The school has finally begun... In the past two weeks I have been reading the amazing collection of articles, documents and quotes about space combat tactics(which I can't fully agree...), existing interplanetary spaceship designs and a few interstellar ship plans from the "Atomic Rocket" website of Matthew Lem ( http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/) , and enjoyed my time "dreaming up" the technological detail and ship design of a near-future human interstellar fleet.
This game can't be dwarf fortress-ish forever, so I made 3 models for the three human ship classes. Since in this particular game the distance between individual ships will be great (I love the way
The Three Body Problem II describes space battle- thousands of ships flying in formation that spans thousands of kilometers), the watcher (player) can only see are tiny sparkling (spaceships are afterall rotating metal polygons) spots with blurry shape.
Like this:
So I only need to make models with enough detail to "spark" like a spaceship. As for the flare effects, I plan to add them later with HLSL.(Yay! Problem solved!)
Here comes the pseudo-scientific details with untextured models!
Frigate:
My favorite ship! The versatile, maneuverable workhorse of the fleet. It's really an interesting mind-game to design a ship that fits both high-G combat and interstellar flight.
The ship is launched "backward" in a "laser cannon+light sail" fashion. It uses a single hardened reflective light sail (that opens around the whipple shield) to recieve the "laser" and heat and ionize hydrogen propellant (stored in detachable fuel tanks not shown on the image) on its surface. A series of magnetic coils deflect ion flow to prevent the contact between the ion and the sail and provide additional thrust. In a nutshell, a large laser powered Orion drive. After the launching sequence, the ship folds its sail and turns 180°, so that the whipple shield can protect the ship from debris.
Once the ship pass the half-way point, the ship turns 180° again, and fires up its anti-matter engine, a magnetic bottle open at one end. The few nanograms of anti-protons stored in the tokamak are injected slowly with streams of propellant into the engine, and the continuing annihilation provides thrust in the long deceleration process.
Before combat, the ship feeds tritium ion directly into the tokamak, and fires up fusion reactions with the few remaining anti-protons. The tokamak acts as fusion plant in the combat.
Carrier
The ship borrowed ideas from Charles Pellegrino's Valkyrie Starship and ISV Venture Star. She is the backbone of the fleet, Tows thousands tons of payloads in interstellar flight, and acts as communication nexus and heavy, long-range battleship in combats.
Head Tail
The ship features nose-mount engines that "tows" a spline of cargoes. Its sail, which is mounted similarly at the nose, is composed by hundreds of fuel-injection units and reflective plates. The whipple shield shades the ship from the light beam. Besides the structural differences, the ship is launched in the same way as the frigate.
A beautiful preview-rendering in AutoCAD. Note the glowing yellow texture of radiators.
Fighter:
Autonomous fighter built around a single weapon. Powered by a single NERVA. RCS nozzles are mounted on its two vertical "wings".
(please imagine the details. I don't want to waste polygons on these small ants. This model should look fancy enough from afar)
This dev is becoming increasingly time-consuming, but increasingly fun as well.
Wish I have time to make another post soon!