Unused Space Odyssey Design Concept, Discovery Bowl Version

This is an alternate design for the ship “Discovery” from the film 2001. In my view it is much inferior to the final version, but this is interesting. This one tends to self-shadow a lot for one thing, which makes it difficult to light. But note that the habitation sphere is identical to the final version used in the film – this element was about the only constant factor in the many design changes.

It is based on sketches in Chris Frayling’s excellent book “The 2001 Files”, and my version incorporates elements from several sketches.

I also did a turntable video of it, to show off the shape.

From other sketches it is clear that there are 48 fuel tanks just under the widest part of the vehicle.

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Latest WIP, more alternate “2001 A Space Odyssey” designs.

Now working on alternate unused designs for the 2001 Discovery, of which there were many. This one is fairly close to the finished version, but had added tension cables (helpful), and large cooling vanes (essential).

The vanes can tip – this would presumably be so they can stay edge on to the Sun, to avoid overheating.

Credible design for the craft like “Discovery” in “2001, A Space Odyssey” was considered very important, but the cooling vanes looked too much like wings, and were therefore dropped.

vanes-cables-01-0060 vanes-cables-01-0090

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Daedalus – A serious starship design

Daedalus was a serious design by the British Interplanetary Society, for an interstellar flyby mission that would reach Barnard’s Star in 50 years.

There’s some more info in this video I made:

Here’s a BIS page on the project:

http://www.bis-space.com/what-we-do/projects/project-daedalus

And another nice article by David Darling.

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/D/Daedalus.html

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Pioneer 11

Pioneer 11 was the first probe to reach Jupiter and Saturn. It is not often remembered, I think because of Voyager 1 and 2 followed on relatively quickly, and these probes delivered much superior imagery.

But Pioneer 11 was important, not least because it established if it would be safe to send the voyagers very close to the giant planets – the amount  of radiation and debris near them was not clear before the encounters.

saturn-approach-compositex pioneer-polar-jupiter2x

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Modo Moon

I keep meaning to find the time to learn Modo properly. It’s clearly a powerful and logically laid out piece of software, but I keep falling back on Lightwave which I know so much better.

Here’s a relatively rare Modo item from me, a displacement mapped Moon, (that’s Earth’s Moon, just to be clear!)

lunar-north-pole moon-2maps-03

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