Alternate Space Equipment and Programs

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Sternberg

Sternberg

Banned
So anyways, I've been pondering on the ideas of space programs that could have, but never been. What if the CSA survived long enough to launch its own space program? What if there was a space race between the Allied and Axis powers of WWII? How about the Entente and Central powers of WWI? What if we had a Russian Tsar in power in the 1950s, overlooking the launch of Russian Empire's first satellite from a space center in Russian Alaska?

Think away at it, my friends.
 
Sternberg

Sternberg

Banned
Ah well. Was hoping for something that would have been like the Alternate Weapons of War thread, but oh well.
 

rvbomally

I have a few I made for Ad Astra Per Aspera lying around.


rvbomally said:
Developed for the United States Navy in the first half of the 23rd century, the Constitution-class frigate has become ubiquitous throughout the galaxy. The Constitution-class was developed for one purpose: shooting down enemy missiles before they could even get close to the American fleet. It is a shining example of the American (and later, Coalition) philosophy of spacecraft modularization. Each pod that makes up the Constitution-class can be detached and attached in new combinations, allowing for quick repairs, upgrades and damage control at the cost of fragility. Manufactured en masse during the Collapse, it was the second heaviest ship in the United States Navy, but by the 28th century it pales in comparison to even the smallest craft in the superpowers’ navies. However, the design would live on as it is relatively easy to manufacture and extremely versatile. Most small navies have the Constitution-class as its backbone while others use them in a support role. Criminal organizations, rebel groups and private groups have also taken a liking to the Constitution-class, using them for smuggling, piracy and other less than scrupulous acts. Even xeno groups, such as the gusano, use the ship in their fleets. The only navies that don’t use the Constitution are those of the Coalition and the Communist International. Because of its ubiquity, the Constitution-class has seen combat in almost every single interstellar war since the Collapse.Variants of the Constitution-class are many, including troop transports and space stations; a gusano fleet has even been sighted using twenty Constitutions in a ring formation to transport a captured Adam Smith-class sonnecoil cannon.
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rvbomally said:
Thomas Hobbes-class Patrol Boat​

The lightest class of warship in the Coalition Navy, the Thomas Hobbes-class fills a variety of roles both within and outside the Navy. Designed in 2655 to take advantage of advances in reactor technology, the Thomas Hobbes-class is the first to incorporate dark energy/fusion hybrid reactors, now standard throughout all Coalition Navy warships. But this is its only luxury: the ship was designed as a demonstration for the reactor and crew comforts, communication technology and armament are lacking. The Thomas Hobbes-class is armed with only ten point-defense EMSEL batteries and a thousand fifty-megaton nuclear missiles, lacks any form of energy shielding or artificial gravity and its life support can only sustain its crew of fifteen for a few weeks. Nonetheless, the Thomas Hobbes has remained popular because it is extremely cheap to manufacture. The Coalition Navy has one and a half million of the vessels under its command, about half of the Navy's ships, with countless more in the hands of other groups. Although originally designed to escort the Coalition Navy's larger vessels, the Thomas Hobbes has been modified to fill a variety of roles, including EMSEL point defense, planetary bombardment and light transport.
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rvbomally said:
Type-225 "Floraison" MTAV​

When the Conseil Systems began developing heavier armor to counter Coalition and United Technocracies advances in the mid-2600s, it sparked a chain reaction of new developments throughout the Conseil military. The Red Armada's floating fortresses needed to be expanded to account for greater ammunition and fuel cell reserves. The Red Army's infamously unreliable logistical capabilities were reworked from the ground up, copying Coalition developments that would be obsolete with the development of the Swallowtail. However, a most obvious issue was brought to attention when Conseil military commanders saw the blueprints of their engineers' new pet projects: their aerospace transports were too small and weak to carry the massive new tank models in substantial numbers. The push to develop a new transport was also spurred on by famine striking the Conseil Systems' larger cities, as the state could not transport foodstuffs from farming worlds quickly enough with its aging transport fleet. The Type-225, nicknamed "Floraison," was designed to handle both the military and domestic issues in one blow. The engineers who designed the Floraison only had one thing in mind: make it big. It could easily be said that every other design feature of the Floraison was made to account for its size, from its powerful thruster system to the eight pairs of wheels it uses to land.
A critical moment in the Floraison's history is the famine on Duglace IV, which cost the local commissars hundreds of millions of peasant lives. Because of this increasing urgency, government impatience with the Floraison's development skyrocketed and the state engineers were ordered to have the ship developed by 2688. If they failed to do so, they would be executed and their families shipped to a bioweapons testing facility. This quickly forced the Floraison through development; the first prototype rolled out of the factory in 2686 and production was in full speed by 2688. Naturally, the rushed design and corner-cutting factory managers caused many problems with the Floraison's performance. The heat-resistant ceramic underbelly of the Floraison was composed of individual tiles fitted together, as opposed to one big pre-molded underbelly that is common in Coalition designs. The Floraison's electronic systems were mostly placed in the underbelly to save room elsewhere on the vehicle, which when combined with cheap ceramic that sometimes had sand and dirt mixed in by manufacturers that wanted to sell some ceramic material on the black market, caused many accidents. A tile could come off or break during re-entry and cut off all electronic control from the cockpit, leaving the pilot powerless to stop his craft from descending into atmosphere. In combat, enemy EMSEL batteries did not help matters. However, the Floraison performed well enough to please many in the government; so long as the people are fed and the Red Army can deploy its new tanks, who cares? However, others in the government had a different take and were less than impressed with the engineer's job, but couldn't replace the Floraison because of the cost of developing a new transport craft and refitting the factories to manufacture a new model. Many engineers and factory managers were purged along with their families, while the government gave out orders to manufacture more Floraisons to make up for the ones that would inevitably fail.
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Color-Copycat

