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Published: 2015-10-16 16:00:07 +0000 UTC; Views: 26813; Favourites: 596; Downloads: 0
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Kronos 1, Deep Space Exploration Vehicle.
This is probably my most ambitious space project so far. I've been working on this spacecraft for quite a while now, several months of all the design work that includes the spacecraft design, interiors, mission structure and goals, functional design of different sections of the vehicle and some other technical details. For now I wanted to present to you a 3d model that took almost a month to make and there are still lots of stuff to do. Anyway, I wanted to tease you a bit and share some of my excitement for this project, full presentation of the Kronos 1 mission coming later this year.
PS - Any resemblance to Hermes spacecraft from The Martian is pretty much coincidental and mostly comes from the research and lots of thinking about realistic long duration crewed space missions. It just means that both me and The Martian crew, did their research on space vehicles
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Comments: 46
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If you don't mind my asking, what kind of propulsion does it use? Is it some sort of open-cycle gas core NTR?
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This looks fantastic. Intresting thread about the future of space travel.
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WARNING! Carry on reading! Or you will die, even if you looked at the word warning!
Once there was a little girl called Clarissa, she was ten-years-old and she lived in a mentalΒ
hospital, because she killed her mom and dad. She got so bad she went to kill all the
staff in the hospital so the More-government decided that the best idea was to get rid of her so
they set up a special room to kill her, as humane as possible but it went wrong the
machine they were using went wrong. And she sat there in agony for hours until she died.
Now every week on the day of her death she returns to the person that reads this letter, on
a Monday night at 12:00 a.m. She creeps into your room and kills you slowly, by cutting you
and watching you bleed to death. Now send this to ten other pictures on this one site, and
she will haunt someone else who doesn't. This isn't fake. apparently if you copy and paste
this to ten comments in the next ten minutes you will have the best day of you life tomorrow.You
will either get kissed or asked out, if you break the chain you will see a little dead girl in your room
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such a beautiful ship. lets go exploring!! = D
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I really love your work! It definitely shows how passionate you are about aerospace and hard scifi.
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Re any probes or lander craft part of its payload?Β
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Yes, both probes and landers 
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It's some future VASIMR type engine en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable⦠, I'll share more details about Kronos 1 later this year
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Really? I took it for an oversized MPD thruster myself/
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well, that's exactly what VASIMR is, so you wasn't that far off
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Well, I like to keep VASIMRs and MPDs distinct myself, but that's just me.
Why a VASIMR though? Why not, say, a nuclear lightbulb?
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I've decided that for Kronos VASIMR is a bit more feasible than nuclear lightbulb or any other type of nuclear propulsion. We have working prototypes of VASIMR engines andΒ a lot more experience with them than some other highly efficient drive types. I may consider using NERVA or nuclear lighbulb drives in some other projects though
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Youβre quite right to shy away from Nuclear Lightbulb.
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In a recent discussion on my G+ Winchell Chung had the following to say about Nuclear Lightbulb: the uranium handling system is going to be a nightmare.
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On engine shutdown the design calls to vacuum the uranium vapor out of the reactor. As Winchell observes: You'll have to gather hot uranium vapor, and somehow condense it back into metal without it
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[a] plating itself all over the interior of the condensation chamber
[b] accumulating a critical mass anywhere in the condensation system.
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For VASIMR the big problem is power. To create the thrust it has to process its fuel (including heating it to plasma state) and create the magnetic field with powerful electromagnets. These take a substantial amount of power. How much? For the hypothetical 39 day Mars mission its creators advertise it would require energy production on the order of 1 kilowatt per 1 kilogram of reactor mass (1kg/kW). That means there needs to be a kilowatt of power for every kilogram of mass in the reactor.
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To put this in perspective, under the most optimistic projections with current energy production technology, 20 kilograms per kilowatt is that best we've engineered. A reactor on that scale would need to be 4,000 tons to output the amount of energy needed to reach Mars (in the 39 days VASIMR proponents advertise). They're looking at 600 tons as an ideal overall weight. Presently we are far from the efficiency we need for VASIMR. We have to find a way to pump out more energy with less mass.
