Small cargo ship

[Halleck]

Wow. The aft section looks like something you might see sitting on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral. Hopefully you will take that as a compliment.

The one thing that I don't understand about this ship is why the crew area is raised so far above the cargo hold. What's the problem with having it closer?

[chuck_starchaser]

Yeah, this engine design (VASIMR) has little in common with current chemical designs, but the exhaust bell looks pretty similar, and while present engines don't have coils around the exhaust, they do have pipes and other greebles which this engine also has, so the exhaust section ends up looking pretty similar.

I made the tower tall for the sake of better line of sight. I know this isn't supposed to be critical, and there will be a number of closed circuit cameras and screens in the cockpit; and the fact that the ship autopilots and autodocks would further argue against a tall tower. But you could say the same about modern sea-going ships, not to speak of aircraft carriers: They got cameras, radar, GPS... and yet look at them: all have their nav rooms raised pretty high.

Besides, below the pilot's level there will be two levels of passenger space. And passengers like to have windows. (At least I do; whenever I fly I ask for a window seat. I can't even understand people that just want to sleep on planes; for me it's like such a great opportunity to see the world from above the cloud layers, I can't miss a minute of it.)

Sure, in WC and Vegastrike, passengers go in the cargo, together with the plutonium and the cookies, and in Fronteer you can convert cargo space to passenger space, but in my mind this wouldn't work: If you look at modern shipping, the crew don't even want to know what's in the hold. To know is to give up plausible deniability. The crew don't go near the hold; let alone passengers, who might include a psycho wanting inject LSD into the oranges. And converting hold space to passenger space, methinks, is out of the question, as it takes a lot of facilities to support passenger space. It has to be built into the ship, have a quarter-decent view, and be well separate from the hold; --or not be there at all.

(And, by the way, the hold would probably be pressurized with nitrogen, rather than air; to help maintain the freshness of consumables, and avoid rusting.)

[chuck_starchaser]

Allright; somebody, can't remember who, posted a complaint that every ship seems to look like a flying dick.

Rejoice! Here's a flying pair of tits



Next is the maneuvering thrusters...

[Halleck]

Ouch, looks pointy.

FYI chuck, I found a workaround for the draw distance issue: select everything and scale it down to fit within the grid.

[chuck_starchaser]

It is pointy, well, not too pointy..



... but when this ship is half way on its way to Pluto, having accelerated at 0.3 G's for two weeks continuously, and reaching a peak velocity of 1800 km per second, don't stand in front of the pinchy thing...

Yeah, been thinking about scaling it down; but I'm kind of attached to using meters as my unit... Ha! Come to think of it, I can save the file, and scale down just for the rendering... ... Great idea; thanks!

EDIT:
Found reference pics for attitude thrusters!







EDIT2:

Here they sell them...
http://cs.space.eads.net/sp/SpacecraftP ... sters.html
Wonder if they take PayPal...

EDIT3:
Okay, no, seriously...

Here's a propellant tank:




Here's their 400 newton model main assembly:



Fill and drain valves... whatever the heck that means...



Here's a schematic drawing:



And here's the "tubes and fittings":



Now, what was I talking about?
Can't remember.
Anyways, here's the PIA (Propellant Isolation Assembly)



I suppose we could have non-isolationist attitude thrusters...
Yeah, I always wondered what a pressure transducer looked like. Here's one:



Propellant Filter:



And, last but not least, a "pyro valve":



Looks like I'm all set. Now, where's the assembly drawing?
Hmm... no assembly drawing...
But here's a pic of the boys integrating the oxidizer tank:



Without an assembly drawing, I'm not buying, tho.


EDIT 4:
Now this is what I was looking for:

Thruster used on the Arienne 5...



This is RITA, ion thrusters on the Artemis satellite.



My cargo ship could use ion attitude thrusters in addition to chemical ones, come to think of it, for very minor adjustments during the cruise. It would have to use chemical ones for docking maneuvers, and to do the turnaround trip and begin deccelerating, but very minor corrections, little ion thrusters would rock.

