ITT: Post Hard SF Spaceships that Don't Look Like Total Ass

>>55278431
>hard sf
>doesn't have heat sinks

Lol, have fun in middle school kid

>>55278450

You dump your heat out the back with the ejection mass. Duh.

>>55278463
Haha

>>55278431
Whats wrong with big and long space bricks?

>>55278431
>don't look like ass
>posts a butt-plug

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>>55278508
I was thinking more in the lines of big and long space cylinders, but the principle still applies; they look like ass.

>>55278631

So, we can all agree this is actually a bad design, right?

If the ship is under thrust, the rotating sections are a deathtrap. This design of ship only makes sense if you plan on spending long periods of time in float, which means you haven't cracked constant acceleration propulsion systems and you are basically locked out of meaningful space travel anyway.

This ship is dogshit for anything longer than an Earth to Mars tier transit, and even then it only works in that its best you can do with your low, low tech that hasn't advanced beyond anything we have in the can right now.

>>55278463
This is what people who don't understand basic thermodynamics actually believe.

>>55278842
>which means you haven't cracked constant acceleration propulsion systems

Sometimes people don't want shitty ion drives, anon.

>>55278463
That doesn't really work with most high isp engines. >>55278514 and >>55278495 are essentially propelled by magic.

The bad news is that you need impractically large heat radiators for classic Heinlein fusion 'torches'. The good news is that you don't really need fusion torches to get around fast in the solar system; much more modest fusion rockets will suffice.

>>55278842
>locked out of meaningful space travel
>not Earth to Mars tier transit
I thought this was a hard scifi thread anon...

>>55278874
Don't turn this into a thermodynamics discussion. You can't argue with stupid...

>>55278874

Doesn't have to be ion drives. Efficient fusion drives or any kind of sustainable propulsion that can hold the ship as a steady g is many times better than boom or bust chemical thrust.

I forget the exact math on it, but steady g constant acceleration, even factoring in the flip and burn, gets you to Pluto in a little over a month. Mars is just days away. Its the key to unlocking the solar system as a territory we can cultivate and colonize without basically just abandoning people on other planets and hope they can survive the years in between missions to reach them again.

You don't know what a fucking hard sci-fi spaceship looks like because you don't know what fucking nonsensical scientific advances will do to make ship designs look nothing like modern spacecraft.

The fucking Borg Cube could be the most realistic hard sci-fi spaceship ever imagined and nobody would be able to prove otherwise.

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>>55278431

>>55278450
>radiator droplet
Confirmed not paying attention.

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>>55279036

>antimatter
Stopped reading there

>>55279005
The problem is trading off with ISP and exhaust velocity. You can have a 1g drive right now, but good luck with the propellant fractions.

>>55279008
But anon, >>55276104...

>>55279008
A setting without constraints is undifferentiated chaos. Diversity and creativity require limits and order.

>>55279114

I can largely agree with that ranking, with 2 exceptions.

Dark Matter started off really 'meh', but has slowly gotten significantly better. It might have moved up a tier since it began.

Bodacious Space Pirates is great, and shouldn't be that low. It might not be a 'serious' show, but it does everything it sets out to do and it seems undeserving to rank it so poorly.

>>55279005
>steady G for days
Which is almost impossible given known and theoretical material limits. You'd basically need a miracle. And if you're going to add one miracle, why not add another? Just sprinkle in FTL and you've got your space opera right there.

>>55279008
>why even try
This is why these threads usually fail. We CAN guess how a spaceship would look given its mass and performance. IT doesn't take a genius to figure out that something accelerating at 1G will look a whole of a lot different than something accelerating at 0.0001G.

>>55278431
What happens when you have low performance spacecraft and FTL? Let's say d6 jump joints in each system with individual jump points being weeks to months apart. Could you have interstellar empires or would such governments be impossible?

>>55279311
>individual jump points being weeks to months apart

So like planets are for near-future or modern tech?

Empire would be quite possible, but think Imperial Britain, not the modern conception of tightly leashed totalitarian states.

>>55279182
>>55279139

>>55279114
>B5 below DS9
>SG1 above mid
Meh.

>>55279311

You can do it, but proximity to the jump points becomes key. The further you are from the jump points, the less you matter.

You could have a planet absolutely shit-rich in resources, but if its 4 months from the nearest jump point? The dwarf planet a week from the jump is still the seat of power for your system. Officials there own the aforementioned planet, not the other way around, because the ability to communicate and trade with other star systems easily outweighs the mundane material resources the planet offers. They can just have their wood shipped to them.

>>55279114
>God tier is nothing but star trek
>no Planetes
>everything >>55279418 said

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>>55279114

>>55279176
I watched Bodacious on a recommendation from /tg/, and fuck you. It was a show that had a single good idea (putting an emphasis on electronic warfare for space battles), but then drowned that in a slew of terrible ideas, including the main "fake pirating" thing. Aside from that, literally only the main character was cute, with all the rest being rather poorly designed.

Want a good space show? Starship Operators, Planetes, Twin Spica, Space Brothers, and if you want lighthearted you go for Space Dandy or Vandread.

>>55279036
This is still retarded no matter how many times i see it

>>55280147
Have you got the
>Dat ass
Pic of the new Boeing space suit?

>>55279114
Voyager>DS9.

Sometimes bad writing and Janeway bi-polarism aside, it was about a journey, experiencing new things. Something barely present in DS9 at all (they only added a few new aliens and the Prophets) and left out of TNG too much in my opinion. Voyager was highly underrated.

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>>55280153

>>55280197
Thanks anon.
Not quite the one I was looking for but it'll do.

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>>55280287
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

>>55279114
>no Buzz Lightyear of Star Command.

>>55279114
>those anime entries
I don't even.

>No crest/banner of the stars
>No LoGH
>No planetes
>No starship operators
>No space battleship Yamato
>No gundam series whatsoever

Since quality is apparently not a factor there's a gigantic plethora of more notable space anime series that are not present on that list and can only conclude that the creator of this chart is a massive normie.

>>55280208
>>55280268
>>55279967
>>55279789
I want to believe.

>>55280543
Same anon. Same.

>>55279114
What no Doctor Who?

>>55279088
Antimatter is the most efficient weight-to-energy fuel our science knows about. You just have to crack a few problems: Making it (giant solar arrays power accelerators, something that supposedly happened offscreen in Star Trek), containing it (better magnetic fields than we have). Once you have both those things, boy howdy are you set for insystem travel.

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>>55279114
No Buck Rogers?

Image must have been made by a homo...

>>55280880
>Once you have magic, boy howdy are you set for insystem travel.

>>55281231
>magic
Not in the slightest, as neither of those techs are "sufficiently advanced".
We can already make and store antimatter, just in exceedingly small quantities; it's a problem of scale and optimization, not one of fundamental knowledge.

>>55281231
You are an idiot. There's nothing magical about antimatter. It just takes tech we haven't quite reached to exploit it. Orbiting solar plants will eventually be very important for power production and using them to make antimatter is obvious since it allows you to make high energy fuel with all that free energy. Better magnets will lead to effective antimatter containment, especially outside the atmosphere where a stray antimatter particle escaping won't result in gamma rays poking holes in your cells.

Orbital solar plants make the antimatter and are used as refueling stations by spacecraft. It's not magic. It's hard science we don't have the tech to manage yet.

>>55280539
>and can only conclude that the creator of this chart is a massive normie.
They put trek on top. Of course they're a normie.

>>55281337
>>55281424
There is no plausible way to create or store the amounts required. Antimatter anything is not hard sci-fi.

