Star Ship Polaris

Discussion in 'Fan Art' started by aridas sofia, Mar 3, 2008.

  1. sojourner

    sojourner Admiral In Memoriam

    Joined:
    Sep 4, 2008
    Location:
    Just around the bend.
    Wow! Love the detail inside that docking area!

    One question though. Why an Apollo style cone? It seems a little dated compared to the rest of the ship. Would something that gave some control in an atmosphere be more useful? Maybe a lifting body of some sort that could still do VTOVL?

    The hexes on the heatshield are a great touch!
     
  2. Vektor

    Vektor Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 30, 2001
    Location:
    Spokane, WA, USA
    Short answer: It's really not an Apollo style cone. It's capabilities go far beyond a mere re-entry capsule and it does have the ability to maneuver in atmosphere, make surface-to-surface hops, return to orbit, etc. It's also about 40' in diameter.

    Don't let the simple cone shape fool you.
     
  3. sojourner

    sojourner Admiral In Memoriam

    Joined:
    Sep 4, 2008
    Location:
    Just around the bend.
    Oh, I am sure it can do alot more technology and size wise. Never doubted that. It's just that the shape does not lend itself to much control aerodynamically. It's a purely ballistic shape.

    Edit: Thinking about this though just gave me a neat idea. Let me cobble something together with my meager Sketchup skills to show you. Back Later!
     
  4. Vektor

    Vektor Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 30, 2001
    Location:
    Spokane, WA, USA
    Oh, ye of little faith... ;)
     
  5. Potemkin_Prod

    Potemkin_Prod Commodore Commodore

    Joined:
    Jan 11, 2010
    Location:
    Out of Here
    Is Dennis away for the weekend again?
     
  6. Admiral Buzzkill

    Admiral Buzzkill Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 8, 2001
    Dennis has relatives in from far-flung parts of the U.S. and Europe this weekend. Dennis just now checked in here.

    Dennis is awestruck. Dennis needs to find something new to say about Vektor's work other than I Absolutely Love This, but Dennis doesn't know what that would be right now.

    Vektor has forwarded to me very cool sketches of the landing boat...well, landing in months past, and I really like them - there's a Forbidden Planet vibe to the whole thing, and it's important in how we've approached staging the upcoming location work and some of our recent green screen work. As far as the way the landers dock with Polaris itself - Vektor had design drawings from aridas sofia and a sentence or two in the script to work from.

    As the size of Polaris became settled, I decided that providing a pressurized hangar space would be impractical and unnecessary. The original idea was that the landing boats would be embedded in the saucer area of the ship. Vektor did something far more clever and visually arresting than that.
     
    Last edited: Mar 27, 2011
  7. sojourner

    sojourner Admiral In Memoriam

    Joined:
    Sep 4, 2008
    Location:
    Just around the bend.
    OK, the above image made me think of the following arrangement. Crude drawing, just raw shapes, but it gets the idea across. Three landers embedded into the bulge much as Vektor has it, but these switch out the apollo style cone for lifting bodies.

    [​IMG]
     
  8. Vektor

    Vektor Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 30, 2001
    Location:
    Spokane, WA, USA
    Giving credit where credit is due, the design of the lander itself is mostly based on the original concept by Aridas Sofia:

    http://home.comcast.net/~aridas/lander1.jpg
    http://home.comcast.net/~aridas/lander-detail.jpg

    As with Polaris itself, I have embellished it a bit and, as Dennis noted, I completely re-envisioned the docking arrangement. Once I realized the bottom curvature of the lander was a near-perfect match for the radius of Polaris' central sphere, it just seemed logical.

    Much more in the coming days.
     
  9. CorporalCaptain

    CorporalCaptain Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Feb 12, 2011
    Location:
    astral plane
    Please don't change the Apollo profile. I like the aura of RL it brings.
     
  10. Admiral Buzzkill

    Admiral Buzzkill Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 8, 2001
    Last edited: Mar 27, 2011
  11. Vektor

    Vektor Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 30, 2001
    Location:
    Spokane, WA, USA
    First, these landers really aren't supposed to perform like F-22 Raptors. They are primarily a way for the Polaris crew to get down to a planet's surface and back.

    In atmosphere, I imagine they would operate in a manner similar to a helicopter or a VTOL, with vectored thrust from the main engines and smaller thrusters giving them more than adequate maneuverability. Again, you might not want to engage in a dogfight with one, but it should get the job done otherwise.
     
  12. CorporalCaptain

    CorporalCaptain Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Feb 12, 2011
    Location:
    astral plane
    The UFO's on Gerry Anderson's UFO had a distinctly Apollo reentry module shape, but also in addition had a characteristic spinning belt of beam emitters that could wail on the unsuspecting. This is not the best image of one, but it is good for recognition.

    I thought you might like to be reminded of/made aware of Anderson's iconic craft with an otherwise similar profile, so that you can avoid any unintentional resemblance in the atmospheric flight characteristics of your landing module.

    For, if your craft moves through the air horizontally while traveling around within a planet's atmosphere, it could easily strongly resemble an Anderson UFO. This could be remedied by making movement from point A to point B on a planet generally ballistic, so that motion is generally along its main cylindrical axis.
     
