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NyrathWiz β PolarisPosterMedThumb
Published: 2013-04-23 21:58:22 +0000 UTC; Views: 4174; Favourites: 58; Downloads: 208
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Atomic Rocket Cruiser "Polaris" re-envisioned[link]
Chances are nobody here is old enough to have heard of "Tom Corbett - Space Cadet" (1952). The Polaris was the spacecraft assigned to the three space cadets.
I re-envisioned it with a Dr. Robert Zubrin style nuclear salt water rocket, heat radiators, and the deadly Casaba Howitzer (which annoyingly is still classified even though it was invented in 1960).
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Comments: 28
I'm a fan of Tom and company! Β Though they are from before my time.
Very nice Job!
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Thanks!
It is rare to find anybody who has even heard of Tom Corbett, before their time or no.
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Nuclear salt water rocket!!!
Does it have a sign that says "This end away from Earth"?
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I saw this on Atomic Rockets, but never expected to come across it on dA.
Pretty neato and nice attention to detail.
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Thanks!
That my peculiar advantage. I am equally home with the logic of science and the intuition of an artist. Not sure how that happened.
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I've heard of Tom Corbett, just never seen the show.
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Fantastic work!!
I need to tell you right now, before I forget, that your site is one of my favorites to read. Pre-Star Wars stuff is fascinating to me, and I always keep a lookout for old sci-fi books like the Perry Rodan series at estate sales and such. I used to read those a lot when I was a kid, and seeing those old rocketships done in CG with proper attention paid to the engineering is just incredible
Are you on Starship Modeler?
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Thank you for your kind words.
No, I am not on Starship Modeler. I thought that was just for pros.
I used to be active on Sci-Fi Meshes, but I haven't been there in a while.
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Nah, anyone can be on Starship Modeler. Some are on there just to talk sci-fi. I know several that would love to talk about old science fiction.
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Wow!! The Tom Corbett novels were the very first fiction I ever read (aside from Tip and Mitten). I love your interpretation of the Polaris. You've done a great job getting it all in that iconic airframe.
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Glad you like it! Though you will note that it is quite cramped inside.
The engineer that helped me with the interior was more of a bridge and skyscraper engineer and less of an aeronautics engineer. Some others are of the opinion that the huge I-Beams are grossly over-engineered for a spacecraft, and something more skeletal can be substituted. That would free up lots of interior space.
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Hey, you finished it!
Sweet Jesus, a NSWR? I can't argue with their performance, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to serve in one of these.
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I know, I know. But given the outrageous performance of the Polaris in the novels, it could only be performed by an outrageous propulsion system.
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It would probably be standard procedure for the first guy down the ladder to be wearing anti-c's and frisking everything/taking swipe surveys all around before anyone else could egress. Less than 450 micro-micro curies per 100 cm2 (less than 100 counts per minute above background). Maybe even take an air sample. As long as the air sample was less than 1.0 e-9 microcuries per mililiter with no detectable alpha (the big concern here, from unburnt uranium contamination), you'd be okay. Otherwise, duct tape is a good place to start for decon.
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Duly noted.
If this is a routine procedure, will the scanning crewman quickly max out their yearly exposure or is the exposure acceptable?
If not, I would hazard a guess it would be safer to use some kind of remotely controlled drone, like the 510 PackBots that iRobot corp graciously allowed to be used at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant.
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*laughs*
I was making the unspoken assumption that the guy coming out to check things would only be doing so after the landing pad was washed down. If there is no landing pad, or the facilities don't provide for such luxuries as cleansing the pad of all that contamination, it would probably be a very bad idea to step out there even in anti-c's. In this scenario, you'd probably have a radiac survey first just to see what the radiation flux was before you even attempted to open the door and start the contamination survey. 100 mrem/hour (1 mSv/hr) or greater is considered a High Radiation Area presently under U.S. Federal regs, which comes with certain requirements - obviously posted area, controlled access, personal dosimetry worn at all times, whole body contamination survey done prior to exit, dosimeter turned in for reading, et cetera. Obviously the usual caveats of time/distance/shielding to minimize exposure will be in effect for crew and ground staff around the pad, but if there is no way to "wash down" the pad, it would probably by dangerous or lethal, and certainly stupid to walk around beneath the spacecraft at all.
I wonder if the best thing to do in places where you don't have a washdown facility for the pad would be to keep some reserve of inert gas stored under very high pressure (minimum 300 Bar so you could pack as much gas as possible into as tight a space as possible) that you could spray down from and around the rocket at high velocity to blast the contamination away from the immediate location, maybe into bunkers/electrostatic dust traps around the perimeter. Radioactive materials are "sticky" and so theoretically should be easily swept up into a precipitator. (Definitely want the PackBots cleaning those!) You would probably still have to wear disposable anti-c clothing to move through the area, but it might reduce the amount of contamination preset to something manageable. The top of the ladder would be a "control point" where one would carefully remove one's anti-c's and perform a whole body frisk of one's self before continuing deeper into the ship, and the control point area and ladder would be treated as a "potentially contaminated" area where one was not permitted to go without the proper clothing. Pain In The Ass, but the price you pay for 10 G's of acceleration and 200 km/sec delta-vee.
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Welp, that sounds absurdly dangerous to attempt to land on a planet you want to have friendly relations with.
(necroposting! couldn't resist... it was a great comment)
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The NSWR is one of those designs that is just crazy, but if it works, you can't argue with its incredible performance. High thrust and high ISP? The holy grail of propulsion.
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Great information, which with your permission will eventually make its way to my website.
Naturally, in the real world, one would use a landing craft with a propulsion system a bit less radioactive, instead of trying to land the entire spacecraft with the NSWR into a self made patch of lava.
But even then the outrageous novels would demand something borderline outrageous. Say a nuclear light bulb (closed-cycle gas-core nuclear thermal rocket)
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Great information, which with your permission will eventually make its way to my website.
By all means!
The nuclear light bulb would have made more sense, but could you get 10 G's of thrust from one? That's where I see you're stuck with the NSWR. You need gratuitous thrust and high exhaust velocity.
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Ah, I meant that the Polaris should be an orbit-to-orbit craft with a NSWR, and carries a lander powered by a nuclear light bulb.
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So did you actually do this one as a print poster?
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Indeed so, just not from Deviantart.
To get a 23" x 35" poster to look halfway acceptable I had to render the blasted thing at 10500 x 6900 pixels. I had to do it in sections or my poor elderly computer would just crash. Even then that is only 200 dpi, not 300 dpi.
But recently I got a more modern machine.
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I've always loved your design on the Polaris, Winch. It really delivers a sexy tech appeal to Tom Corbett.
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Well, you can see from the acknowledgements, I had help designing it.
Otherwise the artwork is me fooling around with Blender 3D for the better part of half a year.
The secret of the appearance of the vertical tail fin is about nine blue lamps.
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master... teach me your kung fu, for it is strong.
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