Ship Components

[NeuralKernel]

Heh... I'd point out that I was asking all YOU for help with ideas... ;)No worries about being harsh with me... I usually don't even notice and when I do I rarely ascribe it to malice... please assume no malice from me, as well, but if I'm coming across as rude let me know. It's the only way I'll learn :)Anyways... yeah... shields in general are a problem...The Droplet Radiator System works as a shield in some circumstances... like I mentioned it can be used to sweep the region ahead of an accelerating craft. Depending on what the droplets are made of you can also direct them with magnetic and electric fields, perhaps forming into a traditional "Shield".Maybe the Atmo Shielding is MADE of atmosphere and that's why it doesn't protect against anything in Space. Instead of the hull itself forming a Blunt Body it exploits the fact that smacking gas at orbital speeds turns it to plasma, and can thus be manipulated electromagnetically... no need for extra Art assets for each individual ship, wasn't there a reentry effect using shaders being worked on a while back? That'd work... just start the front of the fireball a couple meters ahead of the nose...

[Marcel]

The Frontier type of atmospheric shielding never quite made sense to me, except as a limitation of 90s computer technology. I've always imagined it as a force field. If that's the case why are there ships that are able to mount shield generators but are unable to mount atmospheric shields? It makes more sense to me that a ship would either be designed to enter an atmosphere or not. There would be a weight penalty for the heat shielding and wings, giving non-atmospheric ships an advantage in speed. Atmosphere capable ships would simply need to look like they could land. Examples of this type would be the Wave and Deneb. Of course, with Pioneer's super-duper engines you could land anything if you came down at 1 m/s. Perhaps instead of a simple max_atmoshield there could be a variable that states how much friction the hull shape would experience at different atmospheric densities? The Kanara, for example, looks like it could handle about 400 kph at 1 atmosphere, giving it a disadvantage at low altitudes compared to the Wave, but outside an atmosphere the advantage would be reversed.

[NeuralKernel]

In many cases I would agree that a vaguely Aerodyne shape could be the main difference between Atmo Shields and no protection, but Aerobraking independent of landing is a common way to shed velocity in Science Fiction and Real Life. If you have at atmosphere to plough through at your destination why waste reaction mass (and time...) slowing down at the "halfway" point?For Supersonic and Subsonic flight an aerodyne has a very real advantage, demonstrated by John Crichton! At Hypersonic speeds, however, the Blunt Body is ideal from a protective standpoint.Related to both subjects... has there been much progress lately on fixing the squished Gas Giant Atmo bug?How about some Aerodynamic Flight modeling to take advantage of some tweaked aerodynes?

[shadmar]

I tested something like this a while back : [url]http://spacesimcentral.com/ssc/topic/3155-experimantal-re-entry-effect-for-heat[/url]

[fluffyfreak]

I experimented with a sepearte test program to do a heating glow effect on the hull of a ship.It looked pretty good with just a 1D heat colour gradient, if we could pass the (vector) direction of travel and some kind of scale for the heating effect then we could recreate the classic re-entry glow on the hull.aka: Then you could do some kind of projection of geometry to generate the 2D convex hull along the direction of travel and then loft that to get the shockwave trail... I prefer having a physical shield, but in Frontier I always imagined that atmospheric shielding was more about sealing up all of the holes and gaps in the hull that you don't need to worry about in space but which would be fatal for re-entry. Essentially the same hull but sealed somehow and the glowing red shielding was an additional layer of deflection rather than being the main part of the job.

[NeuralKernel]

They used a big airbag in 2010... called a "ballute" I think... about a couple different Atmospheric Systems?There is already Shielding and a Fuel Scoop... how about Atmospheric Thrusters? Why use up your precious reaction mass when you just need to dump reactor output into a Jet Engine or power up some ducted fans?That way you could even further differentiate the Aerodynes... maybe the Wave (as a random example) has amazing atmospheric performance but can only put out a quarter G in vacuum? High impulse low thrust plasma drive... honking big Nuclear Ramjet...

[ollobrain]

Id love to see glowing hulls when reeneter atmospheres

[NeuralKernel]

Just poking around, got a few sketches and blender mockups in the works on a new ship, a Jovian Cruiser... using a few tricks from this article, some that I'd heard of before and some that open up interesting possibilities for trans-atmospheric ship design.[url]http://www.princeton.edu/mae/people/faculty/miles/rmdocs/Conference%20Proceedings/2005_AIAAReno_0561_Miles.pdf[/url]

[NeuralKernel]

OK, so I'm getting closer and closer to a model I'm happy with, but I've actually already got a standard cockpit module that I think would make sense as a standard in-game... a 2 meter sphere. I don't have the inside modelled but I figure it would have something like this, a Linear Seat from UC Gundam.As to whether a panoramic convex display would be better than a VR headset for the outside view... well... either would be better than a bit of reinforced glass in terms of visibility and safety!

[fluffyfreak]

Really struggling to be coherent today so sorry if this is a bit rambling. I really like this idea, being in an enclosed pod within the structure of the ship as opposed to being a "glass" bubble.The Gundam example above is a bit odd to my eyes because I'd prefer the pilot to be really enclosed. In my mind it's not so much a seat but just the helmet visible and much more enveloped as though they're inside a suit that is itself already partially within an escape pod that just protrudes into the flight control space. A bit like the ejection pods on some USAF bombers, but obviously more high tech and sci-fi  The environment itself wants to be HardAR or full VR like the Oculus Rift but with the tech' available in 1200 years time. So some blending between all of those ideas to give a cool looking sci-fi futureistic cockpit / flight chamber that's my ideal.

[NeuralKernel]

It's also a matter of protecting the pilot from acceleration, a free floating spherical cockpit will orient itself according to how the ship is moving, a human body can take a lot more Gs in certain directions than others. There's the armour and radiation shielding argument as well, a sphere encloses the largest volume for a given surface area so you can have more protection for the same mass, unfortunately you need maximum (convex...) surface area on a Spacecraft to radiate waste heat so a sphere might not be ideal for actual spacecraft hulls, especially at larger sizes due to the square / cube law.I think 2 meters is ample for a single crewman and figure multiple crew would be compartmentalized into their own independant modules for survivability, but there are also decent arguments for larger ships either having larger multi-person "bridge" modules or multiple independant "cockpit" modules for each crewmember.Using a standardized, self contained cockpit module also greatly simplifies the design of a standard Escape Pod...