Structurally it can be considered a ring under tension produced by centrifugal force with a tower protruding from its inner circumference, not a wheel. I'd still add at least one extra spoke for redundancy though.
The segmented modular form makes logistical and economic sense. A twelve-sector ring can still be balanced when it's incomplete or if you run out of money so long as it doesn't have one module missing or only one in place and all are of equivalent mass.*
What did annoy me about it was that after it's severely damaged and loses a module or two, it retains its circular form. That would not be possible. I'd at least liked to have seen some cables rigged up to hold the circle closed. Even then it would rotate about its new centre of mass, not its geometric centre.
IIRC, there are fuel tanks supposed to be within the rectangular outer shells of the modules. The inhabited portions are all on the inner circumference with plenty of volume towards the outer. These also serve as radiation shielding to some degree.
So, not completely ridiculous. I'd expect a real deep space vessel to adopt the segmented ring architecture, plus a reactor at the end of a long boom on the axis and radiator panels.
*Two modules at opposite sides, three in an equilateral triangle, four to make a square, and any combination of these. It's a trick you use loading test tubes into a centrifuge in a laboratory.
No, skimming a Wikipedia article gives you very superficial knowledge. You're certainly not as qualified to judge a book as someone who's actually read it (and its technical appendix with citations).
Watts has his flaws as a writer but it's difficult to name a novelist more deeply rooted in science. He's probably "harder" than Geoffrey Landis, to the extent "hardness" means anything useful or measurable.
The problem of course, is that realism is subjective. One may try to apply an objective scale with a threshold that excludes virtually all speculative fiction but few people will agree with it.
Anyway, to get back on topic here's some pretty good concept art of the Theseus from Blindsight.
Bob Forward's Timemaster is one of the least realistic books I've ever read. The idea that IBM could be innovative any time after the '70's is a bit laughable, but the dancing alien iron star cat thing makes up for it. Unfortunately the weird threesome at the end between old man protagonist, middle aged protagonist, and trophy wife makes it weird again. Sad, many such cases!
Anyway, Blindsight is one of the best "science fiction" books written, probably since the genre appeared tbh. Mostly because the bulk of science fiction books don't include back matter explaining the origin of the book, going into detail about the ideas the author explores, and discussing the actual techno-science aspects with citations. I guess that's Watts's pedigree as a biologist/scientist coming out. H. Beam Piper did something similar with a prompt proffered by J.D. Clarke but didn't really go anywhere specifically about it, Uller Uprising is a retelling of the Sepoy Rebellion with thermonuclear missiles and space miners.
Watts specifically sought to ask whether or not consciousness was a maladaptive strategy in evolutionary history, because it is expensive energetically, and evolution seeks lazy/optimized solutions. He built the book around that question with the narrative of two superhuman intelligences duking it out with their starships (Theseus and Rorschach).
It falls into a similar tradition of Herbert's Dune and Asimov's Foundation, which were literally built on exploring the concepts of free will and scientific investigation, by asking a major thesis question that is explored through narrative. The 1960's attempts were primitive, but important, because they laid the groundwork for what people consider "good" science fiction later on with books like The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and the Laundry Files series.
If all people want are goofy starships to look at, which are never really the point of good science fiction, there's plenty of books about that that don't have "stories" or "narrative" to get in the way.
Blindsight is just nice because it aptly describes Watts's editorial collaboration with a then-currently employed aerospace engineer at a major American aero firm over some emails, the description of the starship itself, and even has a nice little mouse-over display describing the components produced to promote the book on his website.
The Theseus has antimatter fusion engines made by Boeing, and the same engines protect the crew from radiation, wow! Imagine Boeing making anything that works these days. Astounding! The crew should clearly be dead from radiation poisoning or something.
It even uses a Bussard ramjet to extract hydrogen from the interstellar media, one of the most memed on hypothetical concepts of propulsion in all science fiction, and probably completely unworkable in real life.
