It's been a while since I've done a terrestrial Bryce scene, but I wanted to show a takeoff scene. I also want to point out that you can do a lot with just Bryce Booleans. Not everything needs to look blocky or tube-like if you learn to work with intersecting shapes. The entire vehicle, including the color scheme, was done in Bryce with positive, negative and intersecting Boolean shapes . Thanks as always for viewing, commenting and even favoriting! --- When the Beanstalks fell in the Last World War, the tens of thousands living in space, in orbit, on the moon and beyond, fell in crisis. While raw materials for building and for some life support were mostly harvested from the moon or near Earth asteroids, much of the food, electronics and spare parts were still shipped from Earth. Before the war, the offworld colonists counted on five hundred tonnes of supplies every day just to survive. By the end of the War, only enough launch vehicles to supply five hundred tonnes a week remained operational, and that was just to low orbit, never mind geosynchronous or lunar orbit where most of the surviving offworlders lived. The Beanstalks had contributed to a lack of capacity and investment in orbital vehicles, and most of those that survived the war were military spaceplanes almost entirely unsuited to cargo delivery. The rush to build new launchers finally overcame the taboo against launching nuclear vehicles from Earth's surface. The Chinese solution was to build a giant gas core nuclear rocket, capable of delivering five hundred tonnes to low orbit, from where tugs would haul the cargo to the surviving outposts and habitats. It was a brute force solution that required a giant bullet-shaped hydrogen fueled rocket and supporting pad and launch facilities. The American solution, built in less than six months on the Pacific coast, was a nuclear powered shuttle, reviving the century-old designs for a nuclear aircraft to provide the initial thrust. The aptly-named Orca heavy shuttle was just less than fifty meters long and no more than fifteen meters in diameter. Its 25 X 8 X 8 meter cargo bay could hold the same five hundred tonnes as the uncreatively named Large Nuclear Launcher, but the Orca massed only a bit over thirteen hundred tonnes fully loaded. Launched from the sea, it used two intakes to propel air through nuclear heated funnels to provide initial thrust. The thermal jet engines could manage just a quarter of the thrust need for a vertical take-off, but with a lifting body shape, the shuttle behaved more like a plane than a rocket. With the funnels morphing to ram and then scram jets, the Orca reached two thirds of orbital velocity before the reactors switched to rocket motor mode and burned enough hydrogen propellant to reach orbit. Landing and recovery was easy. With a water landing, the Orca could at any port on Earth, and with just a tugboat and a container crane, it could be made ready for another flight. By 2060 over a dozen Orca shuttles made twice-weekly orbital runs, completely supplanting the Large Nuclear Launcher. Orca variants were used as the heavy shuttles for the CityShips and even on Mars, though there, a water landing was not possible. One Orca even saw service on Titan. By the time the assembly line shut down in 2105 over eighty Orcas and derivatives had been built and some remained in service until the 2140s. The Orcas accompanying the Cityship Libertas to Tau Ceti are as of last report still ferrying supplies to and from orbit. Great Big Book of Spaceships (Eight Edition), Public Information ePress, 2180