Meant to do this one earlier in the weekend, but I was too sick to create. Much better now - bed rest and drugs killed the worst of the crud. Anyway, this image corresponds to the prelude to a raid on the Martian base at Ganymede. Now, much of my "hard science fiction" stuff is researched a bit. A great site for good rocket science is Winchell D. Chung Jr.'s Atomic Rocket page: http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/index.html I use the site a lot to refine some of my designs and make sure I'm not screwing up too many things (hey, I never finished engineering school - I've just got degrees in History and Finance). No,w all the math and physics there is fine, but I do have one nit. Yes, I agree in principle that there is no stealth in space, and that you could detect thrusters firing from across the solar system. But there is a big difference between what you could (theoretically and mathematically) detect and what you will (actually and in a timely manner) detect and identify. After all, mathematically we wouldn't still be looking for all those potentially Earth crossing asteroids - we'd have found every one of them within a year - math tells us so. And we'd be able to monitor every eruption on Io and meteorite strike on the moon. But I digress. Point is, if you leave a known location under any decent thrust, you'd be identified and tracked. But the greater the resolution of a sensor, the more processing power and time it will take to track the whole sky - and eliminate all known background noise, etc. So with some cleverness, you can exploit that the sensor nets will only see what they expect to see (doubly true for those with no sapient eyes behind them), and clever misdirection and timing can still allow for some unpleasant surprises. Enough of that. The ship's radiators glow from both ambiance and red lights. The planet background is a tweaked Cassini image of Jupiter (with a, um, "rough leather" texture effect in PSP, to give it some depth.) Hope you like it. (Moon positions were verified via Celestia - don't know how accurate it is 500 years out, though) --- We've spent four weeks coasting since we kicked out of Outpost 16. Then, Mars was on the far side of the sun and Jupiter at opposition. The outpost wasn't on the charts, and nobody launched a panicked sortie towards us, so it looks like we pulled it off. We passed right under the Himalia tracking station, but our raiders had done a quick hit and run on it two days before and they were still off-line. All the big moons are on the other side of the planet, and of the little fry, only Amalthea is in line of site to our burn. Task Group 12.3 should have it under attack already. After four weeks of no gravity and little heat, I gave the order. Our ships kicked all ten ion drives on full, lowering the performance and maxing the acceleration by pushing xenon through them at maximum military thrust. The engineers were nervous, watching the currents build up nearly to arcing. We were pushing more than two gees now, changing our course, flying a thousand klicks over Jupiter's cloud tops. The radiators glowed amber. The burns of our group and the other twenty ships lit up my boards - incandescent blue ion drive flames trailed the dark ships, their coppery radiators burning at three thousand degrees. We gained a little Oberth effect thrust too - not so much since we were already pushing 180kps, but after twelve minutes, we'd be back on coast, going 200kps through the ring plane and radiation belts, dropping off drone missiles left and right, hard to spot and only an hour and a half away from Callisto. Only forty minutes out of combustion head range. Those Red bastards are really going to get it. --Belt Guard Captain Leander Nasr-Kwon, commander, Task Group 12.2, 7 March 2522