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Malicious-Monkey — Interstellar Ship Odyssey - Inside and Out
Published: 2013-05-26 05:22:13 +0000 UTC; Views: 9534; Favourites: 111; Downloads: 90
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Description
Odyssey was designed to ferry scientists and probes to and from the Barnard system, which hosts life on one of its planets, Ilion. Its modular design allowed it to adjust to variations in crew size and mission objectives:Mission - Continent - Duration
Mission Patches: fav.me/d6p0ka3
Odyssey I – Pandaros – 17 days
What they brought:
1 inflatable habitat and life support system
1 wheeling cart
4 biosecure, waterproof “barrier” suits
10 refillable oxygen tanks
1 shuttle Little Iliad
Land crew:
Luo Ping, medic
Alexander Willard O’Hearn, botanist
Rashid Prathik Andiyar, pilot and mechanic
Erin Sophie Carellos, engineer and copilot
Orbit crew:
Michael David Vander, commander
Odyssey II – Polyxena – approx. 3 months
What they brought:
3 polar havens + life support
1 small inflatable motor boat
1 four-wheel arctic buggy
2 sets climbing gear
7 sets weatherproof clothing
18 refillable oxygen tanks
1 passenger shuttle Sunset
1 cargo shuttle Sunrise
Land crew:
Caroline Lauren Mercer, medic
Yuzo Yamamoto, geologist
Alexander “Os” Ostrovsky, geologist
Alexander Willard O’Hearn, botanist and exobiologist
Yerem “Nemo” Hovsepian, marine biologist
Grant Maxwell Irwin, mechanic
Erin Sophie Carellos, engineer and pilot
Orbit crew:
Kim Seong-Ja, commander, engineer, and pilot
The first two missions are covered in detail here: sunriseonilion.wordpress.com/o…
Odyssey III - Pandaros – 6 Days
What they brought:
Three barrier/containment suits
Four scouting rovers
Shuttle Telegony with short-term habitat module built in
Land crew:
Juan Castillo, medic
Cora Ann Wulff, ecologist
Tsering Adhikari, pilot and commander
Orbit crew:
Craig Augustine Engle, geophysicist
Fernanda Estrela, engineer
Several changes have been made to Odyssey since the last missions. The extra modules housing the previous crew of eight have been removed and now serve as weather satellites in Earth’s orbit. A superfluous storage compartment near the solar arrays has been refitted with a redundant plumbing system. I’ve heard enough stories to be grateful for that extra accommodation. The shield, once pockmarked and unstable after ten years of bombardment, has been replaced whole. The new shield generates a weak magnetic field to deflect radiation away from the sleeping area. The old Kearney-Rasmussen drive was supplanted by an updated model that I’m not as familiar with. It took me three years to learn the program. Fern is much better at it than I am, which is why I have her handle most of the ship operations.
- Tsering Adhikari (public log)
This diagram shows Odyssey in its third incarnation. The ship provides artificial gravity to the crew by accelerating halfway and decelerating the other half. This means that its structure must be able to hold its weight in both directions for up to 2g of acceleration. Unlike other designs, this ship was not meant to turn around before decelerating. The thrusters simply fire in the opposite direction. As a result, the floor becomes the ceiling at that halfway point, and the ship's interior must be designed accordingly. The ladders go all the way up the walls, the toilet and shower modules can rotate, and the furniture can be bolted to either the floor or the ceiling. All of these modifications are performed in weightlessness, during that brief transition between acceleration and deceleration, and while the ship is parked in Ilion's or Earth's orbit. A second toilet sits just below the debris shield. It is rated for zero-g, but it can be used at other times in a pinch. The medical waste disposal chute can also be used during systemwide plumbing failures.
I wish I could go outside and watch the solar arrays unfurl. Now what use are solar panels in the depths of space, you might ask? Every few weeks or so, the heat builds up faster than it can disperse and we have to vent it. The arrays, normally folded tight to protect against meteoroids, double as radiators. We keep them out until the temperatures fall back to normal.
- Tsering Adhikari (public log)
Power is supplied by solar arrays when possible, and by the engine itself when not. Batteries can store up to six days of power. An engine failure lasting longer than six days can render the ship uninhabitable. It is for this reason that at least one seasoned engineer, traditionally the mission's commander, must remain on board while the rest of the crew explores the planet's surface. This number was raised to two after a month-long communications blackout left the commander of the second mission severly scarred.
