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Shores of Ligeia

Beads of methane slowly fell from the thick orange sky in marble-sized blobs, coating the ground in glistening puddles. The drops pooled on the soft tar-covered sand and flowed over ice boulders down into a massive network of drainage channels, where they finally merged with the great sea of hydrocarbons below; Ligeia Mare. It was the second largest body of methane on Titan, stretching across one hundred thousand square kilometers of the moon's northern polar region. Its vast surface was wrinkled with bulbous waves which gently ebbed on the distant shores, soaking the grimy sand. Scattered across the surface of the sea were brilliant mag

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Science fiction FTW

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Submitted: August 29, 2011
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On Approach to Marsby ~SMPritchard

Digital Art / 3-Dimensional Art / Vehicles / Futuristic

On approach to Mars, just under a month left to go. The communications antenna is folded down along the ship's frame and pointed towards Earth as it rotates end over end to simulate 0.45 Earth-normal gravity in the crew compartment and command module.

Design of the Ares based off of several NTR (Nuclear Thermal Rocket) designs from the incredible site [link]

That is a TransHab module stuck to the bow end, yes. As you can probably tell from many of my other renders, I'm quite fond of them.

-- To clarify on the spin of the craft: The axis of rotation is centered around the comm antenna. "Down" for the crew is facing outward from the rotational axis; in this case, to the left of the image. The very end of the TransHab module is the lowest floor.

~Kasterborous Oct 5, 2011

It's a tumbling pigeon!

~SMPritchard Oct 9, 2011 Hobbyist Digital Artist

Yep! Simple and (somewhat) elegant solution to the living in freefall problem.

~Kasterborous Oct 10, 2011

I've been revisiting transhabs myself recently. I loosely based a concept on them couple of years back when I first read about them, but as I was going for much later than early interstellar at the time they were somewhat more sophisticated and futuristic (the interiors were based on utility fog and utility sand so they could be reconfigured for different missions and crew needs on the fly).

By the way, what do you use to render? All my concepts are still dependent on pencil-and-paper, though the lucky ones sometimes get painstakingly built as orthographic 2D in Photoshop.

~SMPritchard Oct 10, 2011 Hobbyist Digital Artist

I use Blender 2.49. I've been meaning to upgrade to 2.5, but the new UI takes some getting used to for me. I do postprocessing in GIMP.

U-Fog is awesome stuff. A lot of the inspiration for my future history universe comes from things like Orion's Arm and Transhuman Space. I really hope we have something like that in 40-50 years.

~Kasterborous Oct 10, 2011

Ha, Orion's Arm too! I do believe there's still one or two of Encyclopaedia Galactica entries that still bear my original text

I've been much less active there than I used to be in the last couple of years, but it's still an utterly inspiring project and I wander by every so often just to immerse myself in the richness of it all.

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On Approach to Marsby ~SMPritchard

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