2010 Alternate Leonov Design

7d47fd7ce72842c1cce864d1730afe84.jpg
In 1984, the movie version of Arthur Clark novel 2010, came out with the above design for the Soviet Space Craft the Leonov.

This is a piece of Fan art of the Leonov passing the completed Space Station seen in 2001 as it leaves Orbit.

But if you read the novel, you will realize that the design of the Leonov is described differently

leonov01.jpg


So the question is what if instead of the design used in the Movie, the film Makers went with the design from the Book.

How does that affect the Movie it self?

How does that effect other Science Fiction Shows?
Do we lose the image of the Omega Class Destroyer from Babylon 5?
d409e6909cbb3367e2f43dd5e814a306.jpg



What about the Sulaco from Aliens, would it be design differently if the Leonov was closer to the book image?
 
Artists Rob Caswell (Arcas-Art) and Tom Peters (Drell-7) are big fans of Sir Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2010: Odyssey Two. However they have long be dissatisfied with the depiction of the spacecraft Leonov in the movie version. One fine day they decided to do something about it.
quotestart.png


The visual appearance of the Jupiter-bound Leonov from Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010 has become almost carved in stone by the Syd Mead designed craft that appeared in the 1984 film by Peter Hyams. However for us hardcore Clarke fans, the picture of the Leonov was painted over two years earlier when we first read Clarke’s novel. While the book and film’s plots are very similar in the broad strokes, there are a number of differences between the two and the design of the Leonov is one of them.
Clarke’s notes on the Leonov are relatively sparse, but clear enough to define a vision that is not what we saw in the movie. The novel’s craft is smaller in size (“Apart from the four huge propellant tanks that would be dropped off as soon as transfer orbit was achieved. From heat shield to drive units was less that fifty meters.”), it has a heat shield instead of an inflatable ballute, there’s no spin-gravity centrifuge, and it does not support its own EVA pods. It was built for speed to beat Discovery II to the goal and as such was designed with an economy of mass to maximize propulsion.
So from the start of the project, or goal in creating the book’s version of the Leonov was to design a craft that [A] fits Clarke’s written details, looks Russian in aerospace design (while Mead’s craft was a cool cinematic creation, it didn’t look very Russian in shape and coloration), [C] fits in with both the technology of what we saw in Kurbrick’s 2001 while still being something that looks like it could have been flying in 2010, [D] was designed on relatively proven science and technology.
The greatest piece of technical fiction in Clarke’s design was probably the Leonov’s Sakarov drive. The key to the Leonov’s ability to get to Jupiter so quickly, the drive is not described in much detail. It is an invention ascribed to the brilliant physicist Andrei Sakarov, capable of sustaining 1/10th of a gravity of thrust for a prolonged period.
The sparse description of the drive’s working led us to believe it was some sort of plasma drive, along the same lines as the VASIMR drive being developed by Franklin Chang Díaz currently. The drive is described as very compact, and its power source as having very low radioactivity. We assumed a magnetohydrodynamic system to generate the electrical power for the drive and the Leonov’s other systems. At the distances involved in a mission to Jupiter, solar panels would be either too large and unwieldy, or too inefficient in their power collection to be viable as an energy source.
With our design criteria established we decided to begin by having both of us do some design roughs without sharing our thoughts in advance. Oddly enough (or not) when we compared results we found we both were taking the design in the same general direction, so this was both confirming that we were on a good path and it smoothed the process of refining the design.
Tom did all the actual modeling in Lightwave, but the design process was fully cooperative. Every day of so we’d review the current status together and refine the design. This led to a number of features that we hadn’t planned from the outset but grew out of the necessities emerging from the growing design. This included thing like the retractable radiators for the drive section and the pivoting communications/sensor booms, allowing them all to be folded in behind the shadow of the heat shield for aerobraking.
The whole project took about 6-8 weeks and the resulting design is one that is quite mission-specific. The illustration sequence we’ve done so far shows how the ship changes its configuration as the mission proceeds, with the most notable events being the jettisoning of the huge fuel tanks used in the initial boost and the ejection of the heat shield after the Jovian aerobraking. As with real space missions like Apollo, what returns to Earth is considerable less massive than what left."


leonov05.jpg


 
Top