The ion stabilizers contribute a negligible amount of acceleration compared to the deuterium propulsion engines that run the length of the fuel depot. In a pinch, they could accelerate us maybe a tenth of a g but that wouldn’t get us home. It wouldn’t even get us out of the Barnard system. Relying on the stabilizers alone would be like rowing an aircraft carrier. Through a gale.
Their main purpose, as the name suggests, is fine-grained attitude control. The three arms can swivel in all directions, forward and back, to adjust the ship’s orientation in space. Although the computers handle most of the math, the system takes a good degree of skill to operate. The margin of error is unforgiving like nothing else. It doesn’t take much to send Odyssey into an uncontrollable, head-over-heels tumble.
- Tsering Adhikari (public log)
The outside view shows Odyssey with half of its complement of Helium 3 fuel cells. Each has four thrusters associated with it and a set of small radiators (not shown) to vent the heat. As fuel runs down, segments are jettisoned until only six remain. The final leg of each mission always ends in a passive fall towards Sol, guided occasionally by gentle nudges from the supplementary ion drives.
What we discovered today is an affront to everything we stand for. There is an infestation of white-flowered herbs growing in the floodplains near the river delta. It doesn’t take an exobiologist to pick out that Earthly green color against the rosy field. Now, I’m an ecologist, not a botanist. I have no idea what kind of plant this is, but Tsering thinks it might be galangal. I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of blatant disregard for biosecurity would lead to such an invasion. Mold, bacteria, or algae I can picture, but a whole plant?
Who could possibly have screwed up this badly?
- Cora Wulff (personal notes)
The Odyssey program was the culmination of decades of international cooperation and private investment. The three missions mark the end of purely scientific exploration. After an invasive Terran species is discovered by the third mission, objectives turn to conservation efforts, and finally, to an acceptance that nothing further can be done to prevent the accidental terraforming of this beautiful planet. As the invasive plant continues to adapt and integrate itself into Ilion's biosphere, and in turn alter its nature, thoughts begin to turn toward colonization....
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Comments: 24
Great piece. I like your concept. I'll have to check the rest out now.
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Nice starship design!! This looks pretty realistic, nice to see prow shielding, heat radiator panels, and maneuvering thrusters included... and the crew quarters look well thought out. I especially like the inclusion of toilets, so often ignored by early rocketship interior designers. XD I like the jettisonable fuel pods, it makes sense for an interstellar rocket to be multistage!! What about the propulsion units, though, aren't Helium 3 fusion rockets not quite high-ISP enough to furnish continuous acceleration trips across interstellar distances? Slower travel, yes, but continuous acceleration requires ever larger amounts of fuel...
Biological contamination, ouch, I would hate to be part of the crew that had to answer for that!! We've seen enough on Earth to learn how much harm invasive species can do. Maybe the alien and Earth life can reach some sort of balance, in time?
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If you want to travel interstellar distances without absurd mass ratios, you're essentially limited to use of antimatter propulsion, bussard ramjets, or solar sails, and each of these has its problems. Antimatter fuel is almost impossible to find naturally and so must be produced in dedicated facilities, aside from needing to be actively contained while aboard the ship and requiring hearty (and probably impractical) radiation shielding to defend from the products of the reaction. Bussard ramjets can only scoop up sufficient fuel once they've already picked up speed, which will be further complicated due to our solar system being lying within the Local Bubble (an area that is particularly hydrogen poor even relative to the interstellar void), and do not serve much use for deceleration. Solar sails can only offer meaningful acceleration within some distance of the destination stars (while they could be supported via laser from Earth, this will not help them around Ilion), and would require enormous spans (many millions of square kilometers) for meaningful thrust.
Barring these, Helium-3 is the best immediate alternative, as it has the highest specific impulse of all aneutronic fusion fuels; while it still produces bremsstrahlung, that's much more easily contained than the neutrons, and has the advantage that it won't transmute matter into unstable isotopes.
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Wow, absurdly late reply, but I was just clearing out old messages so why not... 
