The Lunar War

YouTube video by The Lunar War The Lunar War - Concordia

To celebrate the 56th anniversary of the first Manned Lunar Landing, we're releasing our next animation :

- The Lunar War - "Concordia"

youtu.be/irkB-iMGsOQ

An enigmatic image showing five diffraction flares from the lasers of an unknown spaceship shining red light at the camera, the center one far larger than the four side ones. A fague silhouette of a ship is barely visible behind.

— "Something Wicked This Way Comes..." —

A jolly looking USSF Alan Shepard with a candy-cane themed livery.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all from the TLW Team !

2025 will bring exciting new developments, and we can't wait to show them...
Stay tuned very soon !

A black and white image of a group of space-suited people sitting on a truss element of the SPS, made to mimic the layout and vibe of the famous "Lunch atop a Skyscraper" photograph.

Credits :
Original Design - Boeing/Rockwell/NASA
ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20...
Lore - L5Resident
SSP Model, Textures and Renders - Theo Bouvier

#TheLunarWar

A flat view of the SPS, in front of which a Shepard-class gunship is cruising, showing the astonishing scale difference. On the left of the image, the giant turreted array eclipses the Earth.

Like the Icarus-class SPS (WPT-36) used by the EU, these are both immensely critical and extremely fragile structures. Their safeguarding being one of the primary drivers for the massive expansions of the US Space Force fleet in the 2040s and onwards.

A view of the SPS from near the Reflector. It's a giant rectangular mesh structure, partially transparent, held by a complex truss, and guided by long cables. At the base is the fixed version of the Microwave array. Hovering above it, and casting a tiny shadow, is a Space X Starship, clearly dwarfed by the colossal structure.

These colossal structures (10km x 5km) could hardly be built in reasonable timeframes without using automated platforms. The giant grids of aluminium trusses are bent and welded in-situ by hundreds of small drones using material shipped in a constant flux by Lunar Mass Drivers.

Another, closer view of the SPS, that shows a lot more of the detail of the truss structure. On the left is visible one of the maneuvering units, with a communication array sticking out the top. Below it is a gold-colored tank. sticking out from it is a flat rectangular array of ion thrusters. In the middle of the edge of the panel, the giant turreted microwave transmitter array is visible, including the radiator panels on its backside. Behind it, the Earth, that reflects in the shiny surface of the panel. Finally, a tiny green figure is visible, standing on the panel, for scale.

Built almost entirely from Lunar-mined materials, these come in two variants a cheaper but limited Reflector unit and more complex complex turreted version, though the latter requires Earth-launched elements making it a lot more expensive.

A frontal view of the mentionned Monolith-class solar power satellite. It looks like a large sheet of dark reflective material, with white lined criss-crossing it. Below the sheet, a jungle of orange trusses, and on the far-side of the panel, a large structure made up of a large rectangular angled reflector and a big round white array.

One of the main drivers for the second space race's momentum from the 2030s onwards has been the steady replacement of surface power infrastructure with Solar Power Satellites, and among the many designs out there, the Monolith-class SPS is the most common on American orbits.

A distant view of Earth and the Moon. Both show a crescent of lighting, coming from the Sun slightly out of the right side of the image. On the unlit side of Earth, the shapes of Africa and Asia are discernible, made visible by the millions of small dots of light illuminating the night. Both continents are a lot more sparkly, lit by a lot more lights than than they are nowadays. The Moon too features its own golden dots, though they're a lot more sparse, sparsely visible near the equator, and more dense around the poles. The attentive eye can also notice small the dots of light of Solar Power Satellites, in neatly arranged, perfectly spaced lines, curving in wide ellipses around both celestial bodies. A small legend at the bottom says "The Lunar War - The Golden Marbles - L5Resident - Theo Bouvier"

- The Golden Marbles -

A million new stars between two worlds - The Cradle's lights, both old and new, ever growing, joined by the dawn of the Moon, and the silent dance of solar collectors.

Three USAF F-15EX and one NGAD fighter at very high altitude, the dark blue sky fading into black, the fighters thrusting almost directly up, and dropping AIM-161 1B Anti-satellite missiles, some of which are igniting their engines.

- Blue Sky -

For most spacecraft of the Lunar War, venturing below GEO is pretty much suicide. The rare units that still operate that low are easy prey for high altitude ASAT launches...

TLW is a collaborative project including works by :
L5Resident
Toky
Theores
dennis
Jericho
Mage of Madness
Loxachi
Sunday Punch
Chobittsu
Pete the Pyro
sbarky
.\figio.exe
KingCam16
Tarakia
AdmiralKewl
SkullBones
Tackyinbention
Cataclysm
A2US
Ubernoner
Samuel Krug
sicksam
And many others.

YouTube video by The Lunar War The Lunar War - Setting Teaser

- The Lunar War -
Brainchild of L5Resident, TLW is a worldbuilding and art project dedicated to visualizing the near future expansion of humanity in space, its efforts to industrialize cislunar space, and the conflicts this new frontier leads to.