"Vampire" is just a in-universe colloquialism for a long-extinct offshoot of the human species that predates on other, lesser intelligent humans, like homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis. They go extinct shortly after the invention of architecture.
They're closer to people with autism or psychopathic cannibals than Bela Lugosi, with an innate capacity to survive in extreme hibernation for decadal periods between feeding, which is how Watts's justifies the development of suspended animation for deep space travel. They get bred in a genetic engineering program, not dissimilar to how people might eventually bring back wooly mammoths (i.e. hybridization), because their brains are good at doing certain types of math.
Watts even manages to finagle a pretty good explanation of why his vampires get confused by rice and barley grains.
It's completely silly, but so are Bussard ramjets, throwing people into a industrial freezer to "preserve" them, and the idea that Jupiter can be turned into a star. It's still probably less silly than a lot of other "hard" science fiction, like Timemaster, and the ship design is cool in general.
2001 is pretty boring, yes. Best to skip the movie and just look at the miniatures made for it. Perhaps Kubrick could have just commissioned an art book and spared us the whole rigamarole?
Starships are ultimately tertiary to science fiction in all its space-faring forms and it's rare when a author or a book series attempts to make one that fits properly in a sense of such deep verisimilitude as by consulting a working aerospace engineer and bouncing ideas off them. Especially so in a story that is much closer to Lovecraft than Clarke.
You take what you get and Blindsight has a pretty good starship for "realism" considering the time (2004-2005) it was written. The same applies to 2001. Both may be horrendously outdated in 20 years (one already is, after all) but the Theseus isn't bad for a "hard science fiction" ship. It's much harder than the goofy dumbbell thing.
Theseus may still be too luxurious to be a true and honest deep space vessel, what with its 0.5 g gravity spin habitat, though.
Anyway this is the re-release of Blindsight that gives a good view of the "canonical" appearance of Theseus.
The ship even has shades of 2001's Discovery One in it from up close. Here is the original art:
Theseus's radiators look like bat wings I guess because lol vampires.
The problem of course, is that realism is subjective. One may try to apply an objective scale with a threshold that excludes virtually all speculative fiction but few people will agree with it.
The fundamental concept of *realism* is inexorably tied to probability, i.e., even if an event or development is theoretically feasible, it may have a vastly different likelihood to actually occur than other alternative possible events or developments. As a concrete example, with lotteries, even the recent superjackpots notwithstanding, based on longstanding statistics, it is likely and therefore realistic to assume that on average every week or two someone will win the jackpot. But for me to blithely assume that I will win the jackpot by buying just one single ticket and then confidently quit my job even before the drawing, would, while in principle conceivable, be completely *unrealistic*.
As another example, let's take next year's presidential election in the United States (and I promise, this argument is completely apolitical!). Based on the current state of play and recent polling, it seems not only perfectly possible but eminently realistic to assume that, barring unforeseen events or developments, the winner will be either the current president or his predecessor, with chances roughly about even at this point, so writing two alternative but mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed fictional versions of the electoral outcome at this point would both seem perfectly realistic, although come November 2024 one would very likely align more or less with actual history and quite possibly be celebrated by some as "prophetic" or "visionary", while the other would immediately collapse into an outdated alternate history fantasy OBE.
But consider for a moment, if you will, the possibility that the Illuminati for now well over 35 years (to meet the constitutional age requirement) in a vast secret underground biolab complex in a desolate corner of the New Mexico desert (to meet the constitutional citizenship requirement) have been bioengineering, maturing and educating human genome based but genetically modified fully sentient mascot size avatars of two beloved male and female anthropomorphic cartoon rodent characters that will soon be presented to the nation and the world as the presidential and vice presidential candidates for an independent third party run, being gently but incessantly promoted by a giant benevolent corporation in massive PR campaigns and social media events as well as its vast empire of network channels, streaming platforms, websites, and theme parks.