>>55282943
>There is no plausible way to create or store the amounts required.
Even a fraction of a partial dyson swarm could produce a huge amount of antimatter with dedicated antimatter production equipment. The only reason it's so incredibly hard to get now is because it's a byproduct of what we actually use our colliders for, instead of what they're designed to maximize.

>>55279114
More or less correct.

I'd bump Farscape down one. I just couldn't stand the main actor.

I'd bump firefly up one, maybe two, I really liked space cowboys.

Speaking of which cowboy beebop probably deserves to go up to god-tier, even though some people just hate anime. I think this list has the one token anime least it exceed someone's weeaboo threshold. (But I'd add Gundam and Robotech)

And Deep Space Nine, while I enjoyed it, a lot of people didn't. And... it wasn't ST:tNG.

Man, I WANTED to like Blakes 7. Good premise... but man that was bad.

Space, Above and Beyond is right were it belongs.
>Space Ghost is a "space show"
...sure.


Space 1999 probably belongs... low-mid

Buck Rodgers belongs LOW.

There was a.... space police? A bunch of shitty costumes. It is GARBAGE.

>>55283168
>megastructures
>ever hard sci-fi

Besides, anti-matter creation would likely be banned decades before it could ever become a practical method for storing energy simply because of how wrong it can go. We already have entire agencies dedicated to sniffing out potential illegal nuclear deals; if somebody told a politician you could take out a city with a bomb the size of a thimble there would be an international crack down on that shit so hard you'd start calling 1984's Oceania a paradise.

>>55283503
..........you do know what they do at LHC, right?

>>55283538
The antimatter made at the LHC isn't even enough to blow up a room, there is absolutely no comparison to what they do and what you would need to drive a spaceship.

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>>55279114
I was gonna complain about Andromeda being so low but to be honest I'm just happy someone fucking remembered it existed.

>>55280840
Bit above space, more of a dimensional travel show.

>>55279114
If you're gonna have anime on your chart, it's gonna need to be a lot bigger so you can have more than just a small handful of absolutely entry-level titles.

>making streamlined designs for space travel
Just build any practical crate and make sure it can withstand 1 atm of pressure difference (a submarine diving deeper than 10m has to withstand more).

>>55280985
>Buck Rogers
Well, here's not a "complete shit" tier, so....

>>55283672
It would look like ass, though.

I bet the Israelis have some kind of plan for the Americans to fund. They're all over the idea of putting nukes in space.

>>55279974
F

>>55283380
I really like Blake's 7 up to about Episode 6.

>>55284424
>for the Americans to fund
Wow, joke's on them for once.

>>55278842
>>55278874

Ships with rotating habitation sections are likely to have constant thrust from electric drives or something similar. Just too little to provide any meaningful sensation of gravity and comfort to passengers and crew.

For long range drives low accleration and very long duration is likely the way to go, even if you are running a fusion engine and ejecting plasma happily out the back it's going to take a LOT of reaction mass and energy to sustain a cozy 4 to 10 meters per second squared.

>>55278944
Technically you can dump heat out the back via expendable coolant, but that isn't exactly something you can do for very long.

>>55285088
>Technically you can dump heat out the back via expendable coolant, but that isn't exactly something you can do for very long.
Someone drew plans at one point for metallic coolant that'd be sprayed into space in tiny droplets, allowing for fast heat dissipation, then magnetically drawn back into the sinks once the droplets have frozen.

>>55283612
>>55283538
They produce antimatter at the LHC in the same way all colliders do.. for a tiny fraction of a second, before it contacts other matter and is annihilated.

They can't pack it into boxes to ship out. To contain antimatter would be a massive technical challenge. The "easy" way would be to lock it in buckeballs, but at that point you'd almost need more energy to get it out then it would release.

>>55285117
That's a droplet radiator and a pretty cool way to do things. You can run them hotter then with solid radiators, and they can dump heat pretty fast. It's not a great option if you plan to change direction a lot, as designs for collectors have to get pretty crazy, but it's one of the most powerful non-expendable coolant designs.

>>55285118
Can't just just set your space-coaldust on fire in your space-boiler?

>>55283538
You obviously don't, so don't embarrass yourself.

>>55278814
>that design
It's like you want to have the smallest shots take off whole segments of your ship.

>>55285348
>implying hard sf is all about space war

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>>55285150
The ship posted by the OP uses that system.
Post exotic radiators.

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If wings don't satisfy you, try using these balls.

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>>55278431
I'm just gonna dump spaceship maps, I don't give a fuck to how "hard" they are.

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>>55285767

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>>55285819

>>55278456
10/10

>>55285832
I wonder how hard those would be to fit with a cloaking device, some quad lasers and a concussion missiles.

>>55278431
>proceeds to post a ship that looks like total ass

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>>55285832

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>>55278508

Slanted armor is king in space too, so you want lots and lots of angles on your warship. That obviously rules out both the brick and the cylinder design. A more realistic approach for general shape would be something like the shell of pic related.

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>>55285981

>>55285983
Yeah, but why?

>>55285983
Can't you accomplish that with a conical ship.

IIRC thats how ships tended to be effective in CoaDE

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>>55285992
>>55285981
>>55285832
>>55285819
>>55285767
>artificial gravity
Go make a generic spaceship map thread daydreaming faggot

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>>55286056

>>55286056
>FTL
if you want to go hard go all the way

>>55286055

Not really because your enemy can intercept you from the angle of the cone and strike a flat surface (well, flat from their perspective). Guided and other self-maneuvering munitions can also bypass the cone shape.

The only way to avoid this is to have shitton of angles on your ship, and the easiest way to accomplish that is a sort of fractal ridges. Go random and asymmetrical and you can even buy some precious seconds while the enemy targeting systems try to make sense of your shape.

>>55286109
tell me anon, how are angles going to help you?

>>55286109
Why not have movable shields/armor instead? Always in motion, always deflecting things everywhere.

>>55279114

What's it like having no fucking taste? Is your life a continual nightmare of fear and confusion? Good. You deserve it.

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>>55286202

Angled armor is thicker armor for the same weight.

>>55286221

If possible, movable armor is obviously better. Changing your shape is also the ultimate fuck you to any recognition software trying to catch you, so you get bonus points for that.

Depending on the velocity of the projectile, angled armour might not help. Past a certain point the impact stops being about cross-sectional density and will just look like a very small meteor hitting the ship. The projectile basically explodes in a roughly spherical blast, so the angle it hits the armour doesn't really matter. In cases like that, flat armour on the side you expect to be facing the enemy would be best as you could make it thicker for the same weight.

>>55286277
no t isn't, if you angle your armor 45º you will cover half the surface (roughly 70%) which means that you'd need larger plates to cover the same volume

>>55286331

The only reason you can have to not angle your armor is if you want to cut costs on internal design.

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>>55286277
>Angled armor is thicker armor for the same weight.
>>55286109
>The only way to avoid this is to have shitton of angles on your ship, and the easiest way to accomplish that is a sort of fractal ridges
That actually defeats the weight advantage it gives. It does increase the internal area, but it weighs just as much for the same protection from a set angle of attack, and if the enemy can vary their angle of attack to hit it at a weak angle it's worse.

>>55286486

I was thinking about a sort of a "sawline" setup, so many-many small ridges, not the "mountains" setup with a few big ones.

>>55286695
Doesn't change the math, and that actually gives you even less of the extra volume that is the design's only real advantage.

>>55286486

If the enemy is really that good he can position at a weak angle in my fractal-ridge armor, then he fucking deserves to get a good shot at me.

>>55286777

I don't really care about volume (extra or lost) because we aren't sticking the armor to the ship (are we?), and I'm cool with having less "empty" space between the hull and the armor.

