Deck Plans Atomic Rockets

Oh, just look at that large silver globe scientifically packed with plenty of von Braun goodness! This little honey is from the famous Collier's Man Will Conqure Space Soon! series. We coudda had this back in the fifties, for cryin' out loud! Most of us ugly Americans have never heard of Tintin. Which is pathetic since it is one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century.

The characters might look a bit comical but the science is hard enough to bend titanium bars around. Readers in the US might not recognize the Tintin graphic novels, but everybody in Europe has read them. This nuclear powered rocket was quite well researched for the time. The main engine is apparently a NERVA style solid nuclear thermal rocket fueled with plutonium. The launch site has a breeder reactor used to cook uranium 238 into plutonium for fuel rods. The rocket lifts off and lands with an auxillary chemical rocket fueled by nitric acid and aniline, so as to prevent contaminating the ground with radiation.

The authors of the indispensable Spaceship Handbook did find one minor mistake. The astronauts lie prone on their acceleration couches, which is second best position to lying on their backs. The authors of the Spaceship Handbook suggests that this was due to Mr. Rémy misinterpreting the diagram of the Werner von Braun moonship. In that diagram, the crew members who need to monitor the chart recorder are prone, but everybody in their acceleration stations are properly on their backs. What's in the engine room?

The control console for the reactor and the control console for the propellant pumps. Plus the controls to the remote waldoes/robot who fix things in the radioactive section. Damage control equipment and related items. Remember, outside the engine room hatch will be a decontamination booth. And I'm sure over the hatch will be mounted an alarm with a red rotating light, so you don't have to put your ear on the bulkhead to hear Astro say "Oh SH*****T!!!". Past the hatch will be a radiation-shielded corridor, with a dog-leg bend in it, so you can get in but radiation cannot get out (radiation has to travel in straight lines, but crewmen can...

Be sure you are wearing your dosimeter. And you might want to get a raycat as a mascot. The shadow shield will be in the floor, with the engine(s) below that. Around the engine deck will be auxiliary propellant tanks. The main tanks provide propellant, which is also used to cool the reactor and keep it from melting. In case something happens to the main tanks, the auxiliary tanks give Astro a few precious seconds of coolant time so he can SCRAM the reactor.

The engine deck will also have some kind of Geiger counter to warn the crew of a radiation leak. There will also be controls for the ship's power plant, whether the power is tapped from the propulsion system or from a separate unit. (ed note: Interstellar explorers from Terra land on a newly discovered planet. There are remarkably humanoid primitive aliens living there. The ship's linguist Kung Su learns the alien language, which is suspiciously similar to Chinese. Captain Griffin has a talk with some natives, and learns some interesting bits of the alien's history.)

This is where the spacecraft's pilot flies the ship. In fiction it is often the dramatic focus. Even though without help from the astrogator, engineer, and ship's captain one will find that the pilot is helpless. Flying a spacecraft is a team effort, but Hollywood finds that to be boring. Callahan squeezed into the crowded flight deck. Grander starships, the handsome corporate-line giants that never saw the surface of a planet, never seared their gleaming hulls with the fires of reentry, could afford spacious bridges whose crews could lounge about with...

Not the Goose. There was the captain's station to port, with its terminal and repeater screens and the vector-shift board; the pilot's chair to starboard, and the engineer's tech pit squeezed in between structural members abaft the... A 'fresher stall and ration dispenser for short-handed watches—the only kind aboard the Goose—completed the crowded layout, just behind the pilot's station. There was barely headroom enough to seat Moses' one meter ninety without scraping his hat on the overhead, just legroom enough for a stiff stretch under the boards, and it had been the heart... Mitsuko had climbed down into the tech pit, all but lost from sight behind consoles and crash padding. Callahan stooped and settled himself clumsily on the lip of the pilot's recess.

