Fri, Mar 12, 2021 at 7:16 AM
Ignatz,
These look great! And the individual drones are quite nice, too. I had been wondering what they would look like, and how they'd be situated on the hull. Yeah, I think six charging pads would be enough. This is the future, so we're probably only looking at a few minutes for each, to charge up to full. Then they can swap out with others that need charging.
They can even move around during starjump, as the jump field extends out by a two or three hundred meters on all sides. Military vessels often travel in convoys, that is, an entire squadron might share a single jump bubble; dronecraft, and sometimes even people, can move around inside the bubble, going from ship to ship, as needed. It's not uncommon in the civilian world either, with vessels like these, and like the supercarriers, moving multiple cargo boxes at a time.
-David
Fri, Mar 12, 2021 at 1:11 PM
David,
Interesting concept that jump bubble. But two or three hundred meters... wow! ... well, that calls for some pretty good close order drill work when considering the size and mass of these space going vessels. Of course, they do have a lot of AI and each ship has its own jump field generator, etc. Amazing what that technology can do in the far future. And to think how difficult it was for me to jump start the ol' family Dodge. Hmmmmm.
Another render comes along with this note. This is a re-render of the underside of the Cargo Hauler. (Do I mean underside or is it more correctly the Non-cargo-container side?1)
There are now only six charging sockets for the drones. You will notice that the spacing is no longer in two rows, but something more on the lines of a misshapen hexagon. The reason for changing the alignment is that I realized there is yet one more drone type (at least) to be made and to my mind slightly larger than the missile turret drone. I am referring to the thruster drones. These things have to carry a fairly burly thrust engine, again to be locked in place on the cargo container (or wherever) and be able to rotate and point that thruster nozzle to do some serious amounts high mass manoeuvring.
To that end I see these drones as having a ring of magnetic pads surrounding the standard locking/charging socket so as to increase their grip to counteract the force of their own thruster. The inclusion of these extra mag pads requires the small flying thrusters to be moved just that much further outwards, increasing the diameter of the thruster drones. I've got a loose plan for the thruster drone in my head, but haven't gotten around to putting it together. Maybe tomorrow if I'm not too frazzled.
Guess I'll go get myself put back into cold storage for the nonce,
- Ignatz
He means the ventral side.