Ha! External view of the attitude thrusters on ESA's ARD (Atmospheric Reentry Demonstrator):



Now this is what I call "thruster cluster", used by ESA's ATV, an automated craft that visits the ISS and gives it a push, from time to time...



There's a lot more to thruster cluster than meets the eye, such as...



... but we never saw that, did we?

This is what we all like to think of when we say thruster: Nice retro bronze works, like the one that pushed Galileo for 14 years...



Here's another retro style:



Besides the main, 400N thruster, Galileo had a dozen little 10N ones, like this baby:



Now, in the pic below, you can see Galileo's main thruster at the bottom, and if your eyes have good resolution, you might see 4 of the 12 little ones, top left...



Back to ESA, here's the thruster used on the Mars Express, and, finally, we got an assembly drawing...



Once you finish putting it together it should look like this:



The Master Chef is having a look at it:



He probably thinks it's a wok...
And, whaddya know, we forgot to put in the heat shield:



Wonder if it's really green... looks pretty cool ...

Lunar Sat's attitude thrusters:



Hey! Those two little dark thingies in the middle look like Pyro Valves to me...
Here's the schematic:




THIS IS IT !!!! :


HI REZ

Those are the thrusters that were used in the Mir station...



Those are the ones I'm gonna model.
And by the way, I found more info than I was bargaining for!
Cosmonaut demoing the Mir's john with his pants on...



Mir's main control room:


HI REZ

EVA Egress Hatch:



HI REZ

And the living room:


HI REZ

Yeah, this is the mother of all Mir space station pic gallery sites:
http://nowscape.com/star_city/star_city1.html
No, it's not; it's a cosmonaut training center; a mockup of MIR...
Those thrusters were a fake...

The quest continues...

Cool looking, 15N, satellite thrusters:



Apollo command module attitude thrusters:



HI REZ

Well, these aren't attitude thrusters but they are thrusters, anyhow


HI REZ

You can count the polys on those exhausts; I guess the forgot to "set them smooth"...

Attitude thrusters firing on the ISS:



A view of the thrusters on the Zvezda module of the ISS:



Well, kind of off-topic, but just to save a link to the pic; I'll need it later for inspiration for the cockpit controls... Here's Endeavor's dash:



Endeavor's maneuvering jets... covered up, though...



Fuel lines to thrusters layout in the Ulyses probe:



Cassini diagram showing the main and attitude thrusters:



Here's the thrust chamber of upcoming Vinci engine



Here it's shown on top of the exhaust cone



Here's a pamphlet about Vinci; I'll be reading it for a while;
later...
http://cs.space.eads.net/sp/PDF/vinci.pdf

[chuck_starchaser]

BTW, I'm starting to understand this diagram I posted earlier



Well, if you pump the fuel and oxygen out of the tanks the pressure
in them would come down; so they keep helium in a separate tank
at very high pressure, 275 atmospheres, so that it doesn't take too
much space, and they release it into the fuel and oxygen tanks to
maintain pressure there. But that means, in zero gravity, that the
fuel and oxygen will come out full of little helium bubbles they need
to remove, ergo the "fuel isolation" stuff.

[Halleck]

I wonder if, in the future, someone might look back on these designs and consider them to be similar to "steampunk". That is- constructing futuristic systems using only the technology of a period (like building a supercomputer from the components of a babbage difference engine.)

I imagine that future technology will afford some degree of miniturization at the very least.

[Ryder P. Moses]

"Can" and "should" are very different things. Low-tech is a good thing when you're dealing with extreme conditions; our fancy integrated components and smart regulators and nanotubule networks and all might get the job done with much less mass and much less fuss, but they're also unpredictable, prone to random breakage, and when they go wrong you are utterly fucked- on the flip side, any retard with some duct tape can fix a break in a steel pipe well enough to limp home on it.

