Reinforcements: Task Force Three by geirla
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Description
I guess I can't leave well enough alone. The big ship in this picture is my third redesign of the Ares class Heavy Cruiser. The first version I did many years ago when my skills weren't well enough developed to show my work, the second, just a year and a half old, was, well, ugly.
(see http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1391411&member if you care)
The Odin design has also been tweaked since that old image (for last week's image), and I spend a couple of hours yesterday redoing my old destroyer model in Martian Imperial Red.
And yes, the new design for the Ares class did come out of another boring meeting. I was sitting next to my boss's boss at the time, so hopefully my sketching won't be reflected on my review...
Thanks as always for viewing and commenting.
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In peacetime, being ten weeks behind schedule on a hundred and twenty week job wouldn't have been a big deal. But this is wartime, and heads have already rolled. Finally, we got the commissioning documents signed off. Barsoom has left its construction bay for the last time. Half a million tons of loaded ship -- two thirds of it was fuel, which took another ten hours to load -- is leaving Phobos behind.
They're calling us Task Force Three -- a little pretentious with only a cruiser, two destroyers and a corvette. But we are the reinforcements for Jupiter, and Doris Shakel has enough political pull and PR skills to get us a fancy title. Task Force One had two cruisers among twenty ships. Task Force Two split off One with fourteen of those ships.
It doesn't matter. We're still strong enough to keep the Roiders from hitting us as we pass through the Belt. What matters is that we're finally out of the barn and heading for the fight. We'll get those problems with Reactor Six and the bad thruster and the door on Airlock Twelve... and the balky main maser communicator and the main galley food processor all taken care of long before we reach Jupiter. Or so they tell me. And we probably won't need those stern chaser laser blisters right away.
Optimism is the word of the day, according to Captain Shakel.
-Commander Adrian Vander, XO IMN Barsoom 3 June 2519
Comments (15)
NickPL
Amasing modelling work !!1
Biffowitz
Myself I like the big one without the solar panels, not as complicated but I think it would hold up quite well in a space scene. Cool modeling and design, hope your boss doesn't come here!
Seaview123
Your modeling work is off the charts. Fantastic detail, and your back story is always great. Well done!
e-brink
Great scene, and yes, perhaps the panels could be smaller and maybe have a facility to angle them a few degrees when required? Just a thought.
geirla
Alrighty then. Two comments on it means I should have mentioned it in my text above. I think I explained this a year or so ago, but most of you weren't commenting then. The biggest problems with a realistic spacecraft design is that it needs to dump excess heat. You can't cheat the second law of thermodynamics, so there's always going to be some waste heat. To move a spaceship the size of a supertanker at any speed with high efficiency, you're going to need a lot of power. Like about a petawatt (yeah, a thousand terawatts). So even if you're 99.9% efficient in turning energy into motive power, you've still got a dump a terawatt of heat off the ship. That's a lot of heat, and you need a lot of surface area to dump it without melting any known material. The smaller ships in this image use their entire hulls to dissipate the heat. The big one, to keep weight down, doesn't have armored fins, just big bad radiator fins. So what we have here are radiator panels, not solar panels.
grafikeer
Excellent modelling work and backstory,as well as your added description of these"radiator fins"...great work as always!
egehlin
Superb modelling work (as always). You've done your homework and it shows in your designs. Keep up the great work!!!
DPW
Wow, you really think about these things, don't you? Great modeling work, as always. Again, I like the texturing work. Only minor nit I have is that I think you could back off the saturation of the hull paint a touch to make it look less "new ship" looking. But that's really just a personal taste thing, they could have just gotten painted in the recent past.
Rutra
Really interesting to see how you think about this and how your design is backed up by theory. The new version has an awesome design.
Bambam131
Excellent modeling and very nice heat radiators you got there! I get the same response when I post some of my ships. They also think that the panels near the engines on my ships are solar panels. Cheers, David
dcmstarships
nice scene and great explanation about the heat radiators. you designs are always so well thought out from an engineering perspective as well as being quite attractive from an artistic perspective
kasalin
Excellent image, this is wonderful !!! Very well done !!! Hugs:)
Black_Knyght
Very nicely done. So visually eye catching!
kjer_99
Much as I love the ships and the writing, the thing which makes my heart go pity-pat is that future Mars with its oceans.
NefariousDrO
As much as I love these ships, I also really like your "green mars" in the background. Super!