Personally, one concept that appeals to me for relativistic trips to nearby stars is Singer's pellet stream propulsion system and other related mass beam concepts. These allow us to do away with the need to carry fuel and propellent, leaving all the heavy parts of the engine and energy source back home near Sol where mass and energy are plentiful, just like the laser and microwave sail concepts... but particles with mass carry far more momentum and can transfer propulsive energy to a beam-rider more efficiently. Certainly sounds more efficient (not to mention safer!!) than dragging around huge amounts of antimatter fuel. This fellow made some crude calculations concerning supplying the abundant energy needed by such a system by disassembling asteroids to construct solar power stations near the sun- www.setileague.org/articles/pr… Big engineering, but if relativistic flight is ever to be done, this sounds like a good way to go about it assuming ramjets are never made feasible. Another, more professional discussion concerning colony expeditions using pellet-stream propulsion is found here- books.google.com/books?id=2uwz…
The scale of engineering is still huge, apparently the pellet accelerator might have to be tens of thousands of km. long. And, finding ways to slow down with such off-board propulsion is always tricky. Not quite as tricky as trying to juggle a Klingon and several tribbles while attempting an emergency beamout from a starship suffering a warp-core breach in the neutral zone, though... C:
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I talked to another artist/writer about the fuel problem and we weighed the pros and cons of different fuel systems. The truth is, even with only six lightyears to cross both ways, there is really no way to make this trip without using unimaginable quantities of fuel and producing stupid amounts of heat. We settled on Helium.
They are lucky it was the cardamom that got loose (long story) and not the kudzu. Cardamom is much less aggressive and will integrate slowly into the ecosystem without causing too much destruction. The crew members responsible for contamination are also lucky for being long-dead by the time the infestation is discovered.
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I have not studied the rocket equation closely enough as yet to calculate the mass ratio of a helium-3 fusion rocket that attempts to approach C- but I suspect the fuel mass will end up being unimaginable, as you say. Most proposals I have seen have a large mass ratio (like 20) for a burn-out velocity of 10% C, and mass ratios rise exponentially with desired ∆Vs- consider Project Longshot, which would use a 10,000,000 ISP fusion pulse motor to reach 5% C and decelerate on reaching Centaurus. Imagine trying to carry enough fuel along to reach 20% C for a rendezvous mission... ^^ Other than the niggling question of "What are you using for gas???" the ship looks quite ready to go, though, kind of reminds of the Project Longshot starprobe in some ways.
Yep, I wouldn't want to have to face the investigation over THAT mistake. But why does an interstellar spaceship carry kudzu and cardamom to alien worlds? Was it an accidental contamination, say, a crew member bringing seeds on board trapped in their clothing or hair, or was it intentional (i.e. for a ship's garden)?
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The story's told here ([link] but basically, the mission's biologist was originally a botanist and wanted to grow some of his research plants in the ship's garden alongside the standard CO2 scrubbers. He snuck the cardamom on board because his friend and crewmate was rather partial to the spice. The mistake was bringing ripe seeds (for making tea) to the planet's surface.
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Interesting! So has the Aeneid I been cancelled, or is it a totally different space program done by another government?
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Aeneid comes later. It is part of the "conservation efforts" phase of exploration.
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Perhaps the coolest science fiction ship I've ever seen. Well done!
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Nice Starship, it seems to be pretty realistic from what I can see!
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reading this... its a nice touch, having the solar panels doubling as heat-shedders.
>and finally, to an acceptance that nothing further can be done to prevent the accidental terraforming
well, there's minimizing the invasiveness (making sure nothing can repeat the flower's success), and then there's the "i know an old lady" solution.
{swallowed a dog to catch the cat to catch the bird to catch the spider to catch the fly she swallowed at the start}
excellent work.
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I hope we've learned enough from Australia's cane toads that that last one is not a good idea.
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Why would you put the restroom so far up! You evil fiend XD
Awesome work, really detailed
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The high-up restroom is just for zero gravity and emergencies. There's another toilet right in the middle near the living area.
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wondering now how many research efforts were thwarted by a bad case of the runs while enroute. owch.
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Houston, we've got a problem...
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this is so incredibly cool! i love your work so much!
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So much for studying an entirely alien ecosystem! I wonder if any of the native species will adapt.
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Yes, they will coexist. I do not intend to destroy the entire ecosystem. There will also be some islands and pockets that remain untouched by the plants, and only have to adapt to the changing atmosphere.
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