Star Ship Polaris

[Admiral Buzzkill]

I need to make a practice of leaving town for three days every weekend - every time I do, I come back to find all this new coolness.

So that's what the Nielsen generators look like? I like that - even better than I like being the writer who just has to type "Nielsen generator" and then see something like this materialize from someone else's talent.

I also like the fins a lot - not necessarily just as they are, because I figure that whatever you do to them will just make them even better.

It's not a done deal that this ship never lands - I imagine that it does, though probably never on an object as massive as Earth. I can totally see this ship landing on, say, the Moon, nose up and fins down just like in the 1950s science fiction movies.

Vektor, if you don't mind I'm going to post some of these images on the Polaris Facebook page.

[Vektor]

Tail fins as landing struts is not a bad idea at all.

And yes, by all means, post anything you want on the Polaris site.

[Venardhi]

For some reason it just occurred to me for the first time that looking out a window on this thing is going to look like it is raining stars. I hope you exploit that great image in some way Dennis.

More on topic, it seems to me that the back end is very square in profile when the warp sails are unfolded. feels like there should be something breaking up those big (nearly)right angles a bit.

I like the fins off the broken ring on the back for the most part, but the forward ring coming off the guns remains an odd distraction for me.

[Vektor]

By "forward ring" I assume you mean the missile racks. If they seem a little odd, that's as it should be because they were never part of the original design. They were basically "bolted on" when the Polaris was rather hastily converted from a science vessel to a war ship.

[Vektor]

I've been doing quite a bit of work on the Polaris and I will soon be ready to post a bunch of new WIP images. In the mean time, I thought I'd share a little teaser of some of the latest progress.




In case it isn't obvious, this is a lander module, Polaris' rough equivalent to a shuttlecraft. There are two of them, one on each side. Landing struts and other details are yet to be added.

I hope to be able to post some additional images before the weekend is out.

[sojourner]

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!

[Vektor]

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.

[sojourner]

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!

[Vektor]

Oh, ye of little faith...

[Potemkin_Prod]

Is Dennis away for the weekend again?

[Admiral Buzzkill]

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.

[sojourner]

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.

[Vektor]

Dennis wrote:

---

As far as the way the landers dock with Polaris itself - the only help or guidance Vektor had from the script was this paragraph:

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.

[CorporalCaptain]

Please don't change the Apollo profile. I like the aura of RL it brings.

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Vektor wrote:

---

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

Oops! That's absolutely right, obviously, and I apologize for the mistake. I updated my post, thanks.