>>55286954
>If the enemy is really that good he can position at a weak angle in my fractal-ridge armor, then he fucking deserves to get a good shot at me.
The point is the fractal ridge doesn't actually get you any more protection for the same mass you ninny.

>>55287053

Against an opponent who can pull that stunt, it wouldn't matter either way.

>>55287155
>Against an opponent who can pull that stunt, it wouldn't matter either way.
And against an opponent who can't pull the stunt it still ends up weighing the same because of basic geometry. Can you actually follow math or are you just assuming angles=good?

>>55287198

Against an opponent who can't pull the stunt, it provides more protection. That's why it is fractal so that the enemy can't get an angle on it and the weight from angling doesn't go to waste as per >>55286486.

The only real disadvantage I can see is that a fractal sloped armor would be a bitch to cool down, because the various parts would keep radiating heat into each other.

>>55287303
>Against an opponent who can't pull the stunt, it provides more protection.
No. No it does not. It provides the SAME protection against someone aligned with it in your favor as the same mass in flat plate. Against someone who can pull that stunt it provides LESS. You did not actually look at any of the math in the post, did you?

>>55278944
In my experience, in order to be hard sci-fi, you either need huge radiators or huge fuel tanks, but not always both.

An interceptor type ship armed with only missiles and mostly fuel tank by volume, will probably not need big radiators. It will probably also have a very short mission before it's time for it to either be abandoned, or recovered/refueled/rearmed by a ship with a much higher ISP and large radiators.

>>55279772
Is the wide cone shaped part a Soyuz style re-entry capsule? What's the diameter of this thing?

>>55285983
>>55286055
Cones are better, the alligator snapping turtle design just adds more weight.

Either you will angle yourself so the enemy's attack hits you head on, or you are fucked. That's it. Adding more ridges will just add more weight which defeats the purpose. Guided missiles are intercepted with counter missiles or laser CIWS. And you turn to face any unguided attacks in order to maximize armor coverage.

If you really do expect to be attacked from every angle at once, then you really can't use sloped armor, and a sphere is the next best option. Unfortunately you can't really mount engines or weapons on a sphere without either cutting holes in the sphere (which mean you are now vulnerable from that direction) or mounting them outside the sphere (which means they can just blow up the things outside the sphere and ignore you.)

All things considered, the cone shape with spinal primary weapons and radially mounted secondary weapons is optimum armor configuration for an armored space warship. It provides the most protection from a single direction, with only slightly worse protection from most other directions, and still leaves you with a place to put engines and the like.

If the ship has any sort of armored citadel like ocean going warships, it will be spherical in shape, containing either the reactor or bridge (but probably not both unless the crew/computers somehow like radiation) Although perhaps concentric spheres could allow for a living area around a reactor.

I could see a suitably giant space battleship having a tiny bernal sphere type habitat inside of it as the crew quarters. It spins independently of the rest of the ship, and is the most armored part of the ship. In the center one of the ship's auxiliary reactors serves as an artificial sun. This would be a rather extravagant luxury on all but the largest warships however. I'm talking like, huuuuuuge. Dozens of KM long, with equally extravagant engines and armor to match.

>>55279114

> no MST3K
> fuck you

>>55285348
>fighting in space

Are you fucking stupid?

>>55289131
Well let's start with a big ass sphere of refractory material. A 2 kilometer nickle-iron sphere with walls 120 meters thick. It serves as the radiator and a heat-sink.

Weapons, sensors and engines are mounted to the exterior of the sphere, with redundant replacement systems mounted within the armor to be employed in the event external systems are damaged. New telescopes to focus lasers piped out from deep inside can be kept 20 meters under the armor, missile silos can be embedded deep in the armor and fired from comparability small ports, ect. You could mount a rotating "train" to the inner surface that could simulate conformable gravity by running on the inside of the equator, if you don't want to spin the whole sphere.

It's basically a weaponize space habitat, you could create it from asteroids in the belt. I imagine at war you'd have to destroy surface mounted weapons and equipment before sending in boarding teams.

>>55290750
That is a big ship

>>55290750
Yeah, but where do you put fuel tanks? Inside the sphere? Does the fuel get piped to the external engines?

It's a great design optimized for defense, but I feel like a warship needs mobility and firepower more than pure defense.

I'd take two cones one of which tapers into a gun barrel, and one of which tapers into engines. Both cones are joined at the wide ends, and a spherical armored citadel goes between them.

The citadel is the only habitable volume, and like you suggested, anything that needs gravity goes on a rotating train along the equator of the sphere. Weapons, engines, and fuel go inside the two cones. Sensors radiators, and heat syncs are built into the armor.

Also, the armor might be made up of rotating and counter rotating layers, so any damage will be spread out before it penetrates all the way through. You won't have to worry about repeated damage to the same area because they won't even be able to hit the same part twice. This might be too much of an engineering challenge to be worth it however.

If the ship has any auxiliary vessels, the two cones can separate slightly to reveal a gap between them and the citadel. Missiles, shuttle-craft, life boats, and maintenance drones enter and exit through there to avoid having to make a hatch which would weaken the armor. For obvious reasons this can only be opened and closed outside of combat, and might take hours. But in an emergency the front armor cone can be jettisoned completely with explosive bolts. This allows lifeboats to escape quickly if the ship needs to be scuttled. If this happens, the rear cone and Citadel can still function as a ship, but will be unable to fight. The rear cone can also be jettisoned, but this leaves the citadel immobilized.

>>55279114
>startrek
>god tier
it's shit.

>>55278431
What are some of the more peripheral effects of introducing force fields and artificial gravity to an otherwise hard scifi setting? How would these technologies effect drive and weapon tech? Could force fields allow you to UBER-efficient torch drives?

>>55291934
Both are magic and can be applied to basically give you free propulsion forever. Why even have a fusion drive when you can make wings of force to swim through interstellar hydrogen, or make your ship fall forever at 1-5g towards your destination? Let alone relativistic projectiles, which are much harder to do than most wankers claim, yet with those technologies you can make it work if you can sustain the energy requirements.

If the tech is less powerful, then yes reactor containment, antimatter generation and storage, and inertial damping are all extremely useful applications. Radiation shielding as well. Nuclear shaped charges for maneuvering, funneled by force fields. Combat all depends on the specifics of the force fields, to be honest. I remember an old science fiction short story where a ship can't be killed if its field is up, but it has to drop it to fire. Engagements are standoffs until someone's itchy trigger finger goes off, and then it's back and forth trying to frag anyone that just fired.

>>55292317
There is a reason most technobabble in the Culture-verse revolves around "Fields"

When anti-gravity doesn't work, a culture drone uses field manipulators to create a propeller and continue flying as if nothing happened. Even FTL travel involves using traction fields to pull yourself through hyperspace, pressing off against the boundaries of reality itself to move without expending propellant.

>>55283380
Does UFO get the same rating as space 1999?
I miss the shit out of Space Above and Beyond but don't think it could be "re-imagined" at this time.

>>55286056
Nice to see ALBEDO making an appearance.

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>>55294351
Never watched UFO.

I think they could totally do a Space Above and Beyond remake. You know how Firefly is just cowboys in space? S:AaB is just Marines in space. "SPACE MARINES!!!" That's really all it is. And I liked it... portions of it.... oh god, that actor for the commander... jesus.

But anyway, it was a ludicrous idea back in the 90's and it's a ludicrous idea now just as it was a ludicrous idea back when Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers back in 1959. There's no reason it couldn't be remade. Do Marines no longer exist?

