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wingsofwrath β Inner Space Airliners
#comic #design #aeroplane #aircraft #airplane #floatplane #water #graphic_novel #marbanian #flying_boat #tambrian #inner_space
Published: 2014-11-19 00:07:49 +0000 UTC; Views: 12719; Favourites: 203; Downloads: 134
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EDIT 24.11.14: Slightly modified the underwater part of the lineart.EDIT 20.02.16 Changed the colour of the water to better contrast the aircraft.
Another concept drawing, showing a couple of airliners from the Inner Space world.
Since rubber is completely unknown in this world, all large aeroplanes have to land on water, so they are either flying boats or floatplanes.
Luckily, the world's geography is such that large bodies of water are plentiful in areas where people can live.
The picture depicts the Marbanian Klatu B.40N floatplane (top) and a Tambrian IAT 825 "Triumph" (bottom).
Both are twin-engine, all-metal airliners of semi-monocoque construction and with fully cantilevered wings, but one is a float equipped biplane (actually sesquiplane) while the other is a parasol monoplane flying boat equipped with airfoil shaped sponsons for stability while in the water.
The performance is roughly similar to our world inter-war airliners like the Boeing 247 or the Douglas DC3, with both designs able to transport 35 passengers at a speed of around 300km/h for approximatively 1,200 km.
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Comments: 25
These are very cool! I hope to see more seaplanes from the Inner Space world.
One minor nitpick though: the floats look a bit too small for an aircraft of that size.Β
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In Anne McCaffery's Pern books the colonists start with a low technology colony and slowly regain some of the lost technology. Β
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Had a chance to meet her once at a sci-fi/fantasy convention in Kansas City, KS about thirty years ago.Β A warm and wonderful lady.Β Made me wish she had been my grandmother.
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Out of curiosity, due to my unfamiliarity with your AU here, these craft are still ran off petroleum fuels, correct? If so wouldn't it still be possible to make synthetic rubber? It's easy to believe no one came up with it yet, particularly without natural rubber to give them the idea, but is it even a possibility that sometime, maybe decades later, synthetic rubber is discovered?
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Oh, they're working on it. They simply haven't hit on the right formula yet, because, as you say, no natural rubber means they have nothing to emulate.
After all, even in our world synthetic rubber only took off during WW1 as a direct result of the war, whereas petroleum had been usedΒ for at least 60 years by then.
So give them a bit of time.
They're also operating a bit haphazardly, since most of their technology is rediscovered (they're former refugees from a high tech world which reverted to 18th century level of technology and then started going up again) they lack a lot of the "basics", especially when it comes to chemistry.
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I would assume that this world would have a lot of artificial lakes for aircraft landing/take offs
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No need for that - most of the main cities are clustered around the coast of a shallow inland sea with lots and lots of islands, so there's plenty of water to go around.
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Alright. If I might presume to make a suggestion a full map of that inland sea and surrounding area would be nice.
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Oh, that's been in the works for some time.
I actually have a few sketches which show exactly what is where, but I lack the time and motive to do a fully rendered map at this time.
It'll be around eventually though, don't worry.
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If the plane can only land on water it means large cities will only exist in shorelines. Since that's the place with the biggest commerce available.
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Luckily, most human habitations in this world are clustered on the shores of a shallow inland sea and on an oversize archipelago, so this works just fine.
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Just asking, Have you ever watch an anime called 'Royal Space Force'?
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In fact I only watched it a couple of months ago and found both our worlds remarkably similar in both scope and concept.
Not really surprising, since we most likely drew inspiration from the same places - prototypes, paper projects, all the paths real life didn't take but we choose to walk, in order to create a world which is both alien and familiar at the same time.
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I see.. the first time i saw it i instantly reminded of your concept arts, very well thought, even to smallest details. but most of all you can make all those things fit together and believeable
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Ohhhh new picture!!! I was waiting for it!!!!
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Fascinating! You'd imagine that vulcanized rubber would be an essential development in a technological society. As a primary insulator and base material, rubber was crucial to the electrical revolution in the late Industrial Age, ours anyway. I imagine their electrical systems are far more fragile and fire-prone than ours. I suppose they have a lot of fabric insulators, and other more fragile materials like Bakelite. How do they feed liquids in engines without rubber hoses? Probably a lot of problems with rigid pipes leaking and bursting, requiring an awful lot of maintenance and replacements. Modern medicine without rubber would also be problematic - no aseptic revolution would have been possible in our world without the introduction of latex rubber products for medical gloves, etc. Their hospitals must be awful places crawling with infection, or hives of continuous activity by cleaning crews. Or maybe they use derived films like cellophane instead - not perfect, but better than nothing. Fragile, though. It's really interesting to try to work through all the ramifications of a thing like that!