[chuck_starchaser]

Then you have someone like Arthur C. Clarke that basically came up with the idea for satellites, geosynchronous satellites, space stations, and introduced the public to such arcane concepts at the time (1930's) as gravity assist slingshots, aerobraking, space elevators ... To give you an idea, at the end of this book he speculates about life on other plantes and postulates that there's probably plant life on the moon. That's how long ago he was writing all this.
So what makes some authors so accurately prophetic, and some others just produce steampunk? Lack of research. What makes many old scifi movies be pieces of crap? Lack of research. And notice that more often than not the error is with overestimating future technologies, not the other way around.

[Halleck]

Point taken. Still, the time period in question probably allows for a bit more extrapolation of current technologies, unless you're planning to set this in the near future (50-100 years I would imagine.)

If that's the case, I would consider all this to be highly realistic expectations for the level of technology.

[chuck_starchaser]

About distant futures, it's like trying to predict the weather on February 16 th, 3770. Who knows? But it's always safer NOT to assume breakthroughs that we have no idea how they might happen in the first place.
Just because there are hundreds of scifi books with time-travel in 'em, it doesn't make it an iota more likely to ever happen. And if you add thousands more sci-fi's about time travel it would make no difference; and that's the cardinal mistake most sci-fi authors make --if indeed it's a "mistake" and not lack of care--: They copy one another, instead of reading science books and mags.

Now, there are imponderables. Who could have predicted, before the age of personal transportation, that 1950's cars would have wings? Nobody is who. Yet there you got them, old, heavy as a septic tank Impalas with big wings at the back, and every desirable car had to have them, including the Batmobile. Is it any wonder that when sci-fi literature exploded, back in the 50's, many space-ships would have wings?
Luckily, sci-fi literature has moved forward, but then came space games, moving at FTL speeds backwards...

Well, hey; just like JackS said Vegastrike isn't trying to be prophetic, I'll say Tadpole isn't *hoping* to be prophetic, but it's gonna try, at least.
I mean, there's a whole genre in sci-fi called "hard" sci-fi. So, where's the equivalent in gaming?
And it's not that hard: Look at flight sims. Some are so damned close to realistic the airforces of the world have adopted them for pilot training, prior to time on expensive simulators. Why can't the same thing be done with a space game?

[chuck_starchaser]

Actually, come to think of it, someone could have predicted wings on cars. Or sort of. Just by looking at economic and cultural trends. The 1950's were the age of wastefulness. Resource extraction and processing, particularly metals and oil, had been fueled by WW2, and still on the upswing more than public demand for goods, and that's a recipi for push marketing and a function follows form philosophy in manufacturing, epithomized by the adding wings to the backs of cars. The population explosion that ensued should have tipped a keen observer that wings on cars would disapper by the 70's. Not to speak of the growth of Japan as a world supplier of form follows function. But if the Japanese knew austerity for lack of land, the Chinese know it even more so, for excessive population; and they are becoming the manufacturing plant of the world for that reason.
They are more likely to conquer space than NASA, the ESA, the Russians and the Japanese put together, in spite of the gap in expertise; precisely because they need the resources that space has to offer, and know how to do things at low cost.

But then again, who knows? Once space mining begins in earnest, there might be a new age of wastefulness...

[Ryder P. Moses]

Once space mining begins in earnest

Heh.



It's a whole lot easier to make predictions for the distant future, really. By the time anyone's got real factual knowledge to prove you wrong with, nobody'll care about what you said anyway, and if anyone even remembers you as likely as not you'll be treated as the next Nostradamus, even your most blatantly absurd ideas being taken absolutely seriously by endless hordes of morons.

The near future... hell, anyone who knows much about what's going on now can successfully invalidate your thesis. No fun at all. Or rather, lots of fun, but only if you do a lot of research and are relentlessly cynical enough to always be right.

[chuck_starchaser]

but only if you do a lot of research and are relentlessly cynical enough to always be right.

Thing is, you don't do any research at all, pal. Do you?
I'm the most cynical guy on the face of the earth; what has that got to do with recognizing the value of a piece of rock in space? Believing that the future will follow the money is not contradictory to cinicism.
Well, perhaps believing that some nation will be smart enough to know where the money is, is...

