Art: Dance!

 It's been a little while on account of me being busy with school stuff, and a general subsidence of creative energies, but I've recently been working on some artwork to go along with the story.

This one was motivated by a desire to be nice to my characters....my current understanding of the plot involves them going through quite a bit of hardship, so I figured I'd take some time to depict them happy and having a good time. This is also the first time I've depicted them all together like this!

From left to right: Noira Isabel, Maliyah Toran, Clare Prescot

Full-size Imgur link!

Skyhooks and spacecraft

I've got a couple of new doodles today, mainly of two spacecraft as well as the rotovator I alluded to in some earlier posts. Let's look at the two spacecraft up close first!

These are two different vehicles drawn notionally to scale with each other, though they have a lot in common. Above we have the passenger tender, a smaller vehicle designed to ferry people to and from those big artificial gravity spaceliners. Below is a cargo freighter, with a much larger volume for shipping between worlds in the Rosa system.

Both of these spacecraft are powered by chemical rocket engines mounted in the back, with propellant stored fore and aft of a centrally located payload bay. In addition to some reaction control thrusters, both are equipped with some kind of metallic heat shield for atmospheric entry. Both reenter skydive-style, pancaking into the atmosphere, stabilized by four drag flaps (two of which are fixed). Finally, to accommodate the unique terrain and infrastructure available in the Rosa system, both vehicles deploy large inflatable lifting gas envelopes from dorsal compartments, arresting their descent until they become inert aerostats that can be manipulated by other vehicles.

Critically, these weirdos are both air-launched, in a way, although here we see some major operational differences. The passenger tender is air-launched "conventionally" as we might think of it today: carried beneath an aircraft (albeit a large airship rather than a fixed-wing aerodyne), dropped, and powered into space by its own propulsion. The tender must accelerate all the way up to escape velocity during this burn, which is made easier by the relatively small mass of the worlds in this system. As previously described, the tender can then rendezvous and dock with the spaceliners, which will hold them in transit before releasing them to perform atmospheric entry.

The freighters are a bit weirder, being integrated with the skyhook system; I've already talked about this, but due to generally lower g-limits for cargo compared to crew, freighters are well-suited to getting yoinked into space by the enormous sky pinwheel. Doing some preliminary math implies this could easily put them on interworld trajectories, so they could potentially use even more of their volume for cargo, with very little dedicated to propulsion at all - cool! That said, the scaled-up tender version with its vast fuel tanks and engines is still used quite a bit since the skyhook/rotavator/spintowininator (note to self: name it properly) is only available when travelling from Orus to another destination.

Here's some more sketches of these dudes:

Notice the much wider planform of the freighter and its beefier engine section (only present on some models!). At bottom-center is a depiction of the freighter exchange process: three hybrid cargo carrier airships have aligned in formation, each carrying three freighters in a line down its back. Arriving in sync with a rotovator endpoint, all 9 spacecraft are lifted off the decks and begin the long climb to escape...at lower left is an exaggerated depiction of the multi-armed rotovator concept I've been thinking about, with six separate endpoints. At the top of their arc the spacecraft all separate at once, firing RCS in an enormous plume to disperse from each other, the grid formation uniformly expanding as the tether curves away beneath them.

Finally, here's a dramatic angle of the rotovator hub as it orbits languidly above Orus. The center is probably a command station home to a team of traffic controllers, working overtime to keep this mega-infrastructure (infra-megastructure?) running smoothly.

One of these days I want to model both spacecraft, perhaps in Solidworks so I can try for pretty accurate geometry. But that's a project for another time. That's all for today!

The Founder-Processor

 

As described in the recent plot outline post, the Founder-Processor is a horrible monstrously large machine that smelts and refines raw ores and rubble into slightly more useful end products. It lies in the bottom of the pit, laboring like an enormous bloated dying animal, smoke billowing from its internal furnace as it vomits forth processed material onto its conveyor.

The Founder-Processors are only mobile to allow them to adjust as the mine grows ever wider and deeper. They are largely constructed on site, and either deconstructed or abandoned to die when a mine's resources are thoroughly exhausted. After encountering one on her first night voyage aboard Ark Royal, Noira is haunted by nightmares of these great beasts lumbering over the landscape, laying waste to the worlds...