>>55278450
>doesn't have heat sinks
Nobody called him out for the failure in conflating heat sinks and radiators? For all we know it DOES have a big pile of water or iron inside of it. That's a heat-sink. Or you could use, you know, THE HULL.

I know you're thinking of the heat-sink in your PC, but that's slang.

Furthermore, I'm wiling to bet that you thought a heat-management system on a space-ship would look like something with a bunch of fins, you know, like that chunk of aluminum on your PC. Space doesn't work like that. There's no air to go over the surface of the radiator. Fins don't do squat. The heat has to ACTUALLY RADIATE away. And if you're facing the sun, and too close to the sun, enjoy your extra heat.

If something is heat sensative, and something else in the ship is hot, the best you've got is heat-pipes to the exterior and putting the sensitive thing far away, or having a cooling system which moves the heat back towards the hot end of the ship.

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Thread needs more BFS

>>55297208
this makes my stomach turn.

>>55297237
Agreed.

>>55297208
Fucking disgusting.

>>55279114
Where do the designs from Babylon 5 rank? The Earth Force ships of the Earth-Minbari War seemed fairly realistically designed, no artificial gravity or shields and even the Omega class Destroyers used a rotating section to simulate gravity.

>>55294891
>big pile of water or iron
Which is impractical for high energy systems operating over long periods of time. Heat sinks aren't very mass efficient when compared to radiators.
>bunch of fins
Well you do want more surface area anon. Obviously it wouldn't look like a mess of fins but the general principle still holds true.
>>55298483
Most of the designs aren't very hard but the human ones are decent.

What weapons would be most effective in space battles

Surely even a small flak cannon would cause horrific ship crippling damage

>>55302412
Lasers. Actual laser weapons, none of that star wars crap.

>>55302412
>throwing flak in space

You fucking madman.

>>55302412

Coil guns.
>but muh missiles
You can fire missiles from your coil gun no problem.

If you feel like a real troll then have a few of your heatsinks made from some sort of adhesive material. Fill up these heatsinks first in a battle, then fire them at your opponent. It is the space warfare equivalent of vomiting at your enemy.

>>55302581
Whats wrong with that.

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>>55279114
>Still no Marcoss, Legends of the Galactic Heroes or Buck Rogers.

I told you last time to fuck off

>>55302701

Flak and other projectiles don't disappear in space, they keep buzzing around indefinitely until they hit something. A stray munition can hit some unfortunate ship even 1000 years after the actual battle.

>>55286277
>Angled armor is thicker armor for the same weight.

Sloped armour is great, yes. On a tank or naval vessel.

It only increases protection when you already know the angle at which munitions will impact it. For a space vessel, as for infantry use (good old plate harness), rounded armour is preferable as it is effective at all angles.

>>55298483
>Where do the designs from Babylon 5 rank?

It's interesting to note (if you never thought about it) that the Narn also did not have artificial gravity tech. Their warships just require everyone to be strapped into their station in zero-g combat

>>55302784
The odds of that happening are insanely small, and chance is that if you're in orbit, the effect of gravity would shed some of it's energy.

>>55302822
>the effect of gravity would shed some of it's energy.
That's not how gravity (or any force field) works. You're thinking air resistance.

>>55302784
>not understanding how big space is

>>55290750
> imagine at war you'd have to destroy surface mounted weapons and equipment before sending in boarding teams

What about using nukes to ablate a surface, and having the resulting explosion transmit shockwaves throughout the mass?

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working on some stuff.

>>55302658
Would that actually be practical though? I mean you'd still be generating more heat firing the gun than you'd be gaining by throwing hot slugs at the enemy. And I think sticking something hot to them would probably be less effective a weapon than just punching holes in them. It's like poisoning bullets, won't make the bullet any deadlier, just more complicated.

>>55279114
I'm surprised Firefly is ranked so high considering how contrarian 4chan is.

I'd personally put it higher, but I really liked the setting so I admit I'm biased.

I really would have loved to see what the series was going to turn in to if it had more time.

>>55300317
>Well you do want more surface area anon. Obviously it wouldn't look like a mess of fins but the general principle still holds true.
Well... No, it doesn't. If the fin radiates.... directly into a fin next door to it.... then the heat didn't leave. There's no air to sweep through the fins and grab the heat away. Surface area,

YAY, but it might as well be a flat smooth surface. Fins don't help in space.

>>55288630
What game is that

>>55303911

You obviously need to sink more heat into the round than the weapon generates by firing. And pouring waste heat onto your opponent does have its uses: it can ruin their heat management, blind their sensors, and/or disable other exposed parts.

>>55304139
>Fins don't help in space.
Non-perpendicular fins don't help in space, you mean. Having four large fins that extend at right angles to each other is a good space radiator design (just make sure they're rotated edge-on to the sun)

>>55304195
Looks like Children of a Death Earth

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>>55285348
>He thinks you can actually take hits from kinetic weaponry in space and survive
>He doesn't know

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>>55278431
Hey I made this. Lovely to run into it.

>>55279088
It's a very small amount, measured in nanograms, small enough that you could make it with a reasonably sized particle accelerator built for the purpose or harvest it from space. Its energy contribution is negligible. What it does is initiate fission in a small subcritical mass (so you don't need any redundant fuel mass in your pulse units, nor all the components of a nuclear bomb) which then ignites fusion much like in a thermonuclear bomb. You could also go directly from antimatter to fusion, but you would need orders of magnitude more antimatter. (which is still piddly amounts compared to actual antimatter drives)

Look up ICAN-II for a more grounded version (because it's a real world paper, not muh space opera) of the idea.

MACs that can accelerate a small projectile up to a significant fraction of lightspeed would wreck shit, anon.

>>55304641
That is what people who have never even looked at the physics actually believe about hard SF.

Realistic velocities for realistic-mass railguns are single-digit km/s.

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>>55302822
>if you're in orbit,
A flack cannon is HORRIFYING in orbit. It's tantamount to a intentional effort to start a Kessler syndrome where debris causes satellites to rip apart forming more debris, repeat ad naseum until LEO is just full of metal shrapnel spinning around tearing up anything in orbit.

We'd lose all LEO satellites (GEO and GPS is still good to go), the ISS, and generally access to space. So those GPS birds up in GEO? Let's hope they last, because we can't replace them.

It would take decades to centuries for enough of the debris to finally de-orbit thanks to the exosphere.

>>55304699
>Realistic velocities for realistic-mass railguns are single-digit km/s.
Before or after the difference in orbital speeds? Everything's relative (if not relativistic) in space.

>>55304739
Muzzle velocity. Not that orbital speeds would change it, because geostationary velocity is about 3 km/s and realistic interplanetary velocities are in the double digit km/s, while "a significant fraction of lightspeed" - 1% c - is 3000 km/s.

>>55304728
Kessler syndrome is overrated. In any case, powerful lasers could clear it up by vaporizing, re/deorbiting, or maneuvering the debris. In a lidar configuration, they wouldn't even need radar.

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>>55304473
>Having four large fins that extend at right angles to each other is a good space radiator design
. . . I'm having a hard time visualizing that. But now that I think about it, yeah, a single fin sticking out like a wing really would help. So, oh, at right angles like a big plus sign. Yeah.


God damnit, I'm an idiot. Fuck me, I could have just looked at those RTG batteries they have on the deep space probes. Those have fins around the outside.

Disregard, I suck cocks.

>>55304807
The core point of "atmospheric-style parallel cooling fins are a waste of material and do nothing" is right, at least.

>>55304807
Fins are good. In the ideal case you have two on opposite sides. If you have any more than two you get some amount of interreflection between them, but you can pretty well go to four before you start getting severely diminishing returns.

