The Sands of Mars An Orion’s Arm future history image. In the days after landing settlers perform the task of breaking out the tools equipment and supplies necessary to sustain themselves and begin construction of the settlement. Center Foreground: a ship-mounted heavy crane lowers one (of 16 – per Cargo Carrier) 625 ton freight container dismounted from the landing craft; below a heavy fork-truck takes up some of the weight and lends stability as the container is lowered. The Cargo Carriers and other vehicles I’ve envisioned are designed for ease of use on a world utterly vacant of the infrastructure we might take for granted. I designed the flat-bed Mars truck to lower the entire cargo bed and chassis to ground level for loading – for the simple reason that there are no loading docks on Mars prior to the settler’s arrival. Tire design is inspired by NASA test-bed models of heavy manned rovers and trucks created in the 1970’s. Cargo Carriers are unloaded from the bottom up – the first containers accessed might be fitted with a track mounted bottom end-cap which would lower in elevator-platform fashion and the cargo would provide, in broken down modular form, the heavy equipment required to continue the unloading sequence –the entire process would be boot-strapped in this manner. Once the lower tier containers are dismounted the second tier containers would descend (on tracks mounted to the vehicle frame) into their place. There are one hundred cargo landers dispersed across the landing site, these would have been targeted to touch-down in a predetermined pattern – the process would depend on the kind of logistical management common to any large scale contemporary commercial freight operation or construction project. Mars Truck in the immediate foreground, facing away from the camera POV, reveals the hydraulically operated landing-gear beneath the cargo-bed which would take up the weight of the load while lifting or lowering. Mars truck wheels are independently steerable, oversize, and set wide for stability on rough terrain. This sequence of images depict events around the Year Zero mark on my future history timeline – see link below. Future History Timeline Context Link: Orion’s Arm Future History Timeline. Image Composition Note: Sky is custom, color matched against true color images from the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity. Terrains are Tectonics Evolved Desolace, Searing Mesa, and Arathi Peaks distressed in Terrain Editor. Terrain textures are a combination of David Brinnen’s “Desert” texture and the stock Desolace texture. Mars ground texture created in Photoshop and applied to the Bryce ground-plane with additional layers added in post-work. Texture sources are cropped and blended from Spirit and Opportunity rover images courtesy NASA/JPL. Texture image source credit: NASA/JPL. Space suit is a Google SketchUp 3DS model of the NASA Mk III suit design created by Max Grueter. All other models are my own Bryce creations, constructed in Bryce 6.3and rendered in Bryce 7 Pro. As always thank you for your interest, thoughtful comments, and encouragement.