Sep 262009
This is one of the more bizarre of the series, pretty much inexplicable without some sort of caption. Of which there wasn’t one. Clearly some sort of lunar lander. The “things” on the ends of the arms appear to have transparent bubbles and reflectors, so perhaps this was supposed to be a solar powered… something.
6 Responses to “Martin Space Art: 6”
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it look like somekind electric engine
i gess is a Colloid Electrostatic engine powert by solar heat
Nah, I’m pretty sure those tubes are the spinners at the bottom of a water heater fill tube that reduce sediment buildup.
I remember seeing that illustration in a book when I was a kid. As I recall, the caption in the book claimed it was supposed to be some sort of anti-gravity propulsion system. Obviously not intended to be a serious proposal.
The ring around the exhaust is suggestive of the charge neutralizer of an ion drive.
Which is not a good choice for a propulsion system tasked with landing a ship on a planet’s surface.
It’s that weird Vulcan ship from the end of ST: First Contact
For some reason that got edited out of the movie for time constraints, the Vulcan one is named the “Jellyfish”, and the big Romulan one is designed to mine “Red Matter” from the cores of uninhabited planets (you know, the Lava Lamp stuff that Spock has around 100 gallons of aboard even though he only needs around two tablespoons worth of it to collapse a star) so that in conjuntion with the Vulcans, they can keep their sun from going supernova with by collapsing it into a black hole.
Does this make any sense at all?
No… but it’s stiill a hell of a lot of a fun as a movie.
One interesting thing about this particular piece of art is that there is a glwing ring around the “halo” thing around the base of the engine.
Normally, this would suggest some sort of air ionisation… but the Moon doesn’t have a atmosphere… so is this some sort of artistic liscense, or is what you are seeing isn’t air ionzation, but rather Cherenkov radiation?:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
Now this, by God, is one amazing photo:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cerenkov_Effect.jpg