Dunno what's up with that RTG though. Assuming it's intended for vacuum, with that many fins they're mostly gonna be radiating into each other. That said, maybe they're limited by diameter and eat those severely diminishing returns just to get a little more heat rejection capability.

>>55304600
Are you working on anything new?

>>55304497
The sad fact of hard Sci-fi is that no one is really going to go anywhere.

Scooting around the solar system, even if there's some economy in space and available fuel, is a major deal which takes months of planning and capitalizing on specific windows of opportunity. The orbit of the planets don't give a fuck about your timetable.

Interstellar travel takes some sort of colony-world, sleeper-ship, or fire and forget probe. Of course, ALL these things are fire and forget. They're not coming back in reasonable time.

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>>55304929
I've got this deeply unfinished missile cruiser. It fires giant NSWR missiles that have drives with enough power to kill the ship if they ignite too close.

>>55304963
>months

That's not a problem tho. Especially with NERVA or NTR for manned ships, and a massive automated drone-mining economy with cyclers.

>>55304963

While Star Trek style intertellar civillizations are pretty out there I think that by the 2150's we'll see at least a pretty significant level of Human Habitation in the Sol system at least. Maybe Mormons or somebody will launch a Colony ship to Alpha Centauri

>>55279114
Needs bebop on the tipytop

>>55304860
From 5 seconds in MS paint, it looks like that configuration gets 2/3rds of each fin out past the others. So if 4 diameter constrained fins would dump 4 arbitrary heat units, this dumps 8*2/3=5.33 arbitrary heat units. I suspect going above 8 peaks and then starts dropping.

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>>55305010
I also have this corvette I did earlier. These all belong in the same setting, but their relation to each other is distant or nonexistent.

>>55305010

That's a very fine looking missile cruiser. Good job!

>>55305052
I think it's a bit worse than that since as I understand basically every point of the radiator surface radiates omnidirectionally, not just perpendicular to the surface. That's why you start getting some interreflection even at three fins.

>>55280435
here is a man of taste and wealth

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>>55305055
Are you also the guy who did this?

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>>55304963
Actually, on top of that, I want to talk about something serious.

/tg/ I think it's time we came to grips with reality. The whole space-opera genre of people flying around in space doing stuff that came out of the space race is sadly a bit of retrofuturism. A past's vision of the future which gets some aspects right and other aspects laughably wrong. Think of anything any major character in any hard space show or story has done. Could it be done by a simple computer script or chip? Could be done remotely? Could it be done by purpose-built artificial intelligence?

(And I'm not talking about some "awakened" AI, I'm just talking about things like the Mars rover picking which rock looks interesting for the next drilling. Or navigating around those rocks.)

Doing stuff in space, whatever it is, can typically be done better by a drone. Some unmanned mix of autonomous and remote control. Taking up a squishy bag of meat that has the expectation of coming back is... not worth the extra effort. Colonies might happen some day (here's hoping), but if they want stuff to happen outside their little bubble of survivability, they'll probably have drones do it too.


And then it hit me: Why not have a show / story / game where EVERYTHING has to be done by hand. From arming space ship guns, to steering fighter craft, to a switchboard of communications, to hand-calculating the encryption algorithm. And maybe you don't tell the players or audience, but the gimmick is that that all the main characters are AI constructs, and all the background characters are Bash scripts or cron jobs or some other bit of computer automation. And suddenly the stereotypical tropes of a massive naval vessel covered with seamen make sense again.

>>55305196
Well, there's still lag to consider, alongside political elements, ROE, and simply having humans onboard because machine learning tends to be brittle.

I think there would be a few human-bearing flagships trailing the bulk of any automated fleet.

>>55305154
Yeah, that one just has shittier lighting than the later render I posted.

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>>55305196
There's just a TON of parallels that keep me awake at night with this idea:

Let's say the bots work on a big genetic algorithm where it selects for fitness, so there's interpersonal competition and drama about who is sleeping with whom. They're military constripts with no rights as secondary citizens (Because they are TOOLS) and there's some mythical god-like creature in the hold which MUST BE PROTECTED because he's a human. And there's a (very stupid) commissar that inspects them for heresy like suggesting they ditch the human, or getting too sapient and suggesting they go rogue. Of course, he's a stupid script that can be talked around through euphamism. And there's exactly 2 rooms on the big ship because that's the mainframe and the backup. They "go to their bunk" as in they unload. And quick-clones are a thing as copying AI is trivial. So a pilot gets shot down in a fighter-craft and his clone walks up a minute later wondering how he fucked it up.

Let's say a pilot is doing something tricky with the big ship and "he can't think in this noise" so he tells everyone else to shut up. That's simply a task taking priority in the scheduler. And yeah, it can bump out important things like the little bridge crew guy telling everyone the engines are about to explode. He gets through the tricky bit, says "clear", and everyone starts shouting again.

...And there's just so much of this which fits between computer functions and space-faring story tropes like a glove.

Let's hear it for bots.

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>>55305196
>>55305357
Random!

>>55305196

Unless your AIs are really good, you will always need at least -some- people to oversee operations and make bigger decisions. If you have an AI who can do this, then a full-blown AI rebellion might be closer than you would think.

The trick is to hit the optimal number of human crew. And keep in mind that this number does NOT necessarily grow with the size of the ship - a small corvette will have the same amount of crew than a massive dreadnought.

>>55305010
Could you go into some discussion on how the propulsion system for your craft work? You mentioned at some point they use "anti matter catalyst fission-fusion". What inspiration did you take for this? Did you do the math for the vessels or was it more of a ballpark estimate? This is not a condemnation, I love the designs you've made. I am just curious as most pulse propulsion systems are not as novel or interesting as this.

Also, what kind of setting do these ships inhabit? What kind of factions or nations are there?

>>55304264
Yeah but like, so can shining a laser on them, detonating a nuke close to them, punching them full of holes, or even fucking spray painting them black.

(actual proposed space weapon, an Apollo LEM with a can of black spray paint to fuck up enemy satellites, blinding their sensors and altering the amount of sunlight they reflect)

>>55305862
This is what I love about hard sf: it's waaay crazier than anything artists can think up - the most hi-tech weapon is a giant paint gun....fucking brilliant! And not only does it wipe out your sensors, it threatens to cook you with your own heat, at twenty bucks per can...

>>55304699
>Lectures people on hard sci-fi
>Can't tell the difference between a raillgun and a coilgun.

Relativistic projectiles are unlikely, but any kinetic weapon in space is likely to be a coilgun rather than a raillgun. Raillguns just can't be made fast enough before they melt.

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This is a Rokh-class Caldari battleship. Say something nice about her

>>55305995
Flat, ugly grey box. Needs engines, and has an awkward center of mass. I like the butt end though, it looks like part of a spaceship.

>>55279114
dark matter two tiers above andromeda even though its writing quality is about the same with even less memorable actors?
i mean yeah the last season was dick all but at least they didnt shoot the main character in the face and have the rest of the cast barely notice he was gone two episodes later

>>55305959
Coilguns have field-saturation problems that limit them to large scale mass drivers. If you want a vehicle-scale EM weapon, railguns are the way to go (and already exist - ofc modern railguns aren't vacuum adapted, but they do function for hundreds of shots between barrel rebuilds).

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Advanced prototype deep-space research/reconnaissance vehicle

Resting Mass: 314 tonnes

Length: 55-85m (extensible spine)

Propulsion: LOS antimatter-teleportation (telematter) drive

Range: Unlimited (no fuel constraints while within T-M broadcast range)

Maximum rated burn: 3.2G sustained, 7.9G maneuvering
Onboard Computer: Nikola distributed quantical AI, 1020-synapse equivalent. 82% classical elements for operation in decoherent environments; quantum elements decoherence shielded.