  13. Herkimer Jitty

    Herkimer Jitty Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Jul 4, 2008
    Location:
    Dayglow, New California Republic
    You know what's more iconic than an Anderson UFO?

    The Apollo capsule.

    No biggie.
     
  14. Avon

    Avon Commodore Commodore

    Joined:
    May 7, 2010
    Location:
    Avon
    i think people watching would realise they're neither viewing an episode of UFO or a real life space mission.

    unless they're mad.
     
  15. JES

    JES Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

    Joined:
    Feb 14, 2011
    Location:
    Ocoee, Florida
    I don't mind the shape of the shuttlecraft. They look like they could work fine. Sure, it would be nice if they looked more like lifting bodies, but I guess that capsule shapes are inherently more compact, which is most certainly in need here!

    I'm also loving the shape of the Polaris. All those moving parts are very cool.

    I couldn't help but notice that earlier in the thread, it was suggested that the Polaris wasn't going to have energy weapons. I couldn't help but think that such a decision would be a mistake.
    The U.S. military has been experimenting with energy weapons for quite some time. Heck, working examples already exist. I am certain that future spaceships that will likely need to defend themselves will have laser turrets, which would make an excellent defense against missiles and fighters.
    I'm not certain if it is already too late to say anything that will make any difference, but I figure I'd better speak my mind or forever hold my peace. I think that given the armaments that the Polaris currently has, and the fact that they are all forward facing, she would need some laser turrets for defense. I think that 4-8 placed somewhere on the saucer should be sufficient to give her an adequate coverage.
     
  16. CorporalCaptain

    CorporalCaptain Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Feb 12, 2011
    Location:
    astral plane
    In case it needs clarification, I haven't been critical of the shape of the landing craft, and nor have I expressed any critical remarks whatsoever. In fact, just one post above my most recent, I praised the shape of the craft.

    My remarks were merely to remind the team, as I'm sure at least some of them saw UFO once upon a time, that if such a craft is shown flying horizontally, it could resemble a UFO.

    If they want it to look like a UFO, or don't think it matters, I'm not objecting. It was just free, unsolicited advice, but it had nothing to do with the shape of the craft.
     
  17. Admiral Buzzkill

    Admiral Buzzkill Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 8, 2001
    There's a line in the script indicating that large ships, at least, have "plasma gun defense" turrets. As far as Polaris itself is concerned, it has missiles for offense and its defenses consist mainly of trying not to get hit. ;)

    My assumption about the behavior of the landing boat - which is subject to change if an artist comes up with something really appealing that's different - is that, based upon the design and the placement of the thrusters, it's simply a VTOL like the Apollo LM (except, obviously, single-stage and reusable). It would come in presenting the shielded lower surface, extend its legs and land, then lift off the same way. As much as I like to hark back to Forbidden Planet, the horizontal skimming-along-cruising-to-the-landing-spot behavior of the C57D is not what I have in mind.
     
  18. JES

    JES Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

    Joined:
    Feb 14, 2011
    Location:
    Ocoee, Florida
    Oh well... Had to try.:)

    Heh, I can only hope that she succeeds. Given her size, I'm hoping that she is extremely agile, made out of a very tough alloy, capable of polarizing her hull plating similar to the NX, have a combination of the three, because otherwise, one good hit, and she is in for a grand cremation.

    She would have to be, since I also read an earlier post saying that the Polaris wouldn't have shields, which is a fair assessment, given what I remember on one program from the History Channel covering future space travel.

    It said that it might be possible to create an energy field that could block attacks like energy weapons and stuff using plasma fields. But it would be difficult to create since to give a plasma field those characteristics, it would have to be made out of hot and cold plasma.
    The catch is that hot plasma is like similar to the corona of the stars, extremely hot, and would melt the ship, and the crew, so it would somehow need to be sandwiched in between fields of cold plasma, which lacks the hotter forms fiery personality. But it could take quite some time to find a way to utilize it.
    Even so, the Air Force, Military, NASA etc. is researching the possibility of using plasma to block out forms of radiation, in a way, similar to the navigational deflector. I don't think that 200-300 years from now, we will have full deflector shields, but we will need some form of navigational deflector for serious space travel, because without it, the risks of being exposed to radiation from stars alone would make common space travel too dangerous. And then there are micro meteoroids (ever see Mission Space, when the ship gets pelted by lots of little meteors?), which can shoot though objects like bullets.

    Perhaps a cold plasma field to screen out radiation, combined with the use of gravity manipulation fields to repel foreign objects, could act as a sort of navigation deflector.

    Just a thought.;)
     
  19. Admiral Buzzkill

    Admiral Buzzkill Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Mar 8, 2001
    Uh...yeah, pretty much. Tough universe. ;)
     
  20. Herkimer Jitty

    Herkimer Jitty Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Jul 4, 2008
    Location:
    Dayglow, New California Republic
    And what's your heat dissipation plan? Or are you planning on letting the laser emplacements cook themselves?

    Dennis has got the right idea. This is really the most realistic way to defend yourself in space, especially if your ship isn't a warship. You only need point defenses if your ECM and maneuverability are hilariously sad, and you decide for whatever reason, to directly confront your opponent. Space combat is wildly impractical if both participants aren't trying to engage one another, because space is just so darn big.