Roselight Outline: Part 3

 Ark Royal begins its journey, stopping at a number of small logistics centers on its way out to sea, many hours passing as Rosa’s light fades from the empty sky. The most exciting part of their mission is still to come: a visit to one of the most productive open-cast mines still in operation. We learn that the largest and least resource-rich islands on Orus were settled, leaving the innumerable smaller mountains as the prime targets for extraction; however, many of these are beginning to shut down as their resources are exhausted, leaving ASMC in search of new sources and new extraction methods. This particular voyage is carrying tech demos for some of these methods, intended to qualify their use prior to deployment.

Dozens of hours later, as the sky darkens and home grows distant, Noira and the rest of the crew gather on the balconies atop Ark Royal to see the spotlights of the mine appear on the horizon, casting their cold beams into the night air. The anticipation is palpable as Ark Royal approaches, pulling up to the dockside at a servicing platform anchored to the island's steep rocky walls. An enormous chute descends from over the rim of the crater, snaking down the dark mountainside as crews align it with Ark Royal's bulk cargo bays.

While this happens, Noira and other members of the crew not directly associated with mining operations take a service pathway up the mountainside, winding alongside the cargo chute - maybe a light vehicle to make the drive. They're all anxious to get a glimpse inside this historic mine, to see with their own eyes what's only been poorly reproduced in images. Drawing nearer, they can hear the sounds of machinery from within, mingling with a noise Noira can't quite place. As they arrive at the top, they all flock to an overlook platform to see inside...

Robert W. Smith's Inferno is a good representation of what Noira sees.

The mine is an enormous pit - staggeringly high, a vast column bored far below the waterline. The spiralling steps along its walls are themselves vastly high, dwarfing the still-massive mining vehicles trundling along their worn paths. At the floor of the mine lies a terrible colossus, the monstrously large Founder-Processor, breathing laboriously as it rests against the near wall. It's a machine larger than Noira can possibly wrap her head around, its groans and strains echoing nightmarishly up and out of the mine, lost within the dark void above. Those gargantuan mining vehicles are but ants at its feet, bringing their offerings to deposit at its conveyor entrance. Slowly, violently, and eternally, the Founder-Processor melts down and purifies the ores in its dark burning heart, belching waste material down into the sea. It struggles perpetually as it heaves thousands of tons of processed minerals and alloys up the impossibly high pit wall, finally vomiting them over the ridge and down the long chute into Ark Royal's bays. Noira finds herself petrified by the scale; what she sees is horrifying and alien to her.

The whole scene is illuminated by several clusters of spotlights overseeing the operation. Tipped off by one of the visiting officers, a nearby set rotates around to illuminate our crew members, turning night into day as its blinding gaze sweeps over them. Noira feels the spotlights, the eyes of the machine, piercing into her heart; they see into the depths of her soul, into parts of her she herself has not yet discovered. The experience haunts her.

The crew descend down the mountain at their leisure; Noira hurries back to the ship. Others continue to mill about as Ark Royal continues to take on bulk cargo; some old mining equipment and such is also transferred aboard. Noira encounters a few of the crew members she’s gotten familiar with, in particular a woman named Kori. They spend a moment in the night together, mostly making small talk about the voyage and the mine. Kori is looking forward to her return home, her wife and children waiting for her. Noira, by contrast, prefers her life on the ship; she has little at home to go back to. She pretends to relate all the same; Kori is friendly and Noira appreciates the company.

After some time, Ark Royal has taken on all it can from the mine, and its crew board once again for the return journey. They have a few more stops ahead of them, particularly to deploy the experimental equipment they carry, but the crew knows they’re in the home stretch of their voyage. Home is on the horizon, as they enter the deepest, darkest round of the night…

More on infrastructure

 With the wonderful suggestions of some friends, I've developed some additional ideas about interworld travel, with an emphasis on some infrastructure stuff. For context, we know the Rosa system features a number of large interworld spaceliners on cycler orbits, tethered by long cables to slag counterweights so they can be spun up to produce gravity. The size and mass of these liners (I'm imagining up to 500m in length, for the largest) suggests in-space construction - and I mean real in-space construction. Not modules being docked together, but rivets being driven by actual people in space. This further implies the existence of big orbital shipyards where this stuff can be built, as well as additional space infrastructure like tugs and such for moving cargo between orbits.