Max. Crew Complement: Ten.

Life Support:Undead optimisation. Mandatory hiba, hibc, and leub gene-complex retrofits (donor species H. sapiens whedonum, patent pending) for transit dormancy.

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>>55305196
"Intelligent", decision-making computers are probably hundreds of years off. The automation that our probes currently have is mostly an assist for the human operators at mission control to compensate for the lack of immediate feedback. You're always-always going to need something capable of making executive decisions, and currently computers are just a handy tool to allow you to make better decisions faster.

>>55305995
Love this.

EVE is definitely not hard sci fi, but fuck me it has such interesting ship designs

>>55306370
The easy solution is to not build small ballistic weapons in space. Build the ship around a giant coil-gun and use it to spray targets at long range. If you want raillguns, make them the payload for a missile, built as cheaply as possible and powered by a bank of batteries that explode as they fire. Launching a single projectile once the missile has maneuvered into the optimum range to avoid point defenses while staying close enough that the enemy can't easily dodge.

This missile might of course, be launched by a coil-gun, and only use reaction mass for mid-course corrections and interception evasion.

>>55282943
>Hard Sci-Fi is only technology we already have.

Kill yourself.

>>55305849
It's loosely based on real concepts. If you google antimatter-catalyzed fission (or fusion, or fission AND fusion; there's concepts for any combination of these) you'll find a bunch of papers and stuff. ICAN-II is particularly interesting. My performance figures however are completely fictional; I do the math so that my numbers for thrust, isp and drive power add up, but the starting point is arbitrary, somewhere in the comfortable middle ground between currently projected performance and maximum theoretical performance. I'm pretty sure in reality my drives would immediately melt, but who knows. I'm never sure if I'm being overly optimistic or lowballing things.

The reason why I've settled on this type of drive is that I want fairly high thrust and fairly high isp, which means exceedingly high power. Your power source needs to be nuclear, and its power output is gonna be a lot more like a nuclear bomb than a nuclear reactor. I mentioned the melting; I am kinda handwaving that away, but one core parameter is that the reaction needs to be external because if it isn't it will certainly flash the engine into so much vapor. Because it's not an electric drive and there are no high power systems other than the nuclear explosion, you minimize the need for drive radiators.

>>55308743
There are a bunch of ways to make exciting nuclear reactions happen. Fission is a lot easier to do than fusion, and a fission explosion is the easiest way to intiate fusion. Many of the same techniques work for igniting fission as do for fusion, but the general theme is you need less - less antimatter, less powerful magnetic fields, less whatever it is you're doing. In the setting, they've mastered fusion, but in engines fission is a very useful intermediate step making for a lighter and leaner drive. Some examples for iniating fission or fusion (some of these are mostly proposed for fusion, but as I understand also work for fission): Z-pinch, inertial confinement, and of course antimatter catalyzation. The first two use magnetic fields instead. For fission specifically, you can also use conventional explosives to begin the reaction as in a nuclear bomb. Using bombs makes for the simplest form of nuclear pulse drive and we could build that now. Using one of the fancy ignition systems has the advantage of simplifying your propellant (i.e. the pulse units) because bomb-based pulse units are each a fairly complex and expensive industrial product. This comes at the cost of increasing the complexity of the drive. However, you only have one drive whereas you might have hundreds of thousands of pulse units so it's probably a good deal. It also cuts a lot of mass from each pulse unit, increasing effective isp. Of these alternatives, antimatter catalyzation probably takes a lot less electrical power than the magnetic systems, and the amount of power should be largely independent of how high the drive power is.

>>55308767
My fluffy term for these engines is cascade drive, which is a nontechnical catchall for all high performance engines which use a cascade of antimatter-fission-fusion reactions to function. It encompasses a lot of engine types that work with the same core principles but might vary a lot otherwise. For example, the corvette's drive is pretty much an Orion-but-better: You have pulse units made of fission-fusion fuel and a slab of propellant. Antimatter zaps the fission fuel, fusion ignites, pulse unit explodes and the slab hits the pusher plate as high speed plasma, having very very short physical contact with it and pushing the ship, hopefully without ablating the plate too much. The interceptor's pusher is instead designed to ablate - a much harsher and lighter mass plasma from the pulse unit hits the pusher, ablates it, and the magnetic nozzle directs the plasma, mostly made up of ablated pusher material, for thrust. The pusher then inches down between pulses to present a fresh surface. On that ship, the pusher IS the propellant - a solid core of silicon carbide running most of the way through the ship. That makes the interceptor very dense in comparison to most ships, incidentally. There are also continuous cascade drives, but I'm a lot less sure how those would work. In particular I'm not sure about the practical differences between a self-sustaining fusion reactor versus a self-sustaining fission reaction which sustains the fusion reactor. (which I guess would be like a fusion-boosted nuclear salt water rocket)

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>>55308791
welp I accidentally wrote a fucking essay

>>55308822
"Accidentally "

>>55308919
I wish I could do essays out of nowhere when I actually need to write essays.

>>55308767
>Using bombs makes for the simplest form of nuclear pulse drive and we could build that now.

We couldn't. There was a lukewarm discussion about this in the previous hard sf thread, but making nuclear pulse propulsion work is legit hard for a vast number of reasons.

Tho, your idea might work, because it uses a few very powerful "pushes". That's a way to go around it, but I wonder how you think the shock absorbers work on your ships.

>>55308998
Well... To put what I said more accurately, the furthest we've looked into it, we didn't find any showstoppers. Orion had a clear way forward with a series of tests culminating in a working spacecraft. It's entirely possible serious problems could have come up, but at least on a theoretical level they didn't. In particular, they figured the pusher plate would survive just fine, and the reasons for that is an interesting subject on its own.

The corvette and cruiser have a conventional shock absorber system that's pretty much just Orion. The interceptor has a much higher pulse rate (and thus gentler shocks) and uses some crazy contraption where the whole ship is suspended around the propellant core.

>>55309096
>The corvette and cruiser have a conventional shock absorber system that's pretty much just Orion

Are these ships organized into fleets that are like conventional naval analogues, or are they something more space-centric that is based on the facets of the setting?

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>>55279748
> vandread AND space dandy
Are you me?

When is something hard sci-fi?

E.g. EVE has pop sci explanations for all its tech. I wouldn't say that makes it hard but then what is actually hard sci-fi? All sci-fi is necessarily based on speculations about what is possible in the future - how do you rank speculations and where is the cutoff point?

>>55309330
The cutoff is blatantly breaking the laws of physics a la Star Trek. But even then, while still in the hard realm some sci-fi is harder than others.

>>55309330
EVE is firmly in the soft side with liquid space, artificial gravity, instant communication, and multiple flavors of "fuck physics" FTL. Giving explanations doesn't make something hard. Obeying something as basic as the newton laws does. Then you have the Kepler Laws.

Why are cargo ship designs in science fiction, even the harder stuff, so damn small? Space cargo ships by necessity will be larger then anything we have on Earth even on the small side, and would likely have a tremendous living area to cargo volume ratio.

