A Pair of Rosa System Paintings

Well hello again.

Recovering from the post-college brain emptiness is a slow process so far, but I've managed to rally together to paint two pieces in as many nights - so it's time to share!

(Be sure to open these up to see them at full res!)

The first one here has a bit more of the creativity I've been looking for lately. This started as more of a doodle than anything but eventually became a more involved visualization of the Rosa system as a whole. The scales are not accurate of course, and I've talked plenty about the order of the worlds, but it was fun to properly depict the whole system in an artistic but structured way, like you might find on a NASA webpage or in the kind of books I read as a kid.

Obviously we have Rosa, the parent star, and her three little worlds. Today, we use a default naming scheme for exoplanets in which the star is considered object "a," and its worlds (in order of discovery, or just distance) are named starting from "b." Exoplanet enthusiasts from a particular Discord server will be happy to note that I've amended my embarrassing 3AM mistake of starting with "a."

As mentioned many a time on this blog, this is a pretty compact system, with a pretty small star - Rosa is only about the size of Jupiter (but considerably more massive), and her children, each smaller than Earth, orbit much closer than Mercury does to our own Sun. They're probably locked in some kind of resonance that makes their orbits stable over billions of years. I considered adding a greenish disk to represent Rosa's habitable zone, as I've seen in other representations, but since all three worlds are settled I figured that might be a bit redundant.

I haven't talked about the Outer Disk much on this blog, mainly because it's remained a nebulous concept in my head for some time. The Outer Disk is a population of small, mostly icy bodies lying out beyond Orus (Rosa d, the most distant planet). Its existence makes sense to me in a cosmological way, but I think it may be quite depleted by the time of the story. Long before our narrative begins, humans in the system harvested the majority of these objects in their conquest of the stars. With their disappearance, the fate of this material is unknown to the reborn civilization. As the people of the Rosa system began to reconnect and return to the skies, they turned to the remnants of this disk for raw materials once again. Almost all remaining mass in the Outer Disk was eventually deconstructed in support of infrastructure, including massive orbital foundries in orbit of Orus, vast fuelling depots, and the grand interworld castles that cycle amongst the planets. To this day, there may in fact be some very traditional space settlements (small pressurized habitats! The novelty!) scattered amongst the debris out here, and this could even figure prominently in the story.... I'll have to noodle about that one.

In any case I had an interesting time making that disk look right. I used the more granular tool with bigger particles to paint a disk, and spent a lot of time trying to shade it convincingly to be orbiting the central light source. I experimented with some radial spoke shadows but couldn't get them to my liking. When I finally added the finer cloud as an afterthought, it actually did a lot to sell the overall effect, so I guess that's a nice win.

The painted background was fun to do, with its sweeping brushstrokes and varying hues. The glow effect was a neat little innovation for me - I started with just a basic airbrush glow, then used a brush with no paint to sort of smear it into visible strokes while maintaining its transparency. It feels a little more organic and less sterile, which I'm always a fan of.

On to the next one!

This was tonight's work, and I tried to bring over the same energy as before. Rosa is rendered in the same way, and I used similar techniques for the (much subtler) background and the painted glowy bits. The approach to painting the planet was less involved than in a previous lineup I did - fewer layers, and more emphasis on just overall vibes for this one.

Here we have Orus, an icy ocean world on the fringe of habitability. Its distance from Rosa and slow rotation period result in extreme day/night variability, in effect more like short seasons than days. Orus' population runs on an irid'An-based schedule, with recurring "days" just 15 or so hours long, and Orus' seasonal cycle takes around 24 of these days to repeat. The global ocean freezes over during the dark Vigil, and warmth when Rosa is overhead is still fairly minimal. The world never seems to escape its biting winds and terminally capricious overcast skies.

In the distance, closer to Rosa, we have pr'Sefone (top left) and irid'An. The former generally appears to be a tidally locked desert world from afar; only close inspection reveals the temperate band of settled land lining its terminator. The lush irid'An practically glows with brilliantly reflected Roselight, a result of its own, significantly more pleasant world ocean.

Overall this piece definitely feels like an improvement over the previous single-planet highlight I made of pr'Sefone. I'm enjoying using these warmer, more saturated hues, and some more creative techniques to shy away from photorealism. Both of these pieces feel more inspired and alive than older ones I've done, even if they're a bit less intricate. I like this style a lot and will be hoping to develop it further in due time.

That's all for now - one of these days I've got to get to sleep at a reasonable hour....

Kent-Boreus KB404

Kent-Boreus is an interworld shipping company in Roselight. Not one of the more luxurious providers, KB is generally more cargo-oriented, with its few passenger routes having longer transit times and more spartan accommodations than their competitors. Nevertheless, they find their niche in high-volume cargo transportation between Rosa's Children, shuttling heavy payloads between growing worlds.

Their flagship vehicle is the KB404 hauler, the classic midsize cargo vehicle of the fleet. Similar in form to standard castle tenders, the KB404 is nevertheless much larger. Traditionally air-launched from exceedingly large rigid airships, the ubiquitous KB404 was one of the first to be adapted to use with the Orus Skywheel. Significant structural reinforcement has taken a bite out of its payload margin, but the reduction in fuel mass more than accounts for the extra material. Over time, many have been refit with smaller propellant tanks to accommodate greater cargo volume.

The KB404 flight profile begins with either a propulsive ascent from an aerial launch platform, or a momentum exchange from the Orus Skywheel. Either case sends the vehicle on a ballistic interworld trajectory, on the order of 5 to 10 days for most routes. Small course corrections and traffic avoidance maneuvers are made as necessary while the crew and cargo coast in microgravity towards their destination. Upon arrival, four actuated body flaps guide the vehicle along its simple, high-drag entry and descent profile. Below around 5 kilometers, the aerostat envelope is deployed by a series of pyrotechnics and rapidly inflated with lifting gas from a decomposition reaction. Once in stable drift, the hauler is retrieved by aerial tugs and refit for its next flight.

Though nominally crewed by up to eight flight officers, the pool of qualified pilots for Skywheel flights is much smaller. Smaller crews find themselves living in greater luxury, in exchange for extremely strenuous g-loading during launch.

Roselight would acquire an aging KB404 shortly before the Drenna Statute and ASMC's de facto implementation of martial law on Orus. This vehicle would be instrumental to the survival of Roselight's revolution in the following months, allowing a small group of insurgents to penetrate the transportation blockade en route to irid'An.

And now for a bonus image of Noira in the observation deck...

I also recently painted this scene of a similar vehicle departing irid'An, with Orus looming in the background. While this smaller craft is likely a ship tender, it still provides a decent concept of what the KB404 might look like in flight.

IM ALIVE

Oh god it has been many months since my last post oh jeez.

This unfortunate hiatus was generally caused by my final semester of undergrad forcibly extruding every last driplet of creativity out of my withered corporeal form like a 40-ton steel rolling pin atop the world's wimpiest tube of toothpaste.

However I am happy to report that I survived the ordeal and even managed to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering. So that's pretty cool.

With any luck I will be posting more frequently again. I don't have much in the way of summer obligations; I did apply for an M.S. program for the Fall, but it's looking to be somewhat less of a godawful nightmare than my undergrad, so I'll do my best to keep the momentum.

I've definitely had ideas bouncing around in my head lately, so I'll try and hit a consistent cadence of getting some of these out! Time and the blog archive will tell whether I succeed.