Now, taking a short ride in the train of thought that Mr. Watts seems to prefer to travel on (but without trying to wade through his apparently copious footnotes, because TLDR), let's see how that might stack up in reality. Is it possible? I'm not a biologist or geneticist, but if genetically reincarnated vampires and other cutting-edge transhuman hyper-specialist are apparently eminently feasible in principle in this universe, sure, fine, whatever, I don't see why not. Is it entertaining? Well not to me, but then again, I haven't watched Barbie either and most likely never will, so maybe to others. But is it *realistic* as a credible fictional alternative in comparison to the current conventional near term binary choice? NO.
Structurally it can be considered a ring under tension produced by centrifugal force with a tower protruding from its inner circumference, not a wheel. I'd still add at least one extra spoke for redundancy though.
The segmented modular form makes logistical and economic sense. A twelve-sector ring can still be balanced when it's incomplete or if you run out of money so long as it doesn't have one module missing or only one in place and all are of equivalent mass.*
What did annoy me about it was that after it's severely damaged and loses a module or two, it retains its circular form. That would not be possible. I'd at least liked to have seen some cables rigged up to hold the circle closed. Even then it would rotate about its new centre of mass, not its geometric centre.
IIRC, there are fuel tanks supposed to be within the rectangular outer shells of the modules. The inhabited portions are all on the inner circumference with plenty of volume towards the outer. These also serve as radiation shielding to some degree.
So, not completely ridiculous. I'd expect a real deep space vessel to adopt the segmented ring architecture, plus a reactor at the end of a long boom on the axis and radiator panels.
*Two modules at opposite sides, three in an equilateral triangle, four to make a square, and any combination of these. It's a trick you use loading test tubes into a centrifuge in a laboratory.
Now, taking a short ride on the train of thought that Mr. Watts seems to prefer to travel on (but without trying to wade through his apparently copious footnotes, because TLDR), let's see how that might stack up. Is it possible?
No. That's literally the first sentence in Dr. Watts's footnotes, he tips his hand to trying something that other authors have in the past. The notes are also eminently readable and done in a conversationally masculine tone. They aren't dry and the footnotes are solid, although many of the weblinks are now expired, because the book was written in like 2004.
I'm not a biologist or geneticist, but if genetically reincarnated vampires and other cutting-edge transhuman hyper-specialist are apparently eminently feasible in principle in this universe, sure, fine, whatever, I don't see why not.
It's a cosmic horror story that is more in the vein of books like Snow Crash or the Laundry Files. The vampires are just a way to show a nearly human, but still superhuman, intellect, as a setup for a twist later on the book. They're also a core plot element in Echopraxia.
If you think Theseus isn't realistic then why do you give 2001's Discovery One such praise? That ship didn't even radiators, neither normal shaped nor bat-shaped, in the film.
Theseus has one major conceit in that it uses "telematter" engines, which seems to be a funny description of quantum teleportation brought about by a misunderstanding on Watts's of how quantum teleportation actually works. This isn't really a ball buster all things considered. There's a discussion in the book about how the Bussard ramjet intakes hydrogen ions from the interstellar medium and uses them to create antimatter or something onboard. For some reason it needs a constant connection to a antimatter factory Dyson swarm (the "Icarus Array") to do this.
(...) She'd taken us a good fifteen AUs towards our destination before something scared her off course. Then she'd skidded north like a startled cat and started climbing: a wild high three-gee burn off the ecliptic, thirteen hundred tonnes of momentum bucking against Newton's First. She'd emptied her Penn tanks, bled dry her substrate mass, squandered a hundred forty days' of fuel in hours. Then a long cold coast through the abyss, years of stingy accounting, the thrust of every antiproton weighed against the drag of sieving it from the void. Teleportation isn't magic: the Icarus stream couldn't send us the actual antimatter it made, only the quantum specs. Theseus had to filter feed the raw material from space, one ion at a time. For long dark years she'd made do on pure inertia, hoarding every swallowed atom. Then a flip; ionizing lasers strafing the space ahead; a ramscoop thrown wide in a hard brake. The weight of a trillion trillion protons slowed her down and refilled her gut and flattened us all over again. (...)
