Hard Sci Fi - Blog Posts

Working on more excavation equipment, this time the prototype for the molten iron thrower - made from a repurposed Nuclear Thermal Rocket torch with pipe-fed iron particulate for maximum heat transfer toward whatever this thing is pointed at ! Lots and lots of radiators and payload storage for the purposes of not melting down when this heats up way more than any reasonably engineered device should ! They also happen to look hella cool

Seeing something I made be put in a game I enjoy is an immensely cool feeling :) Presenting the Obonto Construction Platform 209 ! A decommissioned work ship entering the second-hand market in the rings of Saturn, with a huge side-loaded cargo bay, 2 heavy hardpoint mounts, and a cool rotating habitat section Ship model is mine, backgrounds by Koder of Kodera software. HUD by both

I’ve been playing a bunch of DeltaV: Rings Of Saturn lately and it’s gotten me into a very intense hard sci-fi mood! So I tried to follow the game’s visual language (and roughly stuck to realism) to make this beast! The THIILSRRRF (Titan Heavy Industries Inter-Lunar Search, Rescue, Refuel and Repair Foundry) - if you get stranded in deep space, one of those is what would come and rescue you (...if you can be found) Has all the nice features like: - 4 heavy manipulator arms for holding the ship in place, complete with fuel hoses for attachment by EVA mechanics - A heavy manipulator arm and a laser cutter on linear rails, for... detaching unneeded ballast - A docking bay with a dedicated fuel fuselage and emergency fissile fuel in case of fixing a reactor failure - Propellant tanks heavier than your mum, and encased in a resilient frame that doubles as a faraday cage, just in case - A guiding rail for ships to easily dock, complete with electromagnetic launch systems for undocking without fuel burn - A robust sensor array for locating distress signals over vast distances Tried my best to make it look like a technical drawing :) Thank u for reading!! I hope you never need to call for one of those

An independent freighter and three space taxis in orbit above The Grandmother. This ship is a simple chemical fuel design built to utilize the tether network to get around and only light its engines to provide a little extra boost. It's a very common sight in more heavily-developed areas of space. The second image shows the inner layer of containers with the exterior stacks removed.

Long time no art!

Even corporate paramilitaries need warships in TTT -- this express freighter has been refit with a much more power-dense reactor and AShMs (lasers weren't in the budget) -- it's actually substantially better than the typical patrol craft fielded by first rate naval powers (and that's the point). It's the sort of vessel that is mean enough to ignore anything short of an actual warship without causing undue concern to the people who do have actual warships. It's also vastly superior to most craft fielded by pirates and criminal organizations.

The reactor refit would've been a no expenses spared item bought off a great power's navy with a lot of concessions and begging. Very humiliating for a huge organization but the results are undeniable.

That was ambiguous. Like, they mostly aren't shipping stuff. It's more like a '''fun''' combination of agribusiness and extractive colonial projects. The East India company was bad enough without a nuclear arsenal as large as USA's [on this vessel alone 24x 500 kiloton warheads and 40x 2 kiloton defensive warheads (dialable down to >.1 kiloton but rated to carry as many as 3x that number]

I am still settling on the exact details but the engines are high end PIT or MPD so there's enough thrust for a decent amount of operational maneuverability to set up favorable fights or run down targets with empty tanks. The missiles themselves are fairly impressive post-revolution designs -- bigger than the standard MBE-pattern AShM and capable of doing between 15-17km/s depending on payload and a sensor suite that supports a long chase. The sort of people this ship is meant to fight are mostly not capable of reaching out and touching somebody from that distance and don't have the tools to engage (moderately) sophisticated submunitions from long distance. People who want to do something about a ship like this will either bring a destroyer, suck up to a bigger friend who can bring one, or try to jump it well inside its reach (probably suicidal but undeniably effective). It's not really viable as a mainline warship but conventional patrol craft fielded by actual states are often NTR/NEP hybrids for similar reasons. They are not very capable warships but are designed to cruise efficiently and (like this ship) meet their targets when they have mostly empty tanks. You don't really use ships like that in a peer war but the space traffic environment in TTT is hellishly complicated so you need to be able to efficiently cover a lot of ground to ensure customs, biosecurity, and access to strategic resources.

Love it

I like the look of it.

A slightly spookier revision of yesterday's ship in poster form. Bone white, pitted metal, and copper is a better look for a necromantic spacecraft.

I was going to do a setting writeup on Ten Thousand Empty Tombs but instead, I have created implied a Stupid Thing: a strangereal world with murder cone spaceships, 70s retrofuturism, elves, dwarves, and wizards. Horrible stuff.

Tragically, I have to admit that this has forced me to give some thought to Dwarven corporate law in order to name the prime contractors. Please send help.