BjornFeuer on DeviantArthttps://www.deviantart.com/bjornfeuer/art/The-Jellyfish-164450201BjornFeuer

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The Jellyfish

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Spent the entire day working on this and I plan on revisiting the model to add more detail. I'd also like to do a hand-drawn version of this at some point.

I started with my "Viable Ship Design" in response to thomastapir's ships, then made the compact+shielded version as a demonstration of the design's versatility. I later made "The Nuptial" colony ship, but I think that one was too bulky and had a few drawbacks.

So finally! I arrived at the Jellyfish design.

This design uses a "Push" propulsion as opposed to a "Pull" system I was originally in favor of. This design is a little more like thomastapir's in that sense.
However, This design also has some intentional redundancies. Let's work from the bottom.

The propulsion engine is located at the far bottom. Never used for steering. This would be a very powerful engine, most likely intended for traveling within a star system, though if this ship was scaled up, it could serve as a basis for a generational or sleeper ship design.

Located near the main engine is a smaller engine of lower power, used mostly for backup or if energy/fuel needs to be conserved.

I call this whole section "Engineering and Support Systems". This does not rotate, and would be a zero-g zone.

Moving up we'd come to the crew quarters. This whole section is rotated for gravity. Think of it as a wheel while the engineering section is the axle. This model has enough room for 5 floors of around ~10 feet high. Taking into account insulation and electrical systems, ceilings would more likely be around 8 feet from the floor. Rooms would only be about 19-18 feet wide at most. Depending on the amount of crew, these could be cramped.

The good news is that the outermost floors would have the closest to earth gravity. This would probably house sleeping quarters, recreation, and the mess hall. Moving up the floors would probably be workstations, storage, and labs.

Beyond the crew quarters section is the shield and the maneuvering thrusters. This area is also stationary. It does not rotate. Thrusters would be mounted to a ball socket, allowing them to point in many different directions. These thrusters would be mainly for maneuvering, and not likely used for propulsion.

The shield would be composed of a very dense and strong material. Meant to take a beating if the need arises, and absorb most of the radiation from space that hits it. This could also be coated in some sort of solar panel material to absorb energy (though I'm a big fan of nuclear power).

At the tip of the shield is something I call the iris. This would be a beacon of all the sensors for the ship. Because the crew quarters have no windows (it would be extremely disorienting to see stars or planets whipping by), this would be the only way to see out of the ship (unless there were some windows in engineering).

That is one of the biggest drawbacks to this design. There would need to be some redundancies to the sensory array and tools and parts on the ship to repair any damage.
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thomastapir's avatar
Man, this just looks great...Very sleek, compact, economical. I like the fact that you have the primary thruster directly beneath the ship and only the maneuvering thrusters mounted on the outrigger booms. It almost feels like a divergent evolutionary lineage that could have emerged from that same initial ship design I was toying with, the one that had both bottom- and boom-mounted engines. In my "final" design the ship ends up with ONLY outboard thrusters, whereas in yours, the outboard thrusters are reduced to a secondary role. Your last ship concept could almost be the last "shared ancestor" of the two designs. Very cool. Maybe our ships will meet one day in the vast and airless field of combat, champions of antagonist solar superpowers! :lol:

The bottom-mounted primary thruster brings me to my one possible criticism of this design--the lack of shielding on the bottom. I'm still worried that the crew would be exposed to drive radiation during the deceleration phase. I'm picturing the bottom shielded in the same manner as the top, giving it more of a classic "flying saucer" look...Hmm, that might detract from the aesthetic appeal of this design, though. Of course the degree of radiation hazard woudl be dependent both on the type of drive system ultimately used and on the length of the deceleration phase; maybe the ship acclerates briefly only at the beginning of its journey, travels oriented "forward," and only "flips" 180 to decelerate very close to its destination.

You know, I'm really not seeing that central sensor cluster at the top of the ship as very problematic...I guess I'm always assuming there will be at least double or triple redundancy in sensors at other points along the ship, and that naturally the primary sensory array would be mounted "top" and/or "forward." ...Yeah, it just doesn't bother me at all.

Hey, how big were you thinking of this ship being, btw? I'm still trying to work out the upper limits of ship size. I was intrigued by the analysis under ([link]), but my math skills are too poor to try to work out an appropriate size based on projected engine type/output, estimated vehicle mass, etc. I wouldn't even know where to start. Hopefully some math major will write an algorithm for it. :)

Really nice work, my hat's off to you sir!