Sci-fi spaceship design for my graphic novel. Finally complete, and ready for print. All shaders made with Toonkit. All assets were modeled by myself, no kitbash. This model will serve as the backdrop for some of the panels in the book.
This design features no greebles: there are only purpose-built parts.
I spent a great deal of time (mostly background reading) on practical spacecraft design principles to make this ship, most notably “Spacecraft Systems Engineering 4th Edition”. I highly utilized Winchell Chung’s “Atomic Rockets” page, as well as the Tough-SF blog posts for ideas of how to properly depict a practical military spacecraft. Some design features:
- The giant radiators and supporting structure are made with Geometry Nodes - the suspension cable configuration allows these radiators to maximize surface area, while maintaining a shape compatible with the high-G accelerations required by a military spacecraft
- The large half of the ship, the weapons platform, is built around single central structure: the 1 kilometer barrel of an electromagnetic rocket-gun, and four linear particle accelerators, each 600 meters in length, forming a relativistic electron beam weapon, focused by superconducting magnets. The smaller half of the ship is the crewed module configuration. The two Alcubierre Rings work together to fold space and allow the ship to hop between systems.
- The propulsion system is modeled off of practical considerations for a deuterium-fusion rocket (fed by the gigantic icosphere tanks)
- The Whipple Shield features a superconducting dielectric mirror array to aid in deflecting incoming beam weapons
- The heavy lift shuttle is capable of carrying crewed modules to orbit - the modules fit inside the shuttle payload bay, lending a sense of purposeful scale
All feedback / critiques welcome!
Detail showing the linear accelerators and superconducting magnet array with integrated cryocooling
The glowing radiator effect is produced using Geometry Nodes Proximity