In the story, Theseus is said to be designed for reconnaissance/deep space exploration missions out to a light-day's distance from Sol/Icarus Array. It's not very well described, though, simply because it's not important. It's not like the star freighters in the Lunar expedition that discover the Mysterious Pyramid are well described in The Sentinel, either, which was the inspiration for 2001.
No. That's literally the first sentence in Dr. Watts's footnotes, he tips his hand to trying something that other authors have in the past.
Theseus has one major conceit in that it uses "telematter" engines, which seems to be a funny description of quantum teleportation brought about by a misunderstanding on Watts's of how quantum teleportation actually works. This isn't really a ball buster all things considered. There's a discussion in the book about how the Bussard ramjet intakes hydrogen ions from the interstellar medium and uses them to create antimatter or something onboard. For some reason it needs a constant connection to a antimatter factory Dyson swarm (the "Icarus Array") to do this.
OK - if it's not *possible*, continuing any discussion of it being *realistic* is clearly moot and a waste of time. Thanks for the explicit clarification.
OK - if it's not *possible*, continuing any discussion of it being *realistic* is clearly moot and a waste of time. Thanks for the explicit clarification.
2001 is a bad movie, I agree, I'm not sure how they expected a ship without radiators to get to Jupiter. Maybe it used quantum teleportation.
If you're going to be dismissive, you should probably pick a better standard bearer than a film with miniatures that compare more to Star Wars than any serious space exploration vehicles, tbh. Every science fiction representation of a starship hinges on some sort of conceit: Discovery One has no radiators, because the audience is stupid. Theseus uses a quantum teleportation engine to transmit "quantum specs" of antimatter to a factory that assembles the antimatter from interstellar hydrogen. We're both expected to understand that they work somehow.
The suspension of disbelief that a crew can survive in a space exploration vehicle without radiators to dissipate heat is much larger than the suspension of disbelief that people who have managed to construct a Dyson Swarm for antimatter production on an industrial scale might invent a way to produce it through "quantum information" transmission.
One of those ties into some more oddball theories of physics and the other is just bad design because you assume your audience is stupid. I'm pretty sure the people working with stage lights and electric motors understood that people get hot in enclosed spaces, but I don't really expect a marine biologist to be super well versed in quantum mechanical physics that normally requires a PhD to understand.
Why not just appreciate the spaceship in Blindsight for what it is instead of trying to one-up it? If you can accept that Discovery One doesn't have radiators yet didn't cook HAL 9000 or its human crew the second it departed, not sure why Theseus has such hangups. It at least has radiators on its tail.
In Weber's Out of the Dark, Dracula exists (he has a pseudonym) and runs a group of guerrillas fighting against alien invaders. He turns a group of U.S. Marines into vampires. They then ride alien spaceships/shuttles to orbit (by holding onto the handholds) and kill the invaders in their fleet and steal their ships.
I don't know who you agree with here, because to me it is a truly outstanding milestone not just in Science Fiction but in general film making, and I nerver made any statement that would even remotely indicate that I consider it anything else but a cinematic masterpiece, so please stop misconstruing/twisting my statements. If you had read up even a little bit on the history on the making of 2001, you would be aware that radiators were explicitly included in early Discovery designs, but were later omitted out of concerns that audience members might mistake them for wings and become confused, see for example the discussion at https://space.stackexchange.com/que...y-one-still-a-plausible-design-for-interplane - one of the rare compromises Kubrick made in his films. But at least it required "no warp drive, teleportation, photon torpedos, rubber masked biped aliens or artificial gravity", as opposed to unicorn farts like "telematter", which in my view really *IS* a ball buster.