If [asteroid] Eros is typical of stony meteorites, then it contains about 3% metal. With the known abundance's of metals in meteorites, even a very cautious estimate suggests 20,000 million tonnes of aluminium along with similar amounts of gold, platinum and other rarer metals.In the 2,900 cubic kms of Eros, there is more aluminium, gold, silver, zinc and other base and precious metals than have ever been excavated in history or indeed, could ever be excavated from the upper layers of the Earth's crust.
That is just in one asteroid and not a very large one at that. There are thousands of asteroids out there.
................................................
If you wanted to mine only a section of Eros at a time then a huge solar energy collector - a sheet only a few kilometres in size - could collect enough energy from sunlight to power a smelting plant on the surface of Eros.
These are all "guesstimate" figures. But they serve to demonstrate just how plentiful are the resources of the Solar System, in terms of minerals, metals and energy, once we decide to go out and get them.

Estimated value of Eros: 20,000 BILLION dollars... (Yep, 20 trillion)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/401227.stm
Go ahead and tell me it would cost a few billions to get started...

Here's a list of Delta-V's to a few asteroids and moons. Notice particularly Nereus...
http://www.permanent.com/a-target.htm

UK begins prospecting pretty soon, although they paint it as a science mission, which in many ways it is; and sell it on the basis of studying how to deflect the astoroids from hitting Earth; but none of all those asteroids they plan to visit are any threat to Earth for at least several thousand years...
http://www.esa.int/gsp/completed/neo/simone_execsum.pdf

Not to be left behind, NASA's more fordwardly named "Near Earth Asteroid Prospector (NEAP)":
http://www.spacedev.com/newsite/templat ... 1&subSel=3
Which was being privately funded by SpaceDev LLC
http://www.spacedev.com/newsite/templat ... 1&subSel=3
But they ran out of money for the project, so it's shelved; but the company is solvernt and just bought out Starsys Research Corporation. They build spacecraft for NASA, Lunar Enterprise Corporation, the Missile Defense Agency and others.
And DAWN:
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/Mas ... og?sc=DAWN

Check out also "Hubble Zooms In On Moon Minerals":
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20 ... nshot.html

Also...
"As regards the precious (and "strategic") metals such as the platinum group, cobalt, gold, gallium, germanium, and others, the lower the Fe-Ni metal content, the more enriched the Fe-Ni metal is in these rare and precious metals and elements. These elements readily dissolve into the metal that exists, and the less metal that exists, the less diluted they are. Many asteroids are richer in most of these precious metals than the richest Earth ores which we mine. Further, these metals all occur in one ore when it comes to asteroids, not in separate ores. As discussed later in this chapter, the exact same process used to extract and separate these precious metals from the world's largest nickel ore mine at the Sudbury Astrobleme in Canada is easily used in space, and is a simple process using only carbon, sulfur and oxygen, all of which can be derived from asteroids, too."
http://www.permanent.com/a-meteor.htm

Anyone can be opinionated; that only takes attitude; but being right takes a bit of googling...

Russia Wants to Mine Helium-3 on the Moon:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Russia-W ... 7062.shtml
Space.com's article on H3 on the Moon:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/h ... 00630.html
The American Geophysical Union about prospecting for H3 on the Moon:
http://exosci.com/news/129.html
"Head of the Rocket and Space Corporation Energia, Nikolay Sevastyanov, said the other day that the International Space Station was getting its second wind and it got new objectives. The ISS is supposed to be used as a platform to assemble complexes sent to the Moon."
http://english.pravda.ru/science/19/94/ ... _moon.html
"The International Space Station (ISS) would play a key role in the project and a regular transport relay to the moon would be established with the help of the planned Clipper spaceship and the Parom, a space capsule intended to tug heavy cargo containers around space, Mr Sevastyanov said."
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,17 ... 09,00.html
The Kliper and Parom are here:
http://www.techno-science.net/index.php ... &news=2078
Here's of course. The ARTEMIS PROJECT:
http://www.asi.org/adb/02/09/
"Scientists say the moon is a source of potentially unlimited energy in the form of helium 3. 'And if we could get a monopoly on that, we wouldn't have to worry about the Saudis and we could basically tell everybody what the price of energy is going to be', says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense and space policy research group"
http://www.disinfo.com/site/displayarticle1901.html
The European want in too:
http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object ... ctid=22420
China too:
http://www.china.org.cn/english/scitech/111289.htm
And here's a comprehensive post at strategytalk.org:
http://www.strategytalk.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1927&

