Caz

A roughly headlight-shaped single stage to orbit vehicle with a glossy surface, tuned to reflect as much radiative heating as possible during reentry. At its top is a hemispherical crew capsule (a cargo pod version with a door sized for a single TEU or ~20t of breakbulk exists), with windows and access doors. Around its waist are six small methane-oxygen full-flow staged combustion rockets, generating 1.5 MN of thrust at Titan sea-level. In addition, two large ramjet modules are affixed to the sides - these provide roughly half of the delta-V needed for reaching orbit, with a very nice effective specific impulse of 2800 seconds. On the bottom is a heatshield of reflective-coated AETB, designed to withstand the prolonged low-grade heat soak of reentry. The vehicle masses 104 tonnes on the pad, and has 180 km of crossrange.

The VABN-P/C, a ballistic rocket+ramjet worked design for SSTO spacelift on Titan - Saturn's largest moon - that I commissioned off of @attritionmaxxer.bsky.social. 42 tonnes/128pax(economy) to Low Titan Orbit, with a klick a second of delta-v to spare.

A flag with a black background and a highly stylized 3/4 cutaway of a cylindrical space habitat. In the center is a white structure with a green interior, representing lighting systems and microgee parkland. To the right is the inner wall of the cylinder, showing green parkland and the glinting blue band of a circumferential river. Surrounding the cylinder is a white outline, symbolizing the glacis of shielding material - be it sandbags, glass, concrete, or steel - that every permanent space hab shelters from cosmic radiation under.

Flag of Microselenesia, a pan-cislunar intergovernmental organization formed in the mid-22nd century to govern affairs between the growing cohort of permanent free-space habitats orbiting the Earth and Moon.

mister godshatter

evening scene of a pensive canid-esque transhuman wearing an elaborate jacket-poncho standing on a balcony in an overcast valley on a large marslike planet.

"I only meant to stay a while..."

canid-esque transhuman woman in neutral pose

misc tove sketch

interestingly, the other launch site they were considering for the K-1 aside from South Australia was the White Sands missile range in Nevada. Apparently actually a quite good location for overland first-stage recovery.)

A Bluey episode title card, depicting the slightly wine-bottle shaped Kistler "K-1" RLV flying through the clouds. A subtitle says "[Bluey] This episode of Bluey is called Launch!"

A credits card to a Bluey episode, saying "Produced with the assistance of [Australian Government] [Kistler Aerospace] [Screen Australia]"

Episode from the alternate universe where Kistler didn't lose to SpaceX and the K-1 (K-9?) routinely flies out of the Woomera launch complex.

up to no good

old sketches I never got round to posting here. miscellaneous spacers

the actual paint-swatch value of the habs that I ran through my big stack of filters to simulate titan haze is a -really bright teal-, if you believe it

We see here a view from a dirigible cargo robot, taken in the far northern regions of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. In the foreground, a peninsula of ice-and-tar 'wetland' terrain stretches off into the distance. On it, a settlement made up of habitat modules of varying sizes - from longhouse-like parks to long twisting arcades, all raised on stilts like the old research bases of Antarctica (most of these stilts are obscured under the bulk of their structure, from this angle), curves off along the more orderly lake-facing shoreline. Looking further afield, past the jumble of braided rivers that makes up the inland side of the peninsula, we see a far shore occupied by a sprawling industrial city - pale plumes of steam rise from the cooling towers of nuclear fusion reactors, chemical plants, and water refineries. The sun, smeared into an orange blur by storied layers of photochemical haze - drifts of complex organics formed from unfiltered sunlight smashing into methane molecules at the top of the Titanian atmosphere - sits low on the horizon at this time of the Saturnian year, casting a ruddy glow comparable in brightness to a bedside lamp.

Lunine Beach, a sleepy seaside town on the shores of Kraken Mare - a sea of liquid hydrocarbons at the north pole of Titan, largest of Saturn's retinue of icy moons.

dog-like transhuman and the Saturn system, viewed from a vantage point of high Iapetus orbit

planetary science lesson

On the left, a young dog-like transhuman named Riley holding an orca plushy. On the top right a drawing of Riley's four parents stuck down with a fridge magnet. On the bottom right a postcard with a map of the north polar lake-seas of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, with a pin stuck in the location of Lunine Beach - the small seaside city where they all live.

second generation saturnian

It's actually just a classic plasma magnet, none of the Q-drive tricks going on. Thrust comes from magbeam-esque particle beam stations in planetary/asteroidal/lunar orbits.

tumblr ask #2

The "dusk chorus" - as evening falls on Mangala, its binary companion's infrastructure belt of orbiting power stations catches the sun, brightening to become a ring of stars circling the little Mars analog. (mocked up in Celestia)

Partly that it makes it a touch harder to reproduce with a normal card printer, partly that if the clock chip breaks (or is desynced or hacked) the offgassing rate of the deuterated patch can be used to loosely constrain the card's proper time (direct sampling of the material can get more accurate)