I'm not sure what this means. I don't "agree" with anyone except that I think the ship from Blindsight is pretty interesting I guess?
At the end of the day the only judge of what a "realistic" fictional spacecraft looks like is how close spacecraft appear to be when they're made for real. Discovery One is almost as hokey as the mercury powered space stations of Conquest of Space or Jules Verne's Moon Gun these days.
2001, and Conquest of Space, has its design language rooted in the Von Braun sketches of mercury powered space stations and direct ascent lunar rockets made from duraluminum, while Blindsight's Theseus, Avatar, and even this goober from Red Planet are rooted in the ISS's design language. One is plainly more "realistic" and it's not the 2001 ships or stations.
I expect in 2070 or whenever the Mars mission NASA is planning goes off (if it does) the ships from all those movies will be as hokey as the ones from 2001 are today, too.
I don't disagree that the movie was a milestone in special effects, cinematography, and miniatures design.
However, I don't think it did much in terms of narrative, plot, or characters, which is what movies are usually judged on. It's a movie for people who like movies and like seeing how movies are made, but it's not a very interesting story. Sure, it has some neat mechanical designs like the nuclear missile satellites (which are my favorite miniatures), and the centrifuge stage is impressive, it's still very campy given what we know about space travel and how such machines look now.
Did you think I was pulling the Timemaster reference out of a hat? It is a book about a guy who uses exotic matter to produce commercially viable wormholes and accidentally invents time travel. Bob Forward did some work for the Apollo mission and was a pretty accomplished aerospace engineer, so it's not like he was illiterate in physics.
Watts's has a ship that just forms quantum coherence with a antimatter production plant across a solar system and is able to produce entangled pairs of positrons and electrons out to a light-day. That's silly I guess, but not by much. Perhaps there's a wormhole in the ship to facilitate this? That seems to be his main implication.
In real life, obviously this could only be done under extremely short distances, at best, and you just don't tell anyone that gathering local matter would (maybe) ruin the coherence either. It can probably be engineered out though.
Kubrick would probably just ignore it entirely, and say the ship produces antimatter locally, probably from a cyclotron or something stored on the back of the ship, then he would delete the radiators so people don't confuse it with a meat grinder I guess. Someone coming between the two, perhaps in the 1970's or 1980's, might suggest batteries of lasers setup across the solar system and a large sail for propulsion.
Unfortunately, Peter Watts probably read the SF magazine blurb I posted from Dr. John G. Cramer and spiraled from there. Professional, published quantum physicists have had a devastating effect on the "hard" "realistic" science fiction genre, truly.
Are you trying to gaslight me here? My previous response started as a rebuttal of your statement directed at me that read "2001 is a bad movie, I agree", so you can perhaps understand that I interpreted that as implying you agreed with me, although I never stated anything like that.
On a completely unrelated note, I think getting rid of nested quotes was a truly bad idea, because it seems to encourage deliberate mischief.
That, or showing inability to communicate.
I sometimes come across books that pose as science fiction, but are, in my opinion, fantasy. Like Dune, which I consider to be completely unrealistic in its technology, but which I love for its office politics.
I still think 2001's Discovery is better than most fictional spaceships. I also think that is a low bar to clear, given the utter crap posing for spaceships in other movies - which doesn't preclude I might still enjoy those movies.
Am in the mood to drop a comment then wander off to something else while filling a few minutes of inactive time dealing with a bilateral infection of fluid filled ears and some raging tinnitus.
Not gonna share images here, but the the sci-fi/science-fantasy story I play at writing has its spacecraft varyingly blend "Yeah, I considered the needs and consequences of hardcore reality while designing this one", and, "Yeah baby, that do look cool."
The ultimate deciding factor is the dual question of what pleases me, and what serves the needs of the story I'm telling.
Though inspired by Star Trek via the line "the ship was beautiful" about an alien ship Kirk et. al. chanced upon in a book of Star Trek short stories read in the school library in the 1970s, my story is not Star Trek.
