Askad-Theramel render
Posted: Sat Sep 06, 2014 5:11 pm
Decided to go back to the sail ships. This is the Theramel, another Turgran design and the biggest and most powerful sail ship ever built. Armament is missiles and laser cannon. They mounted just about the largest sail set ever built, giving them a speed of about 350 c. If you hung a much smaller hull on to that you'd get maybe twice the speed - 700-800 c is as fast as you can get with a sail drive of any size. For comparison, the Swiftsure could was designed for 4,600 c, though it only ever reached 3,800 maximum and averaged 1,950.
The sails are armoured with a grid over them. I actually hit blender's limits with my first attempt at drawing this - the mesh was so big and complicated that the program simply couldn't handle it! I damn near crashed it and lost several hours work, fortunately after about fifteen minutes hung up it came free again and let me save. I redrew the grid in a much simpler form, which it could handle. Amusingly, after I was done it turned out that you can barely even see the grid in anything but a pretty extreme closeup.
The red things on the hull are heat dumps. No forcefields at this point, defences consisted of a mesh of material that was a near-superconductor of heat, built into the hull. The mesh would feed into laser cooling units that convert the heat into laser light and shoot it out of the ship. Hence incoming energy hitting the hull is absorbed and beamed back out again. Not a perfect technology, but maybe ten times better than a bare hull for resisting laser fire. And yes, laser cooling is a real technology.
The big white units in the hull are fuel tanks. They're designed to be easily removed and replaced - mostly a hangover from earlier ships like the Longbow where tanks were detachable units, and also retained because it made it easy to swap out battle-damaged tanks.
Notice that I caught a light panel in one of the pics... bit of a whups moment.
The sails are armoured with a grid over them. I actually hit blender's limits with my first attempt at drawing this - the mesh was so big and complicated that the program simply couldn't handle it! I damn near crashed it and lost several hours work, fortunately after about fifteen minutes hung up it came free again and let me save. I redrew the grid in a much simpler form, which it could handle. Amusingly, after I was done it turned out that you can barely even see the grid in anything but a pretty extreme closeup.
The red things on the hull are heat dumps. No forcefields at this point, defences consisted of a mesh of material that was a near-superconductor of heat, built into the hull. The mesh would feed into laser cooling units that convert the heat into laser light and shoot it out of the ship. Hence incoming energy hitting the hull is absorbed and beamed back out again. Not a perfect technology, but maybe ten times better than a bare hull for resisting laser fire. And yes, laser cooling is a real technology.
The big white units in the hull are fuel tanks. They're designed to be easily removed and replaced - mostly a hangover from earlier ships like the Longbow where tanks were detachable units, and also retained because it made it easy to swap out battle-damaged tanks.
Notice that I caught a light panel in one of the pics... bit of a whups moment.