The big addition to the lore here is going to be a dedicated skyhook (or multiple!) in orbit of Orus. Since the vast majority of the system's heavy metal resources are mined and processed here, it's long been the focus of infrastructure (take a shot) for shipping and handling lots of cargo. The sustained need to hurl huge amounts of mass skyward will spur the construction of this as-of-yet unnamed megastructure.

As a quick recap, a skyhook is sort of like a partial space elevator. Instead of being affixed to the ground, such a structure is placed in a low orbit and only extends partially down into the upper atmosphere, and equally doesn't stretch too much higher - a total length on the order of hundreds of kilometers. The key is that the structure rotates - tumbling end-over-end much like the cyclers do. The idea is that the end swings backwards relative to its own orbit as it approaches the planet's surface, reducing the relative speed. So, you have a skyhook dangling from space and moving relatively slowly, which can be intercepted by a vehicle launched from the ground. As the tether rotates, payloads attached to the end get flung up and out of the atmosphere. Detaching at the highest point will send you into a still-higher elliptical orbit, since you're moving faster and higher than the CG of the tether.

The motion of the skyhook over a planet's surface would look something like this; rotating as it orbits, the endpoint comes nearly to a standstill as it approaches the ground:

Boeing studied a concept like this for Earth, and concluded that, unlike a space elevator,

We don't need magic materials like "Buckminster-fuller-carbon-nanotubes" […] Existing materials will do.

Their concept involved a tether that only skimmed the upper atmosphere and whose endpoint still traveled at Mach 10, but I think I can stretch this with a bit of handwaving.

For Orus, the skyhook(s) would extend nearly to the surface - maybe 10km or lower, accessible by non-rocket means. I would also prefer for their endpoints to move quite slowly at their lowest point, perhaps being able to hook payloads that are stationary (with the help of an intermediate trapeze, at least).

My vision for heavy cargo infrastructure on Orus looks like this: Cargo is loaded into a large spacecraft, similar to the passenger tenders we discussed earlier but substantially bigger. These spacecraft are then airlifted by huge hybrid airships: using bulk lifting gas for enormous lift capacity, but leveraging dynamic lift to extend their altitude range, flying at some significant airspeed to climb to their service ceiling. These carrier airships would likely be double-hulled like a catamaran, with a structural segment in the middle on which the cargo vehicles would be carried. Flying along the ground track of the tether, they'd hit their peak altitude while tracking to the endpoint hook, with a dynamic trapeze to bridge the final gap. Once secured to the tether, the airships would release their payload, and the cargo vehicles would be lifted up and out of the atmosphere. Once in their high transfer orbit, the cargo vehicles would use onboard propulsion to circularize, perform other orbital maneuvers, and even propel themselves on interworld trajectories. Finding no similar tethers at their destinations, they would be equipped to perform reentry and envelope-arrested descent much like the passenger tenders.

The tether(s) could also be used to return inbound interworld cargo to the surface, but this requires vehicles to perform part of the capture themselves - propulsively or aerodynamically - before they can interface with the tether at its highest point in space. Vehicles would also need to be cast off slightly ahead of the tether collecting new cargo at both extremes.

I think a tether like this would be made large enough to carry a significant batch of cargo at once - multiple vehicles in formation, perhaps. Or, it might be interesting to make the tether more of a multi-spoked wheel, With many cargo exchanges per rotation period. That could certainly lend itself to some cool imagery. Also, I figure the g-loading that cargo endures during the tether-flinging process probably amounts to significantly more than is considered suitable for passenger transport, so these vehicles are crewed only by trained personnel....normally.

This actually has some fun implications for plot ideas, which I'm already forming in my brain but would like to keep from publishing here until I've posted more of the plot overview. When we last left off, Noira was preparing for her first night voyage aboard Ark Royal, and we've a long way to go from there already! Continuing the plot overview will likely be one of the next posts here.