Second Age Of Sail

[deltapax]

Not much of an update, but I did mess around to show my friend how the magnetic field orientates:




When I do an actual finished render, the field will be invisible, but I might try to come up with some kind of aurora borealis effect that'd show the edges of it...

I'm concerned the magnetic field is nowhere near big enough, so I did play around with adding a second electromagnet farther out to set up a larger ovewrlapping field, but I'm not sure how the two fields would interact, so it's probably an idea I'll drop (damnit Jim, I'm a Doodler, not an engineer!):

[moonglow]

Very interesting thread. Thanks for mentioning over at yahoogroups.

[deltapax]

Thank you Moonglow.

Unfortunately I may have to change what this vehicle is, because the more I delve into the science the more it seems like this thing is too massive to work.
From the reading I've done online, current theories for a magnetic sail involve 50-100 km electric wires spread out from the tiny ship. But since I might be using this for a webcomic project I wanted the vessel to have more visual weight when I rendered it, so I was really hoping for a large solid electromagnet, possibly doubling as some kind of particle accelerator or something to generate power and the magnetic field. I also wanted the large radiators, since they're ignored in a lot of sci-fi.
Yesterday I messed around with trying to find the largest ring I could come up with before it became too unwieldly to work with and looked overly ridiculous. Below is what I came up with, a ring with a 2 mile diameter. Unfortunately the mass has also increased to an incredible number. I figured an average mass of 6.7 lbs per cubic foot based on really rough estimates of the mass of the zvezda module, then applied them to a 20ft thick electromagnetic loop with a two mile diameter.... it was something in the tens of millions of lbs. I guess it's not workable...

2-mile-diameter electromagnet:

A little closer- can you spot the 5 habitat modules?

Itty-Bitty Zvezda sized habitat area and teeny-tiny astronaut stand-ins!

And that's before resizing the structural supports of the ship to something more human-sized...

I could design a more realistic electromagnetic sail using 50+ km ultrathin wires, but they wouldn't render well (at least if I wanted to render the entire vehicle). And the thing is I really like this shield-shaped radiator assembly, and I don't want to trash it...

[deltapax]

Well I took some time to mess with the design trying to make it as scientiffically accurate as possible, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to throw the science out the window in the interest of aesthetics. I tried building a scale version of the actual proposed 50km wire sail configuration and the wires were for all intents and purposes invisible, you were never going to see them in a renderbecause they were too thin and too spread out, and it just didn't make for an appealing design. And since I liked my original redesign look, I guess I'm just going to flub it.
So I started working on how to build the body of this beast, which involved trying to figure out how to create a tapered girder system. The folks over at Yahoo's CarraraFan group have been helping me with that. Here's what I've gotten so far:


Added a second kind of radiator form to break up the form some and distinguish left-right from up-down.


Started scaling girders and figuring out how the habitat sections would mount on.


A closer look at where I'm beginning to create habitats with different shapes and add a small amount of detail.

...While I was messing with my parts I started looking at building a matching fusion drive spacecraft for the same universe. For fun here's what that's starting to look like:


The basic form. The radiators are probably too huge right now, although I intend to at least triple the habitat sections...


The space under the radiators would house fuel tanks.


Eventually I would replace the central spine with an open girder design, and fill in the spaces around the habitats with supply and fuel tanks, perpendicular booms to mount sensors to peek around the dust shield, and missile racks.


By stacking the habitat modules perpendicular to the spine, I can render interior scenes with a force of gravity giving the vessel a series of long narrow halls while the vessel is under acceleration.

[deltapax]

Well, I spent a good portion of the last two weeks coming up with a basic repeatable truss system I could build in Carrara. This is what I came up with, a trigular arrangement of hexagonal tubes with diagonal cross support beams. Here's the first test render:



I re-scaled it so that each segment was about 10 ft long by about 14 ft wide.

I then decided to create some circular sections, which were a pain until I had a eureka moment. Unfortunately I had to rebuild the thing basically for each diameter, so I built a 100ft, 200ft, 300ft, 500ft & 1,000 ft ring segment, and I'm planning on all my vessels being built to those dimensions. I'm planning to build a whole fleet of modular vessels with these components I'm coming up with.

Here's that torchship with a set of truss 'bones' including the 100 & 200 fr diameter rings:




And here's the beginning of a 1,000 ft diameter spherical 'cruiser' I'm thinking of building. A majority of the vessel will actually be empty space surrounded by a radiator shell:




...the next fun part is figuring out how to attach the straight trusses to the circular trusses at 90 degree angles...

[Carach]

wow, ive never heard of this magnetic sail stuff before. very interesting business