Boeing has released some pretty animation of their Commercial Space Transport space capsule. Together with Dragon and Orion, the US *should* be back to sending its own astronauts into space in a few years.
“Starliner” is of course not an entirely accurate name. It’s not going to the stars, only low Earth orbit. And it carries a total of four passengers… not much of a liner.
Pfff. Inaccurately named vehicles? Perish the thought.
The next set of stuff… including diagrams being worked for the Pax Orionis Patreon. The Spacecraft diagrams have taken a *lot* longer than expected.
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.
The image quality is admittedly terrible (being a scan of a print of a microfilm), but this might be of interest… a piece of NASA art circa 1963 depicting the Saturn V with an S-N third stage rather than an S-IVb third stage. The S-N was not a fixed design, but varied over the years; here, it was a fairly stubby stage ten meters in diameter, same as the S-IC and S-II stage. The S-N would vary in diameter and length from design to design, but one common element was the use of a single NERVA solid-core nuclear thermal rocket engine. As shown here, the distance from the nuclear rocket to the Apollo capsule up front just isn’t terribly far; consequently, this depicted a design with extraordinary levels of shielding, or depicted an unmanned Apollo (but then, why the abort tower), or it was just artistic license.
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.
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.
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.”
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:
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?
Boeing art from the late 1970s depicting the construction of a base in low Earth orbit, which in turn would be used to construct components of solar power satellites, which would then be slowly boosted to geosynchronous using electric propulsion. Even though the base would be dwarfed by the SPS itself, the base was monumental in scale compared to any other manned space facility proposed before or since.
The artwork (scanned from a brochure that was folded down the middle, thus there’s a half-repaired fold line) depicts not only a Space Shuttle orbiter, but also the second stage of a ballistically recoverable Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle.
I have posted the full-rez version at the APR Patreon Extras Dropbox folder for 2015-08 (while it’s 2015-09 now, the file began the process of uploading at 11:59 PM by my watch, so…). If interested, please check out the APR Patreon and consider joining. Lots of benefits!
Say what you will about the Shuttle being a reusable payload shroud rather than a reusable launch vehicle… it was a beautiful machine.
