The next set of stuff… including diagrams being worked for the Pax Orionis Patreon. The Spacecraft diagrams have taken a *lot* longer than expected.
Sep 092015
Sep 082015
The Pax Orionis Patreon is now online. It’s a little bare, but it at least seems to be up and running. The first piece of fiction and a tech diagram will be ready in a few days, so the first patrons will be kinda guinea pigs. With this system, patrons get charged when new stuff is made available, rather than on a strict monthly schedule.
So if’n you’ve got a hankering for stories about an alternate history with extra nuclear wars and spacelanes filled with atom bomb powered spacecraft, I got ya covered.
Sep 052015
I’m in the process of setting up a Patreon for Pax Orionis. It’s not yet public; still scribbling on it. As previously mentioned, it’s not a “monthly” thing, but instead a “creation” thing… patrons only get charged when I actually produce a new creation.
Still a little uncertain about a few things. There are currently only two reward levels:
$1.00 per creation: “One dollar per release gets you – as you might expect – the latest piece of Pax Orionis fiction in PDF and EPUB formats.”
$2.00 per creation: “Two dollars per release gets you not only the latest piece of the story but also a Technical Data Sheet… a diagram of some piece of technology (a spacecraft,a weapons system, a launch vehicle, a military aircraft, etc.) relevant to the world of Pax Orionis.”
Sound fair? Comments? Critiques? Ideas for further reward levels?
One idea that was floated was for a patron to pay something extra to include the patrons name in the story somewhere as a character. While I’m not opposed to the idea, I’m not sure how to do it in the context of Patreon, which is a continual subscription system.
Sep 042015
The idea was floated a few days ago of trying to do Pax Orionis via Patreon; it seemed to go over like a tungsten balloon. Oh, well. I suggested that something I’d include at certain levels of patronage would be diagrams of PO-related technological goodies, along with data and description. As examples… something like these, which are designs specifically for Pax Orionis. Obviously they incorporate real-world design elements, but what are depicted are vehicles from the PO timeline.
Sep 032015
I continue to tinker with the CAD diagrams for “Nuclear Pulse Propulsion,” as well as creating new ones. I decided to see what the diagrams for the 10-Meter design for the USAF would look like in a larger format… in this case, two sheets 40 inches by 10, at 1/96 scale. A fair bit of formatting needed as yet, but on the whole I think they look pretty good.
Anyone interested? I’m thinking a combination of prints (folded into a book or rolled) and cyanotype blueprints on vellum. If this idea is popular (I’m going to take at least this design to print, just for myself), I’d do something similar for the 10-meter NASA vehicle, the 20-meter NASA vehicle and the 86-foot 4,000 “battleship.”
Sep 022015
Patreon works two different ways. The first way, the way used on the Aerospace Projects Review Patreon campaign, is that patron are charged once a month, and they get rewards once a month. The other way Patreon can work is to only charge patrons when the content-creator actually has new content. This seems to be used a lot for web-comic creators… when they produce a new comic, the patrons get charged and get the comic. Whether that happens once a week, once a month or with a gap of three months, the patrons only get charged when there’s new stuff.
I’ve been contemplating using that second model as a way to help get Pax Orionis going. Use Patronage to write the book a bit at a time. But there are a few questions:
- The book will be composed of many different bits of wildly different lengths. A one-page memo here, a thirty-page narrative there. Charge the same for the release of a self-contained section, regardless of page count? Or charge for the release of sections of particular page counts (which might mean that it’ll take several releases to get a complete section out)?
- And then, how much to charge? Obviously not very much… fifty cents, seventy five, a buck at most. Given fees and such, i don’t think it can go below fifty cents.
- What to do for “premium” patrons? One the APR Patreon, patrons who pledge more per month get higher-rez versions of the rewards and additional CAD diagrams and other bits and pieces. For the Pax Orionis Patreon, I’m thinking that higher-level patrons would get a bonus technical illustration… anything from a CAD diagram of an Orion vehicle, to a weapons system, launch vehicle, spacecraft, aircraft, a map, etc. I don’t think I’d do more than two, maybe three levels of patronage.
