Putting the ART in ARTificial gravity
This is both an artistic experiment with engineering and a social experiment, given how my usual kind of art (occult symbolism, owls, etc) may feel too complicated for many and it's often met with indifference. Yeah, aerospace engineering is also complicated (after all, it's literally "rocket science"), but it feels to me like this kind of subject (hard sci-fi, Star Trek, etc) is more "socially sanctioned" in Fediverse than my usual kind of subject...
Given the latest happening involving my time-lapses (which I've been trying to post as a proof of human authorship), this time I'm not posting it. I do have the time-lapse for this art, if anyone is interested in seeing how I drew.
Alt-text:
A schematics-like digital art entitled "Artificial gravity for space travel: schematics for torque counterbalancing inspired on real helicopters that have no tail rotors", divided in two panels.
Both panels feature a isometric view of a faintly translucent spacecraft with a gray hull and front-facing cockpit (whose window shows 3 people inside, one of them upside-down weeee-ing in microgravity behind the other 2) very similar in shape to the NASA's Space Shuttle (I actually thought of it as I drew), but with a pair of big ionic thrusters (emitting a strong purple glow) at the rear, as well as a pair of large rotating rings attached to the top of the hull, meant as a centrifuge for artificial gravity. The rings, rotating in opposite directions so to cancel out a torque that would otherwise inflict attitude onto the ship (as per Newton's 3rd Law), are attached through 3 equidistant I-beams to a smaller cylinder (which doubles as a hallway from/to the rest of the ship) which, in turn, is attached to the husk, in different configurations across the panels.
The first panel, "option A: vertically stacked opposing wheels", is self-descriptive: the rings are on top of each other, rotating in opposite directions in the same axis, much akin to coaxial-rotor helicopters (e.g. Sikorsky S-69).
The second, "option B: paired opposing wheels", features a configuration akin to transverse-rotor helicopters (e.g. Landgraf H-2), but with a wingspan slightly angled backwards. Each ring is attached to opposite wings.
At the bottom, there's a label box, describing the meaning of each arrow overlaying both diagrams: cyan arrows represent both the thrust for the ship and rotation for the rings, while blue arrows indicate the gravitational force from the centrifugal motion. A third overlay, painted in magenta, shows the locations for hatches and corridors connecting the inside of each centrifuge to the cockpit and the rest of the ship.
There's also a jab at Star Trek: "Because USS Enterprise is so out of touch with real physics", nodding at how Spock and his crew were "simply" able to stand inside the ship as if gravity was something taken for granted outside a planet.
My head canon was to ignore canon layouts of the Enterprise and assume the saucer section is shaped that way to have spinning disks for artificial gravity.
@agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works @artshare@lemmy.world
This, with an additional caveat: it must be two (or more pairs, always an even number of) rings sandwiched on top of each other inside the so there's counterbalancing of the torque, otherwise it'd be more of a reaction wheel.
To be fair, most sci-fi shows seem to struggle with accurate mechanisms for gravity inside the ship, which is directly related to the ship's size and shape... Which reminds me of how the ship from the Vogons (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) is, by far, the most unrealistic one, essentially being a gigantic cube inside of which the Vogons stand as they use loudspeakers (from the vacuum of the space) to announce their bureaucratic destruction procedures for Earth π
Still, I'd say USS Enterprise is the most iconic spaceship to me.