>>55309330
>multiple impossible things
>one impossible thing as a plot device
>something not yet disproven
>something theoretically possible
>something that's an engineering problem

>>55309532
You forgot

>We can do it but we just don't want to

>>55309532
I use an expanded version of this:

>>Soft
>1
what's physics?
>2
several impossible things but no consistency or explanations
>3
several impossible things but explained and used in a self-consistent way
>4
1 "big lie" impossible thing (commonly FTL) but no consistent use or logical follow-through
>5
1 "big lie" impossible thing (commonly FTL) used in a consistent and logical way
>6
some stuff not yet disproven but very unlikely
>7
everything's at least theoretically possible
>8
worst case is an engineering/materials problem
>9
we can do it but too much effort
>10
right fucking now
>>Hard

>>55306680
>"Intelligent", decision-making computers are probably hundreds of years off.

Sure, the sort that comes in quotes and makes humans feel their egocentrism isn't bullshit and that they're special snowflakes.

For the sort that's good enough to get an engineering job done, it's here and now. Depending on the job, of course.

You're absolutely right that you always need some sort of executive making descision.... but that could happen once, in the factory, when they turn it on. (Which is how any sort of theoretical bio-engineered solution will have to work) Or it could phone home and get updates once a year/decade.

If the brains on the drone are good enough to manage on it's own for 10 hours, that's enough time to get a message to Earth, and back, from ANYWHERE in the solar system. For Earth to Jupiter, and back, at MAX distance, it only has to manage on it's own for 2 hours.

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>>55310143
>>55309532
>>55309330
I would refer to the Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness

I take my sci-fi eggs at a 5 on the moh's hardness scale.

>>55310325
The thing is, most spacecraft operate that way - almost entirely on instructions written before it ever launched. Simple, concrete instructions. Keep this heading, arrange panels this way, do X at Y. This doesn't equate to any sort of intelligence. It's just a series of simple commands.
In order to finish any long-term goal, you need direct input occasionally. Something that can adapt to new situations. The current model's fine for dumb, disposable probes, but for any sort of industrial activity, you need something a bit more robust. Something computers aren't really that good at.

>>55279036

...That was a great subplot in a good book.

:(

>>55278450
Or you change the heat into electricity using the seebeck effect.

>>55310507
You don't change the heat. You change the heat gradient.

>>55310433
Yeah, space probes don't have too many decisions to make. I guess I'm just saying that the state of automation is good enough to have our space-activities handled by bots rather than sending people.

Did you know that the Curiosity chooses it's own route?

> This imagery safeguards against the rover crashing into unexpected obstacles, and works in tandem with software that allows the rover to make its own safety choices

>>55300933

I hadn't watched the show at all

That's how they ended up designing the ships? Way too aesthetic.

>>55280173
Like fuck am I going to accept the notion that the inconsistent dumpster fire that is Voyager has a hope in hell against DS9. DS9 gave depth to it's 2 major recurring races (Bajorans and Cardassians) and ultimately gave better framing to the Klingons and the Federation itself than any of the other shows ever did. Even better, it laid bare the flaws in the Federation while still holding to the ideal that the Federation strives towards.
By comparison, Voyager barely ever drifted from a dull, repetitive serial format that ensured that most actions by the crew had little-to-no consitency or consequence. Janeway could espouse 1 philosophy in an episode and contradict it in the next. Be'Lanna or Paris could learn an important lesson about getting on with the rest of the crew only to be the same standoffish asshole an episode later. So on, so forth.

>>55311144
Automatic collision avoidance != course plotting, anon.

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>>55278431

>>55311593
What's the weapons on those things?

>>55311735

Twenty 100Mw IR lasers accurate to 1000km with triple redundant mirror turrets, multiple 50km/s railguns that fire sub-mg flak shells, a few thousand sub kiloton micromissile interceptors, and fifty 20 km/s hyper-velocity KKV missiles.

>>55303006
No practically sized atomic weapon would be able to impart destructive impulse on something that size. At most you'd be able to push it around as an estraze Orion drive.

>>55290977
For You. Joking aside yes, it's massive. You'd need to scavenge and likely inflate a very large nickle-iron asteroid for the raw material.

>>55291171
A massive sphere isn't about mobility. fuel could be stored inside and pipped though the armor but given the proportion of your mass devoted to armor you'd be less mobile then almost anything else able to maneuver at all.

But.. mobility isn't really that useful in space. Anything highly agile is going to be very fragile simply because of the need to limit inertia and keep the proportion of engines and reaction mass to armor down. If you need to defend something you can't move then a low mobility sphere is a serious threat. You have to enter it's engagement envelope to fight, or try for besieging it with KKV and hope it's defensive weapons can't push them out of the way.

>>55311861
If it's a hollow sphere you might as well use the whole interior volume for reaction mass except for whatever you've buckled to the inside walls.

>>55311932
>3.48 cubic kilometers of fuel storage

Well, that works.

>>55305038
>We're gonna go find our planets and we're taking our harems with us

>>55312247
Seems like an almost logical progression. Massive deep-space habitats made for sustainable closed ecosystem makes a reasonable core for a very long duration colony ship.

>>55312386

The prophecies are true!

That said I'm not sure I want Mormons left alone in some corner of the galaxy to get even crazier than they are now.

>>55279864
Gods, if only NASA had gotten the budget... Or been freed from Congressmen treating the Shuttle as a pork barrel project...
We could've had something truly excellent! Now our astronauts sit at Russian launch pads, sticking their thumbs out and hoping for a ride!
And we all know what they're doing to get up there: NASA doesn't have the budget for cash, our government doesn't let them have any grass, and that just leaves...

>>55313470
Anon you do realize that something like that would likely just become another shuttle type wasteful expenditure even if it was funded, right? Besides, there's no point getting all weepy about the fact that they're outsourcing rocket flights, if anything I'd see it as a diplomatic accomplishment that a former enemy is now a vital trade partner when it comes to space travel.

>>55285767
>>55285981
Just bad designs. Captain doesn't need quarters that big, and the crew needs a bit more space on the second one. First design also has wasted space from the second bridge entrance.
>>55285992
Got it, you decided to basically waste a shit ton of cubic on your bottom deck - don't tell me it's hidden, I can see the available cubic from the perspective picture. Unless that's all fuel down there, in which case... Why isn't the cargo down there, where it's easier for a variety of spaceports to unload?
Oh, and uh, your bridge is too big. Again.
>>55286056
>>55286068
>>55278514
And the decks are oriented as the Gods and Heinlein intended. And all was good in the verse again.

>>55313710
>And the decks are oriented as the Gods and Heinlein intended. And all was good in the verse again.
Get off your high horse. Constant acceleration ship designs are about as plausible as a fucking Star Trek ship

>>55309453
Have you considered the tyrant that is The Rocket Equations?
As mass goes up, so does required fuel and required engine size to maintain desired acceleration. And don't tell me that you're talking about volume, not mass. Because that volume? You have to build the hull for that volume. You have to brace it for acceleration, you have to run your plumbing and internal sensors and power.
Trust me, they'll be small until we can prove big.

>>55313746
Maybe not, but short-burn high-g ships are fairly plausible.

>>55313811
>Because that volume? You have to build the hull for that volume. You have to brace it for acceleration, you have to run your plumbing and internal sensors and power.

No, not really. Almost any form of realistic cargo ship design does not actually use a "hull" for its cargo at all, you only need a sturdy core that containers can be attached to. The hard part would be designing the container, not the ship.

>>55313913
Which you would be accelerating for MAYBE an hour, tops. Not enough time to justify building the entire deck plan around the concept.

>>55279114

Ay yo fuck you.

Bucky O' Hare is totally fine.

>>55313811

Engine size doesn't scale quite that badly. It's fuel and reaction mass that increase with such merciless speed, given for every kilo of fuel and reaction mass you have to accelerate another kilo.