Tumblr ask from anonymous user: text reads "the "relativistic correction not applied" on the DOB on the ID gave me an idea: the issuing agency could make the ID contain a clock so that it tracks proper time so long as the holder keeps it on them. the clock could be something nondigital, like an ampule of tritium embedded in the ID (which could be used to make it glow for easier locating, though keeping radiologicals on something that's meant to stay on your person most of the time is a bad idea.) or some slow diffusion process (e.g. a labyrinthine lead wire with a tip of gold - you sample the age by using x-ray fluorescence to check for how far the gold has diffused along the wire. or merely characterizing the process of outgassing that the plastic exhibits. or tagging a region of the plastic by deuterating it. a lot of these techniques unfortunately have a substantial temperature coefficient)"

A dog-like transhuman woman holds an ID card in one hand. Looking at it, she says "y'know, I actually think these things *do* have some kind of embedded timekeeping, part of the tap ID chip or something"

Top: The transhuman's hand, holding the ID card and flexing it slightly. Accompanying text reads "l think the reason the whole thing isn't a display that'd show my age *accurately* - I'm only some 26 Msec younger than I'd be if I hadn't spent the first half of my life at a third of c, mind - is for plain old cost minimization reasons. A 'dumb' printed card with a readable chip is always going to be easier to make than a MEMS nanoware wafer. Which might not matter to a high-energy polity, but there's not many of those kicking around these days..." Bottom: A cutaway of the ID card. Accompanying text reads "The clock... y'know I don't think I ever looked into how it works. From a look at the MangalaGov Wiki, seems like it's a fairly simple rad-hard semiconductor timer, run off a little piezo circuit backed up by a warm SMES trickle battery. Not exactly atomic decay clock precise, but I guess it... works. Oh! They do have a deuterated patch as an anti-tamper measure though - It's my photo! Kind of funny..."

tumblr ask #1

In the foreground is a magnetic sail spacecraft - on one end the polygonal coils of the sail generation machinery, on the other a small nuclear fission plant and its attendant heat-rejection radiators, and in the middle a habitat and tankage for maneuvering propellant. In the background are two planets, orbiting one another much like Pluto and Charon do in the Solar System. Largest in our field of view is a world somewhat like Mars' big sister, with seas and lakes and a partially-oxygenated atmosphere through extensive terraforming efforts. Behind it is a world more like the Mars we know, although it's been partially terraformed - deep glassy canals have been excavated by orbital lens, with significant habitation on their floors. Both worlds have bands of solar power satellites, factories, habitats, and depots in orbit around them, and in the far distance an asteroidal moon roughly Cybele-sized can be just about resolved as a speck flanked on both sides by habitats and infrastructure.

Inside an observation room on board the magsail clipper - a little cabin with a round window of bulk diamondoid - three canine-like transhumans look out at Mangala and Kahira while floating in microgravity.

high Mangala orbit, 7998 A.D. (M.Y. 399)

On the left, a dog-like transhuman woman standing in a neutral pose, wearing a t-shirt with the logo of a large space mirror company on it. To the top right, a short comic snippet - the aforementioned character pointing out her birthplace in the sky, a starship currently in orbit. To the bottom center, an immigration ID card for the governance of the binary planet system she currently lives on - it's old, and she doesn't look particularly happy in the photograph. To the bottom right, a topographic map of a great outflow valley system, split by rivers. A red star marks the largest city of the region, and two flags - regional and planetary - are visible.

In a large outflow valley on a terraformed Mars-like binary planet, two dog-like transhumans stand on the waterfront of a riverside city. The old quarter of the city sprawls on the other bank - a conurbation of boxy arcologies and industrial complexes. In the distance, a band of large satellites crosses the sky, and a towering bank of sunset-lit clouds rolls in. The planet's binary companion, a world a fifth the mass of its primary with a thin CO2-dominated atmosphere streaked with wispy clouds of water ice, shines full and bright above the clouds.

Landermere Vallis, Mangala

A selection of historical small-world (~0.05-0.3 Earth masses) SSTOs of the far future.

anthro clouded leopard woman wearing flightsuit

spacer cat, vernox.bsky.social

anthropomorphic wolf cockily grinning at viewer

icon comm for @rainboweyeddog.bsky.social

A close-in shot. In the twilight, an anthropomorphic dog woman leans over a balcony, looking pensive. Behind her in the evening sky is a constellation of large satellites - a straight line of bright specks crossing the sky, airline-like.

1,000 AU away

anthropomorphic border collie woman

new & improved fursona ref sheet....

A view from a low-altitude flier on Snohualmy, a terraformed mars-mass moon of the ringed waterworld Rainier. On the plains in the foreground is a small city, and in the distance a statovolcano is wreathed in towering cumulonimbus clouds. Scattered light from communications laser installations around the mountain's summit is visible. A band of habitats and infrastructure in the moon's low orbit crosses the sky.

altiplano

Several sketches of one-eighth of the individual-pack "Amdiranifani" from the science fiction novels A Fire Upon The Deep and The Children Of The Sky. He is a group mind comprised of eight weakly wolflike creatures, each of which is in isolation nonsentient but capable of sharing ultrasonic 'mindsound' with other pack-members, the gestalt of three to eight of which forms a discrete personality.

sketching up ideas for Tines