Take a look at What Graham Gazzard did with the Mars mesh I released over on Foundation 3D!
Great for wallpaper! And that’s the Prometheus in the foreground.
Astronomy
I’ve been working on a mesh of Pioneer 11, the first probe to go past Jupiter and Saturn.
Here are a few renders, as usual done in Lightwave 3d
Not posted for a while, so brace for impact, here come a few!
Here’s my model of a Bussard Ramjet.
This was thought of as a serious design for an interstellar starship, which would use a huge magnetic scoop to collect interstellar hydrogen. This would be fused and used to shove the starship ever faster.
Unfortunately on more detailled examination it turns out to have severe problems, including that it need to go really fast to get going, (like 10% of the speed of light fast), the difficulty in making a hole at the base of the magnetic funnel, and most problematic of all, the friction from collecting the hydrogen is greater than the force you get from the fusion.
When people first started making serious plans to get into space, it was seen as being rather like an antarctic expedition – there would be loads of equipment, and lots of men (always men) on the expedition, not the tiny numbers of astronauts that went when it actually happened.
One of the biggest sources of graphic inspiration for me is the work of Wernher von Braun and his team in popularising the feasibility of space exploration, most notably in the “Colliers” series of articles, and the “Man will conquer space soon!” documentaries. This is the ship he saw as possibly carrying out the first close up reconnaissance of the Moon.
This short animation shows my model of the Bernal Sphere Space Habitat. (No sound this time). Full HD.
The idea is that people live on the inside of a rotating sphere – the hoops on either side of the sphere contain agricultural areas, and there are rings of mirrors to direct light in the right places. The big vanes are to dump excess heat in order to control cooling.
For this animation I used light from the side, as it shows the shapes better. To be accurate it should shine along the main axis instead.
The resemblance to Babylon 5 is not a coincidence, the design for that series was loosely based on the Bernal Sphere too.
This is the current state of my Hale Telescope WIP.
And another image:
And a third.