[chuck_starchaser]

Informal poll: Shall I go exoskeletal? Here's the basic concept:



I'm struggling with the question, and I think final descision rests on aesthetics. Thing is, if I just put a plate on each side for attachment of external cargo modules, it will *look* weak. I say "look" weak because there could be a lot of support structure internally, but you can't tell from outside, and if the observer assumes that the external cargo modules are relying on the strength of the skin of the hull, it will look odd to them. Additionally, having an exoskeleton frees up space inside for cargo.
On the other hand, exoskeletons aren't as efficient as indoskeletons. To provide strength via an exoskeleton takes more material than to provide straight weitht-bearing bars inside. That's why the ribs are so thick (that, and that I'm thinking the material might be magnesium foam).

Opinions?

[rockstar]

when looking at the basic concept i would suggest to go exoskeletal, 'cause this fits the very detailed construction of the engine better than leaving the hull plain... the front part would lack some structural details.
another thing i would suggest is to make the exoskeleton less strong. this one looks quite massive - perhaps half of the height would do.
you could try going both ways - adding internal structures and exoskeleton for extra stabilisation. so a less massive skeleton would make sense without bending physical rules much.

that's my opinion about and i guess i don't need to mention that's my personla one only... i'm sure the final result will look great anyways

[Halleck]

Indeed, an exoskeleton would fit well with the "exposed guts" asthetic this ship has going for it- visible scaffolding, exposed wiring, etc. Additional cargo room is another benifit.

[charlieg]

That and the fact the model just looks f-ing cool.

[chuck_starchaser]

Thanks all; and hi charlieg, long time no see; so that's concesus, so exoskeletal it is. I was dreading hearing what I already knew, namely that the ribs are too high, but I needed that. Have to figure out how to thin them out and scaling won't do it. Probably if I figure a way to select all the crossing edges I can then Subdivide Multi 3 -them, and then delete the exterior geometry...

Here's a shot of an attitude thruster WIP, btw..



Just copying the Mars Express model

[Halleck]

Have to figure out how to thin them out and scaling won't do it. Probably if I figure a way to select all the crossing edges I can then Subdivide Multi 3 -them, and then delete the exterior geometry...

What about selecting the faces and moving them along their normals? Dunno if it would work in blender, but I do it often in wings 3d.

[chuck_starchaser]

Yeah, that's exactly what I'd want to do; but Blender doesn't have such a function AFAIK.

[chrisdn]

Models looking great, and I mean great. Exo skeletal will look better, indo is better from a structural engineering point of view. Like the thruster unit, I had something similar in mind for the forward thrusters on Atlantia. Almost got the launch tubes working properly, I just need some software I can use that can do decent texturing!! Argh! It's driving me mad!!!

Got any other concept designs for exhanust nozzles, thrusters?

Hers's the launch tubes!

[chuck_starchaser]

Solid doors. I like that. Me I know nothing about softwares; and I certainly can't recoment Blender for texturing, given I can't figure it out. The idea that's forming in my head is that Max is the tool to have for texturing. At least Ryder uses it and his stuff looks excellent.
Yeah, no, that's the only exhaust nozzle I got, and it's not finished; I'll send it to you when it is. For reference pics for nozzles, go to this post and scroll down a bit.
Here's one of them..

[chrisdn]

Found this page and it has loads of great tips- texturing software etc. I'm off to try and get uView 2.5 now...original of course

http://www.strategyplanet.com/starfleet ... rials.html[/url]

[chuck_starchaser]

Tadpole's at a spaceships' nightclub, and it's dominatrix night...



Not finished yet with the exoskel. Just getting time for work, so won't be able to post an update till tonight unless I do it now.