Star Ship Polaris

Another vote here for blue, although I find myself questioning the purpose of a big, glowing Simon Says game encircling the body. It's a little too Star Trek, IMHO, where all magic tech must glow a primary color.

 

Is a lighted ring really required at all? Does it serve a purpose beyond looking cool?

If you need a lit ring how about yellow or white?

--Alex

 

I like it without the light, but I like the red better than the blue.

 

I'm cool with it being simply ornamental. Maybe it can cycle through colors like these LEDs I have lighting my desk. Oooo, red! Now blue! Now purple! Yellow! White! Brown!

 

Well, most of the saucer section of this ship is supposed to be a part of the FTL drive system, or possibly a toroidal loop for a fusion reactor power plant, or maybe something else. The point is, there's energy being either produced or used out there for something, so the glowing ring makes sense to me from that standpoint. More than anything else, though, I just thought it looked cool as a lighting effects experiment. If Dennis and his team want to do something along these lines, that's up them. I'm just playing around a little.

 

I like them both, and completely agree with your thoughts behind this, Vektor - maybe the red glow is 'at idle,' and it transits to blue when the drive is powered up and 'engaged.'

 

I admit to not being a huge fan of this design, but really appreciate the work put into it. Just amazing detail and these renders really make the ship pop...

I like both colours and really can't decide. This ship decidedly looks agressive with the red and peaceful with the blue. But that's a very basic emotional response not indicative of the purpose of the ship.

Ptrope's idea isn't a bad compromise. It would be a cool visual at the very least.

 

Maybe I'm too much a stick-in-the-mud, but it seems to me that in real life, stuff usually only lights up if it, you know, it's a light. When something is high-energy enough to emit light, it's usually boxed up so tight that the light is never really seen by humans eyes. Having glowy "high energy" parts in a sci-fi setting just ratchets down the realism for me by several points. Star Trek is probably the worst offender in this regard. I look at Geordi or even Trip Tucker screwing around with something behind a panel and ask myself, "Dude, why does your screwdriver light up like that?"

I think the ship looks great and far more believable than pretty much any other sci-fi show's hero ship, but once you add the lit up ring, to my eye, it really makes the whole thing seem cheaper.

YMMV

--Alex

 

Well, there's always the possibility that they are just lights.

 

Um, I have a power screwdriver that lights up to allow better viewing of screws in tight places. Besides, for space craft, in reality, you might actually have heat radiators that would glow when trying to get rid of high amounts of heat.

 

In that case, perhaps the ring should emit black-body radiation in accordance with Planck's law, in which case the color would lie along the Planckian locus.

 

^Heat radiators, by their nature, are not in equilibrium with their environment.

 

True, but, without sidetracking the thread, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation:

 

Never mind, upon further reading, we're talking about the same thing. I just wasn't familiar with the black-body terminology.

 

They wouldn't glow very bright, just a dull red, which would probably be washed out by a weak flashlight. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/basicdesign.php#dullred

 

Final detailing on the booster engines:

 

Last one for tonight:

 

That's gorgeous! I love the orange paneling. And I gotta admit, when quite faint like in this last pic, the glowy blue ring doesn't look bad at all.

--Alex

 

I was talking about getting rid of heat from a stardrive. Could be any amount. But the idea was that it would be red in idle and blue-white when activated.