Brome's starship models

[Brome Teks]

I decided to pick up Google Sketch Up, And I love it! Here's the first starship I made, the Top of the line pocket dragon ship, the Goliath. It's 400 m long, which to them is huge. They're 12 cm long, so on average their stuff is 1/150 the size of a comparable human vessel. That means that to them, this ship is roughly the same as a 60 km (37 mile) long ship to us.

The front view:



Rear view:



Laser Turret with Human for comparison:



One of the auxiliary rail guns (The primary one is protected within the hull)



Starboard side detail:



Boat bay detail:




Energy source: Quantum vacuum energy. The theory exists today, but it has not been proved or disproved if we can harvest energy from it.

Primary propulsion: Cells on the side can create gravity wells anywhere around the ship, so it just falls towards them smoothly and gracefully.

FTL Propulsion: Step-through, a type of wormhole technology.

Weapons: 200 networked laser cannons (only 162 are shown, if I had added more my lappy would have crashed), 12 auxiliary rail guns, capable of a 40 petajoule output each every 4.8 seconds, One primary railgun capable of a 2.02 exajoule output every 78.3 seconds (That's a 100 kg slug to 60% light speed) (Also not shown, if I had added it my lappy would likely have crashed.), numerous flak guns and pulse weapons which I wish I could have added, and torpedo tubes which are not shown.

The bridge and pressurized sections are located under two outer hulls, the bridge is in the center of the ship with as much matter protecting it in any direction as possible. Windows are a big no-no, they let in radiation and are an obvious vulnerability, almost literally like a screen door on a submarine.

The hexagonal shape ensures that no matter which way the enemy is coming from, they are exposed to at least two faces of the ship, bristling with weapons. Yes, the front and back are the areas which were supposed to display weapons but didn't.

[Wolfgang of Borg]

Neat! You should paint it red and embed an asteroid!

Does it turn to face the direction it's falling in? Can the gravitics be used to rotate it? (I assume the floors are perpendicular to the long axis, tho then again i guess microdragons wouldn't be bothered by a lack of gravity in which case it needn't even have a preferred front and back when not pointing the main gun.)
EDIT: derp i just realised it wouldn't even have floors, the thing moves by essentially being constantly in freefall, not by being thrust along...
EDITEDIT: tho wouldn't there be a problem that everything else would fall into the gravity well it creates too? Seems like a recipe for constant collisions, and plus it makes it tough to run away from enemies when they are as easily moved by your motive force as you are. OTOH i guess any ship not specially reinforced against spaghettification would prob be damaged in the process, making the drive itself into a weapon. Or maybe the ship could be constantly accompanied by a rock fitted with it's own grav engines, which goes in front acting as a snow plow / battering ram / shield?

Clustering the lasers liek that seems a mistake, i'd prob have dotted them randomly all over the thing.

What are the six turbine-looking things sticking out from the sides for? Fake engines? (enemies concentrate fire on them and then suddenly.. oh shit! It just started accelerating sideways!!)

Love the no-windows thing! (my own ship design is basically an octahedral chunk of ice riddled with habitat centrifuges, studded with webcams).

[Brome Teks]

EDITEDIT: tho wouldn't there be a problem that everything else would fall into the gravity well it creates too? Seems like a recipe for constant collisions, and plus it makes it tough to run away from enemies when they are as easily moved by your motive force as you are.

Not necessarily. If they make this force comparatively small and right nearby them, it'd be much smaller the further away you get. Taking Gravitation equations ( G * (m1m2)]r^2, we find that if an 8000 kg ship made a gravitational force equivalent to 8*10^12 kg of mas a mere 10 meters in front of itself, it would accelerate at 5.3 m/s/s. A ship 1000 meters away would accelerate at 5.3*10^-5 m/s/s, which could hardly be considered moving at all.

OTOH i guess any ship not specially reinforced against spaghettification would prob be damaged in the process, making the drive itself into a weapon.