>>55314161
It makes more sense as a deck plan than doing it sideways. And small but constant acceleration like 0.01-0.1g is plausible for some fusion drives, and would result in exactly that sort of deck plan.

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>>55305038
Oh you mean the storyline of the Expanse sci-fi series?

>>55314332
That's true if you're on the ground, but if you're in space then not really:

http://www.quantumg.net/rocketeq.html

Take 200,000 kg and 400,000 kg as your dry mass and with the same delta v and ISP you're going to end up with the same wet/dry ratio. In fact, if you're going with solar-electric propulsion chances you're going to be able to scale things up fairly easily as the bigger designs can take advantage of all sorts of neat tricks to keep your solar panels running cool to produce more electricity, and your engines operating at peak ISP because you can afford to trade off less reaction mass for more engines.

>>55314588

This is obviously true. A tiny electric engine can produce very nearly the same total delta-V as a huge cluster of electric engines.

You aren't really escaping the rocket equation by using an electric engine and solar panels, but you do get a HUGE advantage.. because you don't carry fuel, instead getting the energy to accelerate your reaction mass via collected energy.

>>55314677
You're not escaping it, but if you wanted to build BIG the hardest part would be getting it in orbit more than anything.

In fact, an even bigger tyranny that most people tend to forget about when writing about hard science fiction is the tyranny of the launch window. When you have to wait an entire year until you've got an efficient trade day I could see it making sense to go with one big ship rather than a cluster of smaller cargo haulers, because then you'd need less crew members and can afford to add on more redundancy for safety measures as it would be a drop in the bucket weight wise.

>>55314746
To be fair, there's plenty of material out their in micro-gravity rather then at the bottom of the deepest non-gas giant gravity well in the solar system.

We are in the hardest part now, the bootstraps part where all of our people and infrastructure at a hundred kilometers down and seven kilometers per second slow to be used in space.

Once we get past that, it gets a hell of a lot easier. Or at least, less energy intensive.

>>55308822
Would love for you to do art for my sci-fi thing.

>>55309453
Cargo ships in my sci-fi setting range from little courier vessels all the way up to massive super freighters that double as small mobile space colonies.

Someone should do a 'virgin hard sci-fi vs chad gothic sci-fi'

>>55315420
They really should.

>>55305196
The only way to be this optimistic about the prospects of automation is to not have worked with automation. You can do a lot with robots, but you still need a genuine intellect (artificial or natural) to handle the oddball cases that crop up once in a blue moon.

>>55315912
Or more frequently, if you don't catch the dangerous idiots before they insert bugs into the programming.
Think about it, as the need for programming to run automation goes up, and as the automation base program needs to be modified for the equipment its running, after a certain point we'll be hiring people to write those programs and patches - who are not qualified to do so. At best, it'll be like automation itself, with a simple base program, roughly like what you need it to be, that you then have to patch and modify to work on your specific system. At worst, 95% of all automation software will require constant oversight from a handler and a team of programmers standing by.

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>No Chris Foss

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>>55316202

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>>55316235

>>55280539
what are
>banner of stars
>planetes
>starship operators
I love all the rest

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>>55279114
>no macross
>no SB yamato
>no gundam 00
>no gundam IBO
>no gundam at all for that matter
>no LoGH

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>>55316247

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>>55316376

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>>55316380

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>>55316398

>>55311241

Well, it is not like the books had detailed descriptions of the ships. For all we know, book!Donnager could look like an Art Deco daydream.

>>55316235
I'm having flashbacks to the ace Galactic Encounters and Terran Trade Authority books of my youth. Bloody hell were those books awesome.

>>55309096
>the furthest we've looked into it, we didn't find any showstoppers

That's because we didn't look into it that much. People vastly overestimate how well thought-out the Orion drive is.

>>55317232
We looked into it as deeply as could be done back then before doing actual real world tests. There was a lot of physics, computer simulations on plasma interaction with the pusher (yeah, even back then) and so on. Real world experiments were planned and would have been built had the program not been canned.

It would be interesting to see what the results would be if this was redone today with the much better simulation capabilities we have.

>>55317182
Considering he did a lot of art for those, it's not a surprise.

diary of a Space Person has a lot of epic scenes like those.

>>55317255

Nah, we looked into it as deeply as Dyson could push it. There is a reason they unironically built and tested a nuclear ramjet but left the Orion drive in the dust.

>>55317390
It became politically difficult due to the partial test ban treaty, but there also wasn't a lot of will to fund it when Apollo became the the focus of the US space program. After that there was no will to fund any large scale space projects.

I am not saying Orion would 100% definitely work, but the reasons it was canned weren't engineering-related. This paper is a good overview of where they were with the program, though it doesn't go into all the gory details. There are many other papers but they can be difficult to locate.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070704104944/http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19770085619_1977085619.pdf

Orion was also apparently investigated in a much smaller capacity some time in the 80's at Los Alamos. I don't know if that went beyond bouncing some ideas around. All I know about that is that they were apparently focused on improving the performance of the system with advanced pusher designs. Since Orion is declassified, I'm curious whether a FOIA request would yield anything. Or if this stuff is already on the internet and I just can't find it.

>>55302958

Space is big, the usable sphere around a planet is not.

>>55309170
It's complicated. I'm gonna go with the imperial fleets that the cruiser belongs to - the corvette is the ego project of a huge corporation and is part of that hierarchy whereas the interceptor belongs to a very distant and different empire.

The Creharran empire is a very old, very decentralized polity (that, with hyperdrives, would take you about a decade to cross) that's more a relatively stable state the region has fallen into than it is anything planned. They've got about 9000 systems, most of which live merrily on their own, trading with their neighbors and such, as long as they pay their dues. The empire reigns by virtue of being the biggest, most entrenched organization around that gets away with taking a little bit of every system's GDP to make the biggest number of the baddest warships. Also through a lot of deeply entrenched bureaucracy and tradition. They rarely need to put down a rebellion by force, but their ability to do so informs the political landscape. To many the empire is useful since it doesn't really interfere with your life too much and serves as a guarantee that your neighbors don't rock the boat excessively. You might like it less if you're the one who wants to rock the boat, for which you might have perfectly valid reasons since the empire is flawed in many ways.

>>55317988
Just like the rest of it, the fleets are heavily decentralized too, for reasons of both necessity and tradition. There are maybe a couple dozen distinct fleets in the empire, and it's less one military as it is a set of allied militaries. On a high level their political objectives are centrally directed but otherwise they're pretty independent. They're also small societies in on themselves with their own cultural aspects. People live and serve in the fleets for anything from five years to indefinitely, and some are born into it. They need the empire to survive - building competitive warships is an extremely costly and time-consuming consuming affair, and without the empire's bureaucracies and supply chains they couldn't do it. On a personal level, it's not a luxurious life, but the fleet and finally the empire do guarantee you all the necessities, so the status quo is a comfortable place to be, at least when you're not deployed to a war zone and retching from radiation poisoning from the nuke that just went off next to your ship. If a fleet were to rebel, the others would hopefully gang up on it not only from a sense of duty but for selfish reasons.

None of this is as stable or inevitable as everyone in the empire thinks. And now you know it's secretly space opera with hard scifi spaceships. FTL though is the only place where I outright murder physics.

>>55317480

That pdf is an interesting read.

>>55317988
>>55317994

Space!feudalism is an underrated setting. You do God's work here anon.

>>55309330
>If it would be possible to create at real life assuming ner infinite (but not infinite) wealth, manpower, time and resources, is hard scifi

>>55311793
Please share it on the Worshop!

>>55305995
I'M IN A ROKH!

>>55314211
I like you, anon.