Star Ship Polaris

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Vektor, you and aridas may have a market there.

I bet this mesh would work well for stereolithography; it's really clean and well-designed.

 

[Vektor]

The thought has crossed my mind. I'd probably have to redesign the articulation for those wing sails a little bit, though; the current configuration is just borderline mechanically feasible.

 

[Vektor]

Made a little more progress on the lander interior illustration. Shading is only temporary. Click to embiggen.

 

[sojourner]

Getting a really cool dashboard and center console vibe there. Makes me want to see you design a concept car.

 

[Maurice]

^^^Cool. Have we discussed how many people this thing has to carry as well as the equipment? It needs at least 10 seats (including the pilot(s)).

 

[Vektor]

There are four seats on either side, plus a pilot and co-pilot, so exactly 10. Probably 2 to 4 additional jump seats could be installed in a pinch, or the central and aft areas can be used for cargo.

 

[Maurice]

Um. $poiler.

 

[sojourner]

Does the Nielsen generator create fully sentient Leslies?

 

[Vektor]

Um. $poiler.

I do believe that item has been discussed before on more than one occasion, but I've deleted the reference from my comment anyway.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

I'm not sweating it.

Ten is about right. This is a really cool design.

There is a sort of concept that we really need to think about, not directly related to the ship Polaris itself, if you've got some time to give it. It wouldn't necessarily be complex or too involved.

 

[Vektor]

An evolving design for one of the background ships:

This might look familiar to some of you who remember this earlier set of concept sketches:

 

[sojourner]

Great art, complete with mini usb port, lol.

 

[Santaman]

Neat concepts also planning a battleship or two?

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Someone would have to build the models. Our available resources over the next six months will dictate how extensive a fleet we have - that, and the story demands (there are only a few scenes that will use these).

 

[Maurice]

An evolving design for one of the background ships:

Nice. I'm wondering, though, are we going to carry forward the idea that nose=up and tail=down a la the Polaris? Dennis?

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Well, we clearly have artificial gravity in our little techno-continuity; acceleration alone wouldn't account under all circumstances for Polaris's internal environment as we see it.

In building Saladin I've tried to detail it so as to suggest that gravity runs along different axes in different modules of the ship, giving us more wiggle room for interpretation on various vessels.

Rather than ask artists to constrain themselves to a particular approach, what I've come to is that there are issues of how systems "scale" on our ships.

For example, little Polaris has some nifty variable-geometry sails to manage parts of its FTL drive in an energy-efficient manner,while a behemoth like Saladin employs huge fixed structures that draw on enormous energy resources and "brute force."

The real reason for the design difference is that if we put structures on Saladin that both move quickly enough and are proportionately large enough to be seen in quick-cut shots I'm afraid it'll appear less massive and we'll destroy the sense of scale difference between it and Polaris.

So, on the matter of gravity - it's more practical and efficient for a small vessel like Polaris to make use of acceleration forces to help with the gravity situation, but much bigger ships can prioritize other design demands over efficiency because they have enough energy resources not to have to worry about it.

Or something. Sometimes forward is up and sometimes it's not.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Mind if I put this up on the Facebook page?

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Meanwhile here's how this is going:

 

[Vektor]

If you mean the latest ship sketch, by all means, post wherever you like. Just make sure to note it's a work in progress.

As for the artificial gravity/deck orientation question, my feeling is that Polaris' decks are arranged the way they are mainly because it has the ability to land. Probably a lot of smaller ship classes have similar arrangements and for the same reasons. For bigger ships, they can orient their gravity and their decks however they want, and even vary them from one section to another. Even on Polaris, I have the gravity in the lander modules oriented perpendicular to the rest of the ship, and the access corridors leading to them actually transition from one orientation to the other like a skateboard ramp.

Regarding the drive "sails," I've given quite a bit of thought to the rationale for them. By way of an analogy, I liken them to the fletchings on an arrow. When a ship makes an FTL jump, the effect is similar to firing an arrow from a bow. Without the fletchings, there is nothing to stabilize the arrow's trajectory and it is likely to go wildly off-target.

I imagine that FTL jump drives in this universe have effectively unlimited range, but any jump longer than, say, a dozen light years is impractical because the accuracy diminishes exponentially with distance. Beyond a certain point, the FTL trajectory can actually skew beyond the dimensional limits of this universe, making longer jumps exceptionally risky.

Polaris' drive sails were a design innovation intended to stabilize the FTL trajectory much like the arrow fletchings. They succeeded, giving Polaris pinpoint accuracy for short jumps and a much greater effective range for longer ones, but the sails themselves were relatively fragile and vulnerable to misalignment problems. Only two or three ship classes were ever fitted with the technology and only a handful of each were ever produced. Within a few years, the external sails were superseded by somewhat less efficient but far more durable internal components.

Anyway, that's my unofficial explanation for the drive sails and why they aren't used on any other ships in this production besides Polaris. It also ties in with certain plot points, which I will not reveal here.

For what it's worth.

 

[Vektor]

That engineering space looks awesome! Amazing fidelity to the concept painting. I can hardly wait to see it with all the lights on.