A conscious decision was made to not detail how the drive systems get action from energy, and how various other technical and engineering things work within their innards.
All the story needs is that they work when called upon.
A conscious decision was made to sometimes detail how waste heat gets moderated and how consumables get stowed and processed.
Likewise for a few other things.
And there are a couple things where I can't imagine any details of how they would work in the physics we know and love, but they work in the story setting, and that's good enough for me.
Be consistent with them and you can "suspend disbelief" long enough and locally enough for the storytelling to work.
Of course it was an aesthetic choice. Everything in fiction is an aesthetic choice, and realism in fiction has nothing to do with probability (???), it's an aesthetic technique that's more accurately called verisimilitude.
Since Kubrick was a master of this technique 2001 and Discovery are (rightfully) remembered as masterpieces despite being pure space magic. The attention to detail is there to fool people into suspending their disbelief in a story that on second glance is as fantastical as Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.
Of course it was an aesthetic choice. Everything in fiction is an aesthetic choice, and realism in fiction has nothing to do with probability (???), it's an aesthetic technique that's more accurately called verisimilitude.
Since Kubrick was a master of this technique 2001 and Discovery are (rightfully) remembered as masterpieces despite being pure space magic. The attention to detail is there to fool people into suspending their disbelief in a story that on second glance is as fantastical as Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.
You seem to consistently confuse actually being realistic with merely looking *cool*. Those are two fundamentally different concepts, though there may certainly be some overlap. However, so far the LEM is the one and only flight proven crewed lunar lander/ascent vehicle, so by definition it doesn't get any more realistic than that, but nobody would accuse the design of being an epiphany of beauty and aesthetic design. In actual engineering practice, which any so-called "hard science fiction" worth its salt would be well advised to emulate as much as possible, form follows function and not wishful thinking.
You seem to consistently confuse actually being realistic with merely looking *cool*. Those are two fundamentally different concepts, though there may certainly be some overlap. However, so far the LEM is the one and only flight proven crewed lunar lander/ascent vehicle, so by definition it doesn't get any more realistic than that, but nobody would accuse the design of being an epiphany of beauty and aesthetic design. In actual engineering practice, which any so-called "hard science fiction" worth its salt would be well advised to emulate as much as possible, form follows function and not wishful thinking.
Let's abuse FTL travel for an example: current models of the Alcubierre warp drip require a ring or two around the ship to support the field generators. So any scifi story using those models also requires a ring (or rings), of a certain diameter relative to either ship overall length or overall mass, depending on model used.
Skipping FTL (damn you, Einstein!), a nuclear rocket will have radiators that will likely glow red-hot to handle the reactor waste heat.
Not fictional but a design study, the Firefly. The British Interplanetary Society initiated a programme in 2009 in partnership with the Tau Zero Foundation to follow on from Daedalus, titled Icarus (probably not the best choice of name). The brief was to deliver 150 tonnes of scientific payload to orbit (not mere flyby) around Alpha Centauri. Firefly was the eventual result in 2014.
You seem to consistently confuse actually being realistic with merely looking *cool*. Those are two fundamentally different concepts, though there may certainly be some overlap. However, so far the LEM is the one and only flight proven crewed lunar lander/ascent vehicle, so by definition it doesn't get any more realistic than that, but nobody would accuse the design of being an epiphany of beauty and aesthetic design. In actual engineering practice, which any so-called "hard science fiction" worth its salt would be well advised to emulate as much as possible, form follows function and not wishful thinking.
Why is 2001 considered a classic, while the contemporary Moon Zero Two, with its much more realistic spacecraft designs and zero space magic, lambasted on Mystery Science Theater?
Because Moon Zero Two, despite being realistic in one sense, doesn't achieve the verisimilitude through Kubrick's attention to detail that makes you forget you're watching a goofy space movie.
