ToughSF

Original artwork not permitted for use as AI training data or input. A spaceship featuring two large gold parabolic dishes made up of hexagonal pieces a la the James Webb Space Telescope.

#toughtober Day 4 was Sail; I started out trying to do day 6 but I got on a roll with the hexagon thingy so here's some kind of antimatter photon sail contraption #scifi #space #art made entirely with #blender3d #geometrynodes

For #toughtober Day 8 (Plasma) I made an animation illustrating how a Q-drive works. Annotated diagram to come later. Once again entirely nondestructive #scifi #space #art thanks to #blender3d #geometrynodes

#toughtober - Frisbee
projectrho.com/public_html/...
Just a small section of the 700km length of Frisbee's pion rocket. Most of those hundreds of km is just radiators to shed 14.5TW of waste heat, all for 100 tonnes of payload.
#lego #space #starship #spaceship #spacecraft #rocket

Thanks for making this!

I suspect it need so much AoA to stay level that the pilot never sees the ground.

Even if we imagine very fast rotors and a very powerful motor, it doesn't have any internal volume for fuel!

100 kW laser... in a container.
5 MWe reactor... in a container.
Cruise missile launcher... in a container.
Reverse osmosis plant... in a container.

The KJ-1 AEWC was a Chinese attempt to convert their massive B-29/Tu-4 copy bombers into airborne early warning platforms.
The project was only terminated in 1979, when F-15Cs and MiG-25s were flying around.

Concept art of a K-64 unmanned attack helicopter. It's very heavily armed for its size and the airflow interactions between the coaxial rotor and the twin pusher-prop at the rear must be pure chaos.
#art by 北陵重工的票票.
www.artstation.com/artwork/ZGvEN0

Every single cell experiences 70,000 DNA lesions and mutations per day.
www.cell.com/action/showP...
That's 20 billion billion errors that have to be repaired, every week, across your body to avoid fates ranging from apoptosis to cancer.

The central region of a planetary nebula is shown in a box. Labels indicate “Shock waves”, “Outflow collisions”, and an “Ionised jet” in the dust on both sides of the nebula. Close to the centre, “Dusty torus” and “Ionised torus” are marked. In the very middle, a faint dot inside a blotchy pink cloud is labelled “Dying star”. Bright stars surround the nebula and can be seen through the dust layers.

This new annotated JWST Picture of the Month features a cosmic creepy-crawly called NGC 6537 - the Red Spider Nebula. Using its Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam), Webb has revealed never-before-seen details in this picturesque planetary nebula with a rich backdrop of thousands of stars. 🧪🔭

3.75 MW of electricity in a 20 ft ISO container: this is Wright's DenseGen 3750 built around a turbine hooked to their WM2500 electric motor. It'll run on diesel, jet fuel and natural gas:
www.weflywright.com/products/den...
Delivering 2027.

One day, a drone will take this photo of an astronaut and her little rover on Mars.
#space #art by Jama Jurabaev.
www.artstation.com/artwork/YBqzDw

If we consider a room-temperature sail under a GW/m^2 beam like in the paper, it's a ratio of ~1,000,000 between the laser light pressure and the heating light pressure.

150 kW-class Solar Electric Propulsion power architecture:
ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20...
The main finding is that adding a small millisecond delay to how high power loads are applied can really help a SEP system achieve a stable voltage without damaging peaks.

More:

An excellent report on Microwave Thermal Propulsion for space launch:
ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20...
There's comparisons between propellant choices and ways to create SSTOs that only need 0.3-1 MW/kg to launch, followed by details of many successful small-scale demonstration flights.

Russia's northermost base is at Nagurskoye. It comes equipped with a 2.5 km long airfield that can deploy fighters or extend the range of strategic bombers.

The 'High View' from orbit, a space scene by Edouard Groult.
#space #art
www.artstation.com/artwork/lREDyV

ZERODUR is a glass ceramic lithium-aluminosilicate with near-zero coefficient of thermal expansion, thanks to nano-crystals formed over months of controlled cooling that shrink exactly as much as the surrounding glass expands:
www.researchgate.net/publication/...

I don't think so... it's too small to be a solar sail and a photovoltaic panel would want to absorb, not diffract.

Yes!
Technically, you are consuming some of the laser energy to act as a heat pump that removes more heat via fluorescence.

A Shuttle II concept with two reusable winged stages:

Testing the pressure release valve on a liquid hydrocarbon tank to prevent a Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion:
youtu.be/EKg1Eo5hZ5o

A solar freighter created for a book cover for novel by James Crawford. I imagine it uses large thin-film PV arrays to power an electric thruster.
#space #art by Wojtek Kapusta.
www.artstation.com/artwork/398DV2

Using the same laser that accelerates a lightsail to cool it:
arxiv.org/pdf/2206.05383
Exploiting the fluorescence of a ytterbium-doped layer atop the lightsail can extract more heat than simple blackbody radiation, allowing the sail to handle higher intensities and go faster.

Malik K., writer!

I signed up for @thelunarwar.bsky.social's Patreon.
They've got the best hardSF spaceship designs available right now, and I want to see more!

It would be fun to write an alternate history in which the post-Apollo space program would be based on Apollo/Saturn technology & experience - and then ask people to identify the bits I made up (as opposed to the bits based on real plans from the 1960s/1970s).

Yes, density in the hundreds of trillions of tons per cubic meter.