Since the prompts are so rich this year, I’m going to focus on storytelling with these images.
The gaseous upper atmosphere of neptune is rich in deuterium. Before processing in orbital refineries, the concentrated gas was stored in large semi-rigid balloons. The cost of building the infrastructure was enormous, and it needed to be as light weight as possible to reduce fuel requirements. But the huge investment was going to be worth it, as the deuterium could power fusion reactors back on earth. Tragically, the light weight construction proved to be the undoing of the project, after balloon #17 burst during a filling operation. The scattering debris caused a chain reaction, damaging several of the balloons and eventually destabilizing the refinery as well, causing it to burn up in the thick Neptunian atmosphere. back on earth, global civilizations collapsed, and small tribes once again roam the earth, under a dense layer of rocket exhaust.
I’m pretty pleased with how this turned out, a very satisfying start to nodevember.
001+002-SPACE_JUNKYARD.blend (2.2 MB) - CC0 license