"Aesthetic technique" doesn't have anything to do with looking cool, and obviously emulating a LEM or not is an aesthetic choice, as is everything in arts and fiction. Most internet arguments would probably be avoided if people realized words had different meanings in different contexts.
IIRC, there are fuel tanks supposed to be within the rectangular outer shells of the modules. The inhabited portions are all on the inner circumference with plenty of volume towards the outer. These also serve as radiation shielding to some degree.
So, not completely ridiculous. I'd expect a real deep space vessel to adopt the segmented ring architecture, plus a reactor at the end of a long boom on the axis and radiator panels.
Overall, it's bigger than it looks...you don't have a good human scale but basically the center "pod" has four individual multi-passenger SSTO vehicles attached to it.
Alongside inflatable and folding structures, I think tension and tensegrity are going to be commonly used in space. A lot of studies are exploring them - and at very large scale.
The authors explore the possibility that near-earth, rubble pile asteroids might be used as habitats for human settlement by increasing their rotation to produce spin gravity. Using previously published scaling by Maindl et al. and studies of asteroid populations, it is shown that there is no...
I've added art by Carter Emmart for a purely radial design for comparison. During the cruise phase of its mission to Mars, three ships are docked nose-to-nose and spin about their centre. In this case they are 'hanging' from the centre with tension along three radial axes. Separated and under acceleration or aerobraking, they are under longitudinal compression.
In contrast, once a centrifuge makes a continuous ring, it is under circumferential tension. There is no need for it to have a centre 'keel' or whatever that performs any stress-bearing role - you only need something to dock with and store supplies 'Not Wanted on Voyage' (an old term used with luggage aboard liners). Physical connection can be minimal. Distributing the thrusters around the perimeter can work, provided there is sufficient redundancy to ensure that it remains balanced even when one or a couple fail. That would make sense if you have a limited number of launches from Earth and you want to pack as much function and redundancy into each module as possible. If you do attach thrusters to the rear end of an axial 'keel', then it would make sense to extend it opposite the direction of thrust (in compression) and have cables (in tension) extending back from the nose to the ring. However, most designs for efficient propulsion in space are high ISP and very low thrust, producing far less strain than artificial gravity.
If you do have some sort of high thrust drive, like Orion, or aerobraking deep into an atmosphere, then some sort of variable geometry would be needed - that's the principle in the concept Carter Emmart illustrates. Come to think of it, sailing ships are variable geometry vessels using large tensile structures...
Carbonfibre is well-suited as a material for the ring, as described in the Habitat Bennu study - that's the exact opposite of the case with Oceangate's Titan, BTW.
Discovery at Saturn by David Hardy, based on the novel. I think he got the direction of the radiators wrong. I gather from my reading they were narrow nearest the engines, as in the concept art above. Nonetheless, it's beautiful art. He reused the basic design for a starship in another painting.
Ahh, those photos show the fuel tanks that Discovery had on launch...just as well they were dropped off in the film and the radiators were non existent, they would have made clamping the Leonov on a bit more dificult.
Where the Endurance gets most ridiculous is where it still almost makes sense. The heavy landers shown in the film had gimballed seats and windows above and below (Christopher Nolan does like things that spin and tumble). Not shown in the film but in concept art, they entered atmospheres on their backs. Once the Endurance found a planet worth settling, it would be partly dismantled and four of the modules would be carried down to the surface cupped in the leeward sides of the landers, which presumably then perform a flip and lower them to the surface like Curiosity and Perseverance. That's just a wee bit more complicated than necessary...
Why is 2001 considered a classic, while the contemporary Moon Zero Two, with its much more realistic spacecraft designs and zero space magic, lambasted on Mystery Science Theater?
Because Moon Zero Two, despite being realistic in one sense, doesn't achieve the verisimilitude through Kubrick's attention to detail that makes you forget you're watching a goofy space movie.