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That's indeed what I thought, but the more research I did, the more I realised that we simply settled on vulcanized rubber because the process was discovered relatively early on, so we never bothered to find alternative solutions - after all, "if it ain't broke"...
Interestingly, for most of the 19th century the material of choice were actually gutta-percha and gutta-balata, and india-rubber, what we know now as natural rubber latex (NRL), supplanted them only in the late 1870s after the industry nearly collapsed due to over-harvesting.
In the Inner Space world though, there is no natural equivalent of any of the other natural rubbers, but the inhabitants, being refugees from a high-tech world, know about rubber, so they've been trying to create an artificial substitute for a long time. They don't know it yet, but they are actually on the brink of success.
The amusing thing is that the original colonization effort included most of the Earth plants and animals they thought they needed, but a source of rubber was never even on the list - it's remarkably easy to overlook how useful it is.
Then again, the original idea was also for them to escape Earth into a life "safe from the ills of modern technology" like a sort of Space Amish . Guess that didn't work too well either...
However, humans being resourceful animals managed to find workarounds for most problems - for example, all the hoses in the Inner Space world are made out of metal, like those used in our world for high pressure applications - they contain a corrugated inner tube and an outer covering of braided steel wire and are thus incredibly sturdy, if expensive and hard to manufacture.
The electrical wire insulators are indeed textile, with the plugs being either ceramic or cast from a natural resin endemic to the Inner Space world which has properties similar to early plastics.
Another material, used for gaskets and the like, is leather, which led to livestock being far more important than in our world.
When it comes to medicine, the solution is, again, incredibly ingenious - the same natural resin that hardens when exposed to air is dissolved in benzene or acetone and then the resulting solution is liberally coated over the surgeon's hands (after first washing them with bactericidal soap, of course) and allowed to dry, creating a thin veneer that is aseptic, resilient and impermeable. The benzene also prevents perspiration, and, at the end of the day the coating is removed by again washing it off with benzene.Β
In our world, this technique was in fact used in hospitals circa 1900, as can be seen here .
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that bothers me, "When it comes to medicine, the solution is, again, incredibly ingenious - the same natural resin that hardens when exposed to air is dissolved in benzene or acetone and then the resulting solution is liberally coated over the surgeon's hands"
Because:
"Exposure to this substance causes neurological symptoms and affects the bone marrow causing aplastic anemia, excessive bleeding and damage to the immune system."
Immediately dangerous to life and health = 500 ppm
Benzene is a clear, colorless, highly flammable and volatile, liquid aromatic hydrocarbon with a gasoline-like odor. Benzene is found in crude oils and as a by-product of oil-refining processes. In industry benzene is used as a solvent, as a chemical intermediate, and is used in the synthesis of numerous chemicals. Exposure to this substance causes neurological symptoms and affects the bone marrow causing aplastic anemia, excessive bleeding and damage to the immune system. Benzene is a known human carcinogen and is linked to an increased risk of developing lymphatic and hematopoietic cancers, acute myelogenous leukemia, as well as chronic lymphocytic leukemia. (NCI05)
pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compoβ¦
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Yup, pretty much.
Unfortunately, us humans have always had a habit of using substances which are really harmful to our health before we knew any better. Like you know, lead in gasoline and plumbing. Or asbestos. Or mercury.
And I shudder to think what they'll discover in the future about other substances we now think of as "safe" that are in fact incredibly dangerous, but we just didn't know it...
In this case, what I'm describing has been actually used in real life around the turn of the last century, after the discovery of aseptic techniques but before the widespread introduction of rubber gloves. Oh yeah, and before they tried this type of coating they washed their hands in carbolic acid, so this is a step up, I guess?...
Of course, unfortunately for the Inner Space crowd, they don't have any natural rubber, so they're stuck with coatings until they can manufacture some synthetic stuff.
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Ah, if I had read this comment beforehand I would've found my answer.
Hmm, so this is actually a colony of, now ex, Luddites? Interesting, I thought it was a alternateΒ parallelΒ world that didn't have rubber at first.
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Yup, that's pretty much the gist of it.
They're ex-Luddites grappling with the problems of rapid industrialisation, internal religious strife and constant border skirmishes between the dominant nations that threaten to upset the status quo and send the whole world spiralling into the chaos of an all out war.
And into this situation come the first ever visitors from back on Earth, with their fancy high tech wonders and complete ignorance of the local values and traditions.
Oh and did I mention the fact their arrival might coincide with a prophecy some people might think true, that not everyone agrees with that opinion and that, when it comes to their religious beliefs, all of these people take them really, really seriously?
Nothing can go wrong with this setup, now can it?
(yes, I now know the power George R.R. Martin feels every time he sits down at the writing desk...)
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Religious tensionΒ is a fickle thing, ain't it? Β
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