Beyond Marvelous!

Great looking diagram! Teah, Winchell Chung's Atomic Rocket site is a great place of real science fiction spacecraft design.

That's some piece of work man, great job William Peace

Very impressive work.

Fantastic! Corrie

Fantastic ship and great presentation!

some fine and thoughtful work here, bud!!

Very interesting technical drawing!

Very special and inventive artwork!!

Fantastic and great work on the layout and all the specs. Speed of Light = 299,792,458 m/sec. So no matter how far away the energy signature can be detected from that signature will not travel faster than the speed of light. Thus the timing of when the signature becomes detectable is also significant. So translate all that mass and meters per sec into a max speed in relation to the speed of light please. I looked up the Brachistochrone curve and my math skills are not there to figure out how to translate your 14 days to Saturn. Assuming your using the 7 days there accelerate and flip and 7 days braking or is there a new design on acceleration and braking? All this makes me wonder about the relevance of the timing/cycle of the ship weapons as even with a modest low speed of light and considering the ability to maneuver and the size of the engagement envelope is going to be measured a tiny fraction of a second, assuming they are on opposite tracts. One ship overtaking the other would provide a different picture of course.

Excellent design and render. I really like your ships!!! David

Very beautiful work!

EXCELLENT

Neat model

Excellent sci fi, well done...

COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

I love annotated spaceship designs like this. It shows all the thought you have but into the design. Well done.

dbrv6, The vehicle depicted is a sub-light interplanetary spacecraft. Brachistochrone is not necessarily a relativistic velocity trajectory. Relativity doesn’t enter into question because the vehicle never approaches relativistic speeds.

What an awesome ship! What kind of warheads do the missiles carry? High-explosive, nuclear, or just plain old kinetic?

Hi Xytan, As to warhead type, an array of effective (theoretical – at least presently no nation admits to possession of specialized space combat weapons – although these have been the subject of study) warheads are worthy of consideration. The type depends on the circumstance. For a comprehensive overview of space combat, tactics, and weapons I recommend Winchell Chung’s Atomic Rockets site, it has an extensive space warfare section. Nuclear warheads can do all kinds of interesting damage even in the vacuum of space. See Link: Conventional Space Weapons Nukes In Space Heat is the enemy – heat generated by the array on board electronic systems, nuclear reactors, humans and life-support systems – and radiators (required to dissipate waste heat) are fragile. Spacecraft with nuclear thermal drive systems (excluding some solid NTR’s) require radiators to dissipate engine waste heat. On combat spacecraft some weapon systems generate enormous amounts of waste heat which must be radiated away into space – lasers are one example. While exceedingly effective as a point-defense against missiles, the drawback is the amount of heat they generate requiring radiators, on-board heat-sinks, and either or both open-cycle and closed-cycle active cooling. Radiators are rather fragile and vulnerable to clouds of high velocity shrapnel from kinetic kill warheads. One possibility is a single-shot coil-gun firing a kinetic weapon. Another type of warhead is an explosive charge coated with shrapnel, designed to deliver a cloud of kinetic kill masses into the path of the target spacecraft. Of course the simplest is no warhead at all, making the structure of the missile an impromptu kinetic kill weapon. According to the first law of space combat (Rocketpunk Manifesto) above about a three km/s relative velocity difference a chemical explosive warhead is superfluous. Rick Robinson says that at these speeds the only reason for conventional explosives is for the bursting charge to open a shrapnel cloud. In my image Link: Battle Over Phobos I show one spacecraft firing a missile carrying a Casaba-Howitzer charge at another spacecraft delivering a mission-kill with a single shot. Note: under normal circumstances space combat would occur at such distances that opposing spacecraft would only be visible (as very tiny dots) with a telescope – in Battle Over Phobos the context of the story is one in which the men manning the spacecraft presume that they are on the same side. In the back story the Earth Alliance, a global Socialist State located on Earth, has seized the settlement established by men over 500 years in the historical past of the story setting – this is an act of overt aggression by the nations of Earth enacting a theft of the 500 years of labor the Martian settlers put in establishing a terrestrial atmosphere and climate on Mars. The Martians, of course, would not sit still for this – biding their time, they plotted to take back (from the criminal State located on Earth) the value they had won by virtue of their long labor – some years after the invasion of their territory they act to throw off the weight of the Socialist oppressors from Earth. The battle depicted in Battle Over Phobos is akin to the opening shots of the American Revolutionary War in which the settlers of America fought off and repelled British forces, under control of King George in England, and repelled them from American shores. This is the reason for the combatants being in close proximity, in Mars orbit, over the main port or mooring located on the Martian moon Phobos – the war to take back Mars begins in this setting where the Martian’s open fire unexpectedly on Alliance Fleet spacecraft which represent the occupying force from Earth. For an explanation of the Casaba-Howitzer charge (a nuclear-shaped-charge weapon which directs a substantial portion of the nuclear warheads output into a narrow cone, effectively transforming the output into a directed beam which can strike with devastating force) see Link: Nuclear Shaped Charges.