"Aesthetic technique" doesn't have anything to do with looking cool, and obviously emulating a LEM or not is an aesthetic choice, as is everything in arts and fiction. Most internet arguments would probably be avoided if people realized words had different meanings in different contexts.
Well, if it's apparently now even considered fashionably debatable what realistic actually means, I honestly think we're done here. You most certainly can have your own opinion, but you also most definitely *CANNOT* have your very own reality. There is only ONE objective reality.
Why is 2001 considered a classic, while the contemporary Moon Zero Two, with its much more realistic spacecraft designs and zero space magic, lambasted on Mystery Science Theater?
Why was Moon Zero Two and Doppelgänger, less regarded as the monolith of Sci-Fi called 2001: a Space Odyssey ?
One is name Stanley Kubrick that guarantee you will see something spectacular.
The others were Hammer Films true Sci-fi movie, while Gerry Anderson Produce his first Movie with Actors.
so what went wrong ?
Hammer Films had good reputation of Horrorfilms, some with Sci-fi elements like Quatermassand the Pit and others.
But Moon Zero Two was planned as "Space Western on Moon" and not as Horror movie.
and viewers were disappointed to see it's not a horror movie, because Hammer Films had reputation to make good Horror movies.
next to that director Roy Ward Baker was constant dispute, with producer about budget and miss casting the roles.
Gerry Anderson problem was, his work was consider TV for children, despite the darker tone of Capitan Scarlet.
He wanted to make sci-fi Movie with Actors, but Doppelgänger was flaw from the begin.
The Story and plot was average, flawed, also the Director Robert Parrish not understand Sci-fi.
Irony: part of Doppelgänger SFX team worked later for Kubrick on 2001
Both Movies has problem to find a Distributer, they were unimpressed or underwhelmed, like wise the critics.
in the UK, Doppelgänger was show as of a double feature with Death of a Gunfighter, only running for less than a week.
In mean time 2001: a Space Odyssey had in begin also performed poorly at the box office.
until younger audience stampeded the cinemas to see the movie under influence of LSD...
Mean time in Cinemas was also the cynical The Planet of the Apes, who was also very successful.
Well, I know it doesn't mean real. Something that's realistic is by definition not real. We're discussing fiction, not objective reality.
My own standards for realism in science fiction are fairly high (I don't think the Discovery is very realistic, its design is mostly dictated by theme and symbolism), but not so high as to require NASA TRL 6, which I suppose is a valid but certainly unique and extreme opinion.
At the same time I'm aware that even the hardest science fiction story must diverge from reality in some way (otherwise it would be a news article), and that "hardness" doesn't have any inherent value except as a constraint artists and writers place themselves under to increase creativity.
Everybody who's seen the movie knows what went wrong - it's awful. Again, it probably has the most realistic designs of any science fiction movie ever, but these probably detract from the whole by harshly juxtaposing the 60s campiness.
Many sf spacecraft are a blend of the eminently plausible with impossible (or infinitely improbable) bits. Peter Watts' novel Blindsight has a pretty impressive one with a very low TRL drive. It's not so much propelled by unicorn farts as a bathtub bolted to the rear in which a philosopher shouts 'Eureka!' to propel it forward. The principle is quantum teleportation. Rather than carrying a store of antimatter on board, an antimatter factory is in orbit close to the Sun and the qualities of the particles produced in the factory and those on Theseus are exchanged.
The rest of the spacecraft is more familiar technologically and the main focus of the book is on consciousness. In fact, it's pretty much cosmic horror - the horror being a principle rather than mere squiggly creatures that can hurt you. In this case it's the contention that intelligence does not require consciousness and that consciousness may in fact be evolutionarily disadvantageous.
The book's found it way onto reading lists for numerous philosophy and neurology courses and It's probably going to me even more relevant now with the recent boom in AI. The entity 'Rorschach' in the book can be thought of as the ultimate iteration of ChatGPT.
Watts provides extensive notes and reference in an appendix, explaining his sources, including the 'telematter' drive.
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