Here are two spacecraft designs I drew for a story arc of my TL that never really panned out.

This one's a manned orbital weapons platform used by a League of Nations-descended faction.

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And this one is an orbital interceptor employed by the US.

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Hapsburg

Hapsburg

Banned
Space stuff, you say? Well, try this on for size.
Yeah, I posted it in the weapons of war thread at least a dozen times, but I ought to post it here just once. It is, after all, an interstellar spaceship. Space battleship, but a space vessel regardless. Don't worry, I won't post a ship here for a while. Next anything I post will be more along the lines of satellites, space suits, and the like.

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e of pi

This is sort of interesting, it's kind of AH for an AH. I produced these images for the Eyes Turned Skyward timeline Truth and I are posting. However, due to a change in the Tl's course late in the game, they are now obsolete--the LV it's built around ended up never existing. In other words, this is an alt-alt-Space Station Freedom from an alternate-Eyes-Turned-Skward TL in which the Saturn Multibody wins ELVRP II instead of Titan V. Interested in what that means, or what actually ends up happening in our TL? Give it a look and find out!

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e of pi

Rich Dickardson said:
Impressive. Which program did you use to make this?

Also, I'll check out your TL soon enough.
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AutoCAD Inventor for the models, then Fireworks to add the backgrounds and labels. I'm going to have to completely rebuild it for the new version, unfortunately, but I may take advantage of it to do more detailing and maybe add the ability to do some cutaways.
 
Hapsburg

Hapsburg

Banned
Standard unmanned defensive space satellite used by the Union's orbital space forces. Using twin nuclear reactors, the medium-sized satellite can power two turreted laser beam guns. Virtually unchanged in shape from the first laser-armed orbital combat satellite, the QO-71 uses a time-honoured design with significantly more powerful and capable components to form a formidable adversary to hostile space weapons and vehicles. These are often used in large, dispersed groups to defend space stations, orbital colonies, and inhabited planets.

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modelcitizen

modelcitizen

I figure any CSA space stuff is going to be borderline crude with surprising dashes of elegance here and there in the design and engineering, and, heavy reliance on slave or quasi-slave labor.

The first CSA space travelers might be drawn from the same group of people who built them, probably because a) their lives would be considered less valuable, and, more cleverly, b) to preclude thoughts of sabotage among the workers.
 
Hapsburg

Hapsburg

Banned
Grumman's Lander and Excursion Vehicle, for use in low-gravity environments ranging from moons to asteroids to small planetoids. Used by government as well as civilian commercial and exploratory groups across human-occupied space. The LEV is designed to land on a low-gravity surface, conduct experiments and exploration, and then lift off to return to an orbital vessel or station.
The simple, practical design is essentially unchanged from the most ancient of 20th-century lunar landers, albeit with greatly extended life support for several days.

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Angry_scottsman_1989

Angry_scottsman_1989

Someone mentioned my name so....

John Carter Class.png

The product of procrastinating when you have two assignments two tests and a lab report due.....

Here's something i've wanted to do for a while, a remake of the very first space ship I did in the alternate weapons of war thread.

Now renamed the John Carter Class. This one in particular is the lead ship of the Dejah Thoris sub class (also known a the "John Carter Flight 1 mod. 2" ) It is distinguished from other Flight 1 John Carter ships by having a large telescope assembly just ahead of the fuel tanks.

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Sir Scott

Anybody who enjoys this thread needs to download the Kerbal Space Program Game. Ive been fiddling with it and its various mods and come up with dozens of interesting (albeit largely impractical or unrealistic) spacecraft. The one I use most commonly is my "Komorov" class launcher , a three stage rocket designed to put the orbital module into low Kearth orbit with a full tank of propellant for practice manouvres

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Hapsburg

Hapsburg

Banned
As usual, excellent work Angry Scot. I wish I had that much detail with my ship exteriors. I just usually don't have the patience to draw every panel and stuff.
 
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