The view through the narrow forward port­holes (the ship is a belly-lander) offered nothing save the uninspiring, heat-scored flank of an orbital barge. The staccato sounds of a working keyboard rose from the tech pit and the panels around Callahan suddenly came to life, a swarm of green fireflies shot through with an alarming scatter of warning... The familiar background noises of his ship surrounded him again, the susurrance of the ventilators, the buzzes and chimes of half a dozen telltales, the static-laced dialogues between Hybreasil port control and its traffic... (ed note: one hex module is a hexagonal prism, about 3.7 meters wall to wall (12 feet), 15.2 meters long (50 feet), and has a volume of 241 cubic meters (8,500 cubic feet) This is the work-room of the spacecraft navigator. The commonly used term is "astrogator", coined by Robert Heinlein.

Everything needed for interplanetary navigation. Instrument to determine the ship's current trajectory and calculating devices to plot new trajectories. There are many navigational instruments. A periscope sextant to take navigational readings, with its azimuth ring. (In THE REVOLT ON VENUS, this is what Roger Manning was looking through when he noticed the atomic bomb attached to the Polaris' tail) There also might be a goniometer, which is used to... A good-sized telescope, either in a dome or with a coleostat.

(The periscope, the telescope, or both will be equipped with a filar micrometer.) Star trackers, star scanners, solar trackers, sun sensors, and planetary limb sensors and trackers. Inertial tracking repeaters (note that the inertial tracker platform will have to be manually realigned every twelve hours because it tends to drift. The star tracker is used for reference.). There might even be a pulsar positioning system. In addition to navigational instruments there will be other necessary gear. There will be an incredibly precise chronometer.

An integrating accelerograph (displaying elapsed time, velocity, and distance in dead-reckoning). An indicator of the spacecraft's current mass ratio. An integral audio recorder and a log book for radio messages and navigational fixes. Not to mention lots of paper, pencils, slide rules, and ballistic calculators. Or instead of all this junk they may have a smartphone with an AstrogateMeTM app. Alright, space cadets!

This is the way it is. If your ship is bigger than a space taxi you gotta have more than one crewperson. There are lots of critical jobs (or "hats") on a spacecraft, the more hats a given crewperson wears the lower will be their job performance. They hafta sleep sometime. What kinda jobs are we lookin' at here? Well:

(ed note: the good ship Space Angel is unexpectedly on a desperate mission. At their last encounter with hostile forces, they got away but the ship took damage. They are going to set down on an unknown unexplored planet to do repairs. ) (ed note: Kelly is the newly-hired Ship's Boy. He is barely a teenager.

Lafayette is the former ship's boy, just a little older than Kelly. Lafayette is not handling the strain of the mission well.) Where your ship goes, you go. If the pilot swings the vessel into an asteroid belt and butts it up against some rook, that's where they'll find you later. There are simulators that'll start someone off, but the only way to learn to fly is to punch the board. The previous section had just the bare basics of spacecraft design.

This section has some of the fine details, as well as a few far-out science fictional concepts. (ed note: this is science fiction, but some of the principles are sound. The most glaring fiction is the "traction drive" which is some kind of handwaving reactionless thruster forbidden by the laws of physics. It is described as "non-Newtonian", which is a dead giveaway that it is bogus science. Anyway that is why the described ship has no propellant tanks, which in a real spacecraft would dominate the design. In the story, Starling and her parents owns the largest momentum tether in space, and make a good living at slinging cargo all over the solar system.

Unfortunately the advent of traction drive ships is going to put them out of business. So Starling's foster father Gampy wants to invest in an unconventional new type of spacecraft as a business move.) “So, kiddo,” Gampy poked again. “Is a spaceship cost-effective?” “Yes and no. I mean, a traction drive isn’t that hard to fabricate.

People Also Search

• Deck Plans - Atomic Rockets
• Engine Deck - Atomic Rockets
• CONTROL DECK - Atomic Rockets
• Astrogation Deck - Atomic Rockets
• Deck Plans - Atomic Rockets - Pinterest Login
• Crew - Atomic Rockets
• Advanced Design - Atomic Rockets
• Deck Plans - Atomic Rockets | Spaceship design, Spaceship ... - Pinterest
• Space Stations - Atomic Rockets