So… what do y’all think? Suggestions? Worth doing? Anyone know of a similar sort of thing with someone successfully creating a novel a bit at a time via Patreon?
A good case can be made that I’d be better off simply making P.O. available for free bits at a time, available to all. So perhaps… the P.O. Patrons get these releases, say, three months before the world as a whole? Get to see ’em in the first draft, and get to critique and perhaps see their suggestions incorporated?
Jul 282015
One of the last, if not the last, chapters in my Nuclear Pulse Propulsion book will be on NPP in popular culture. Mostly, of course, this means nuclear pulse spacecraft in science fiction… short stories, novels, TV, movies. These vehicles will get layout diagrams just like the non-fiction concepts.
With designs that are complex or difficult to really work out – which covers just about all fictional designs – I’ve found that it is a whole lot easier to build the vehicle as a 3D CAD model and then convert that into a 2D diagram. A bonus of doing it this way is that perspective views are also possible. So because why not, here are some of the fictional NPP’s that will appear in the book, along with the current status list for NPP diagrams (green means the diagram is done, yellow means it’s in progress, red means I haven’t started or haven’t gone beyond preliminary scribble). Some of the fictional designs, such as the “Orion Shall Rise” and the Tycho were drawn in 2D right from the get-go. Currently being pieced together is the Archangel Michael. It is a bit different from the usual depiction in a number of ways, most obvious being the straight shock absorbers. I understand the reasoning behind those designs that use angled and pivoting shocks to allow the pusher “dome” to swing with respect to the rest of the ship… but I still don’t agree that that’s a good engineering solution. Once you get the dome swinging, getting it to *stop* is going to be a friggen nightmare, especially if the ship remains under thrust. The dynamics of a spring system like this with that many degrees of freedom would be massively complex, never mind the actual mechanics. Oh well. Anyway, my “Michael” is still far from finished. The interior is only roughly sketched out, armament is currently rough and incomplete and secondary payloads need a lot of work.
In the final book, these fictional designs will get not only orthogonal views, but also to greater or lesser degrees “rationalization.” Some designs I can’t honestly make any real sense of, and thus they’ll get the bare bones. Some I can dream up a fair bit of (essentially fan fiction) explanation for, so they’ll get further detail work.
Jul 222015
I have finished the next Pax Orionis story (to the first draft level, at any rate).”Deadliest Catch” – which will almost certainly be re-titled, for legal reasons if nothing else – is a bit shorter than “The Cuban War,” and tells a far smaller story. One incident from the Great War of 1984. It is written in the form of a magazine article interviewing one of the participants 10 years later, and probably needs to be tightened up a *lot.* But I think it’s potentially entertaining.
As previously mentioned, I’ll send a PDF of this to the first three commenters who want to read it, with the understanding that:
The only requirements will be that the readers do *not* share it further, but *do* share via email any critiques or suggestions they have… and that they post comments on the blog giving their general impressions. “This sucks” or “this is great” are both fine, so long as they are the honest assessment. No spoilers!
So… if you’d like to read “Deadliest Catch” and give me your honest feedback, leave a comment below.
UPDATE: Three commenters spoke up and have been emailed a copy of “Deadliest Catch.” So now we wait…
Jul 142015
I have a number of ideas for different tales to go into Pax Orionis, including standard third person narratives, bits of memoirs, articles, interviews, technical descriptions, etc. Some of them I’ve started poking away at. Because why not, below are the opening paragraphs of four such yarns. Some I have little more than what’s here, others are good long chunks. None are done. The titles are just placeholders for the moment,
Jul 082015
I haven’t had an opportunity to really dig into this, but Boeing just patented a jet engine powered not by hydrocarbon fuel combustion but by small nuclear explosions. Basically an Orion (via laser-driven inertial confinement compression of tiny fusion fuel pellets) in a jet, stuck on a passenger plane.
Neato.
The US Patent Office page on this.
THIS should link directly to the PDF of the patent.
Sigh. Every single time I think I’ve got a handle on “this is everything in the world of NPP, I can finally finish the book,” they suck me back in