Then it's a good thing the pocket dragons are listed as expert ship builders, and the inequality of the forces on one end of the ship compared to another would be less than those of a rocket pushing the ship along. It's essentially making a gravity tug-boat. It would hardly be a difficult engineering solution. Spaghettification happens in much more extreme gravity wells, where a small difference means a difference of Some ungodly high number of newtons. With that 8000 kg ship being the 25 m long one, the force of spagettification is less than 1 percent of the thrust a Saturn V rocket on liftoff, so building something tough enough is not only feasible, it's been done.

Plus, using a more extreme gravity well as a drive field, the drive field would move with the ship, allowing them to keep the gravity well in front of them preventing collisions. Not to mention other ships would be trapped in it, basically allowing the ship to go Katamari Damacy on her enemies.

Clustering the lasers liek that seems a mistake, i'd prob have dotted them randomly all over the thing.

Granted, but that would have required more work. As it was, those laser arrays took me over two hours to make.

What are the six turbine-looking things sticking out from the sides for? Fake engines? (enemies concentrate fire on them and then suddenly.. oh shit! It just started accelerating sideways!!)

No, They're primarily heat sinks, and if necessary can be activated to form hydrogen ramjet engines should the gravity drive fail.

[Samantha Arrow]

Wow! You just picked it up? You made even more complex shapes than me xD

[Wolfgang of Borg]

Not necessarily. If they make this force comparatively small and right nearby them, it'd be much smaller the further away you get. Taking Gravitation equations ( G * (m1m2)]r^2, we find that if an 8000 kg ship made a gravitational force equivalent to 8*10^12 kg of mas a mere 10 meters in front of itself, it would accelerate at 5.3 m/s/s. A ship 1000 meters away would accelerate at 5.3*10^-5 m/s/s, which could hardly be considered moving at all.

Sorry, i was being stupid as usual was assuming far higher accelerations and larger ships, & making the well much further away and stronger.

I wasn't saying spaghettification would be a problem for the dragons, just that other people's ships may not be designed to be stretched, only compressed. Might mess with the plumbing or something.

8000 kg ship being the 25 m long one

This ship must be incredibly skinny!

more extreme gravity well

Heh, unnaturally high gravitational-field-strength Katamari... in your example, an object 1 cm away from the well's centre would experience a momentary acceleration of 5.3 Mm/s^2 ! Wonder what sound effect a singularity chewing through a ship makes?

As it was, those laser arrays took me over two hours to make.

Eek! Blender (at which i am shit) has this thing where you can select a bunch of objects (like a grid of cloned laser turrets) and tell it to randomly delete an arbitrary percentage (i unsuccessfully tried making a starfield this way).

heat sinks

Excellent! Love it when people pay attention to heat dissipation issues.
Also good from a Zones of Thought perspective (wherein what technology is possible varies from place to place... ships equipped only with hyperdrive can get stranded if they jump to a volume where it's physically impossible to perform the necessary calculations for the next jump etc).

[Dusty]

I still have trouble making a house on sketchup xD All in all a great design. My only qustion is the rear of the ship seems devoid of any weapons and your turrets can't rotate to fire on a smaller ship that could get up into the blind spot.

[Brome Teks]

I still have trouble making a house on sketchup xD All in all a great design. My only qustion is the rear of the ship seems devoid of any weapons and your turrets can't rotate to fire on a smaller ship that could get up into the blind spot.

I was going to put weapons there, but as I said, I was already on the verge of crashing my laptop. =P So I simply say they're not displayed.

[Brome Teks]

New ship modeled: The rapier patrol ship.



Dorsal view:



Ventral view:



Profile view:



Rail gun Detail:



Starboard side detail:



Power and propulsion are the same as the first ship.

The Rapier is equipped with 4 networked laser turrets, two forward torpedo tubes, and a single central mounted rail gun, capable of a 30 mega-joule output every 1.5 seconds. The two outer cells house the primary shield generators as well as the sub-light propulsion. The blues area host the step-through drive and the power core.

The super structure is designed to be tough enough for the ship to get bounced around by bigger ships with no critical damage. There is an outer hull and an pressure hull, no intermediate. The bridge is towards the center of it, with as much ship in any direction as possible. Again, windows are not made because they are weak spots.

[Brome Teks]

Logistic vessels done!













The logistic vessel is designed with two full sized, detachable cargo containers capable of holding thousands of tons of ammo, units, parts, etc. This model is 137 m long.