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Description
This is a 3D model of the earlier depicted Starcatcher Class Transport, displayed here . A full analysis of the ship and components is available there, but I won't leave you empty-handed: you'll have to close-up to see everything, but red pipes carry hot fluid and blue ones carry cold (relatively speaking – the “cold” argon flowing around the reactor bell is 1800 K while the “hot” water flowing out of the heat exchanger is 320 K, so it would be more appropriate to say these signify fluid about to give up and take in heat respectively), clear tubes are for antimatter or fuel injection, and the dark tubes are support cables. The ignition lasers, pipes surrounding the reactor itself, tethers and sail are deliberately left out for clarity. Each image is precisely to scale (yes, that little white nub at the bottom right left corner is the ship, practically invisible next to the sail and tethers), but not all are to the same scale. I should note that this ship can haul cargo with the proper containers, but I figured such modules would be so simple compared to the others that there was no need to bother drawing them.

This image was made with AutoCAD, which is probably anyone’s last choice for 3D modeling and rendering, but as an engineer by trade it's what I'm most accustomed to. I had started off with Sketchup, but the way that program handles circles (as polygons with a set number of sides) made it a pain to draw the cylindrical craft and bending pipes – 6 hours through I gave up and managed to do it all over again in 1 hour with AutoCAD. That doesn’t mean the latter didn’t give me its own share of trouble – the materials are hideous, the heavily populated polar arrays slowed operation to a crawl (but then, I guess that’s what I get for featuring all 1440 winches and 240 radiator pipes), surfaces tended to act transparent when viewed from afar forcing me to combine close-ups for a good image of the exterior, and the x-ray view alternated between colorless and colored (hence why the second image has a large gray streak through it). All this was meant to be a test run for what I figured to be the more complicated starfighter, but in retrospect, that should require less work.

Description
This is a 3D model of the earlier depicted Starcatcher Class Transport, displayed here . A full analysis of the ship and components is available there, but I won't leave you empty-handed: you'll have to close-up to see everything, but red pipes carry hot fluid and blue ones carry cold (relatively speaking – the “cold” argon flowing around the reactor bell is 1800 K while the “hot” water flowing out of the heat exchanger is 320 K, so it would be more appropriate to say these signify fluid about to give up and take in heat respectively), clear tubes are for antimatter or fuel injection, and the dark tubes are support cables. The ignition lasers, pipes surrounding the reactor itself, tethers and sail are deliberately left out for clarity. Each image is precisely to scale (yes, that little white nub at the bottom right left corner is the ship, practically invisible next to the sail and tethers), but not all are to the same scale. I should note that this ship can haul cargo with the proper containers, but I figured such modules would be so simple compared to the others that there was no need to bother drawing them.

This image was made with AutoCAD, which is probably anyone’s last choice for 3D modeling and rendering, but as an engineer by trade it's what I'm most accustomed to. I had started off with Sketchup, but the way that program handles circles (as polygons with a set number of sides) made it a pain to draw the cylindrical craft and bending pipes – 6 hours through I gave up and managed to do it all over again in 1 hour with AutoCAD. That doesn’t mean the latter didn’t give me its own share of trouble – the materials are hideous, the heavily populated polar arrays slowed operation to a crawl (but then, I guess that’s what I get for featuring all 1440 winches and 240 radiator pipes), surfaces tended to act transparent when viewed from afar forcing me to combine close-ups for a good image of the exterior, and the x-ray view alternated between colorless and colored (hence why the second image has a large gray streak through it). All this was meant to be a test run for what I figured to be the more complicated starfighter, but in retrospect, that should require less work.