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The question I have regarding Kronos 1 is, this appears to be a very large and massive spacecraft. It seems quite beyond the propulsive capabilities of a single VASIMR engine.
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The radiator panel configuration, while it looks cool, is problematic. The panelβs look like the low-energy radiators on the ISS, which would not be suitable for a high-energy system like a nuclear reactor.
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Also, as Iβve learned, white is probably the worst color for a high-energy radiator system, white is fine for low power-density heat radiators like those on the ISS, however it will not do for high-energy radiators, deep non-reflective flat black would be more appropriate.
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Additionally, on your design, the radiators appear far too small in area to manage the high thermal output of a reactor capable of powering that drive, and, finally, the three panel configuration is an issue, the panels will radiate waste-heat onto each other. A cruciform configuration of four panels, keeping in mind their relationship to the radiation shadow-shield, would be better.ο»Ώ
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Getting back to the original thread, if you are talking about hundreds or thousands of tons of payload/propellant mass, for the energy density required to move very large spacecraft, you probably want a high thrust, high energy-density, nuclear thermal propulsion system, and likely in a clustered engine configuration.
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You cannot cluster VASIMR for the same reason you cannot cluster fusion rockets, the magnetic fields interfere with one anotherβ¦ which would be bad. Β
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Ion is off the table (for very heavy payloads) because, while very efficient, it is very low thrust, so it takes a very long time to build up appreciable momentum, hold a sheet of paper in your open palm, the weight you feel is about what an Ion drive, at present levels of development, can do, although Ion can keep up thrusting for a very long time. It works great for light-weight robotic probes.
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Fusion is off the table until we actually build an operational fusion reactor. Although there are design studies, a realistic fusion rocket of comparable payload capacity to what you have pictured here would have radiator panels the size of Long Island. See Winchell Chungβs post nyrathwiz.deviantart.com/art/Aβ¦ and the Atomic Rockets page here www.projectrho.com/public_htmlβ¦ for the Boeing design it is based on.
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Open Cycle Gas Core, or NERVA style nuclear thermal, or Nuclear Pulse propulsion, are the feasible near-horizon high energy density propulsion systems for propelling high mass spacecraft. Of these Open Cycle GCR and NERVA can be clustered β so long as the engines are spaced apart with neutron attenuating panels between them.
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Thank you very much for your input, really helpful. Probably I won't be able to change much in Kronos design, I'll just assume that it's some new, slightly more efficient type of both reactor and drive. But your input is really helpful and I'll keep that in mind for next projects!
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Any relation to the Klingon home world or just a happy coincidence?
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Probably just a happy coincidence
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nope it doesnt look like the martian hermes...the hermes didnt have a shield,its radiators when not deployable and had a different configuration than yours, the hermes tanks where spherical, it had a different engine than yours and the hermes has balka iss style solar panels. i like your ship a lot more than hermes. it also looks like youre using a Magnetoplasmadynamic Engine while the hermes one looked like a nerva engine.
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thanks, glad you like it! and yes, you are right about the Kronos' engine
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Reminds me of that spaceship from Defying Gravity...Beautiful work!
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thanks! and yes, I can see the resemblance 
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Amazing... I like the level of details on the picture! Good job!
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It looks like a Monogram model from the 1960s.Β I guess there are just so many ways to build a spacecraft.Β Personally, I like Robert Zubin's ideas for oneΒ in his book "A Case For Mars".
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yeah, Zubrin'sΒ idea is really interesting, I may try to do something with it after finishing Kronos.
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Hey, I'd like to do something like this for my own project. What's your process? How do you design interiors and such?
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I will share a lot more details on this project and the process later this year, I will post some of it here on dA, but Β will be posting everything onΒ spacethatneverwas.tumblr.com/ in some time.
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Since I haven't seen The Martian I can't really comment on any likeness there might be. I'm just amazed by the amount of detail that's gone into it. It's nice to see a spacecraft that looks like it could actually exist rather than ones reliant on technology that might never (and in some cases will never) exist.
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thanks a lot! and yeah, I try to keep my designs as realistic as possible, with some dose of speculation and optimism on top of that
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Looks beautiful and functional. Nice work.
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