech, cheap to buy second-hand, but fuel costs kill you so you only take high-paying rush jobs. It can push a continuous 1/3 of G accel with a light load, at which accel/deccel rate can cover an AU in 5 days. Pluto is 40 AU's away. Square root of 40 is 6 and a bit. 6 and a bit times 5 is slightly more than a month to get to Pluto. In my mod there won't be spec or warp or wormholes; but there will be some kind of alarm clock like in Fallout. You'll spend sometime each "day" of game-time doing advanced trading and mission-taking, and planning the next trip; and new missions come up all the time, and you want to maximize your cargo so you want to catch all the ones going wherever you're going next, so there will be plenty to do on a daily basis, besides standard ship maintenance routines, reading the news bulletins, emailing with npc's, etc.

No more detail on the fins, Zay, as it would not help: since they aren't air-flow fins, but rather purely thermal radiation fins, which lose efficiency from mutual heating very rapidly as you space them any closer.
That's why I have dual cooling stages: First a local radiation stage, and then the deep cooling via circulating liquid hydrogen, which uses the active radiation stage, near the hull.

[Bodo]

In my mod there won't be spec or warp or wormholes;

So you'll restrict yourself to one solar system? Allthough I like the aproach you're taking alot, that would be a pitty...

[chuck_starchaser]

Oh, no pity at all, there will be 2 fully inhabited planets with atmospheres, and then many colonies on planets and moons. Four gas giants with plenty of moons. 3 asteroid belts with mining operations. Plenty of space stations, and space elevator stations. And planets will have many starports and cities, and space stations will be like cities as well, with many places to go.

[zaydana]

hmm, i wasn't thinking so much of how much heat would be radiated, more the illusion of largeness.

also... i think the single solar system approach is probably good, it gives everything you do a lot more detail and makes it just as interesting as many not detailed systems. Besides, more systems could be added later if really needed.