Idea ISV Venture Star (Avatar)

Bloodworth

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I've just noticed... what is the point of an ISV if there are not any stars to go to? :hmm:

Actually one of the dev's here is working on a functional galaxy for orbiter and tentatively expects to have it finished by the end of the year. This will give us PLENTY of stars to fly to. :cool:
 

Hielor

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does not matter. But once I thought about it. My idea for this is to a planet orbiting the sun as far as a star. Then put the textures of the sun on this planet and moons that would be the planets in the star. Is that possible?
Not in Orbiter. Two issues:
- You can't have a moon of a moon, so the planets (which are really moons as far as Orbiter is concerned) of that fake star would be unable to have moons of their own.
- Orbiter has numerical precision issues when you get too far away from the Sun.
 

T.Neo

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I believe I already explained that, Hielor.

Thanks for bringing it across in a coherant and understandable manner. :p
 

Hielor

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I believe I already explained that, Hielor.

Thanks for bringing it across in a coherant and understandable manner. :p
...Apparently I never made it to the second page before replying.
 

raftdood

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Possible but it had drawbacks. Orbiter becomes unstable and shaky at such distances, so you wouldn't be able to dock at say 4.4 lightyears from Sol.

Also, the "planets" of the "star" will not be able to have their own moons. This rules out a Pandora-Polyphemus arrangement.

The planets will also be illuminated by Sol and not their parent star, and Your Mileage May Vary with 3d star textures.

****************************
I think you'll find this interesting. :thumbup:
http://www.orbiter-forum.com/showthread.php?p=177042#post177042
 

Voyager

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As soon as figure out how to make mods for Orbiter 2010, I will start making both. But I can make mesh, not so good with everything else.
 

fsci123

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I remember when i first saw avatar i jumped out of my movie-seat when i saw that attractive spacecraft... And then i saw the rest of the movie...
Which was completely horrible...


But the ISV should be made into a US-made vehicle... And the solar sail widened to like .5km... Fusion engines would be better than antimatter...
 
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Hlynkacg

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I've been using Atomic Rockets to draw up specs for a near-future NTR space-craft called Skytrain that (visually at least) is based on the Venture star. My objective is a cargo hauler capable of making a 0.1g Brachistone from Earth to Mars.

Unfortunately, my time of late has been occupied by work, school, and other projects, so it hasn't hasn't gotten past the planning stages.
 
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T.Neo

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Amen. That scene is absolutely awesome. If it was left in, it would have increased the awesome-factor of the film by about ten times. It really is the kind of sci-fi stuff that we annoyingly don't have enough of (yes, I know the engines would have vaporised the ship, but I don't care). Top that off with the really cool music in that scene (that I can't seem to find anywhere).

The opening scene with the ISV was awesome enough, this is so much better. But if you look at how it was going to be structured into the rest of the film, it (kinda) makes sense as to why it was cut; the film cuts from the big birdy pterodactyl being released to the protagonist talking about how he's never going to see the inside of the cool science lab again, before his mind-transfer and Eye Awaken. In this case, it cuts from the pterodactyl thing being released, to the uber-cool ISV shot, and then to another deleted sequence of people fishing by a body of water, and also a cute shot indicating that the Blue Skinned Space Catgirl is pregnant, to the protagonist's video log before the mind transfer...

Cut for time, presumably. The whole thing really fits together well, and I think it would have been quite tricky to fit in the ISV shot and then go straight to the video log. Film is all about flow and a lot of films have stuff cut because it would disrupt the flow of the film or add running time 'unecessarily'.


I wouldn't have minded an extra 50 seconds or so of that extra material. Maybe it was less a matter of time and more a matter of keeping the love interest's pregnancy ambiguous.

Either way, it is really cool that Cameron put in the geeky effort to make the science in the film far more plausible than that seen in most movies, which makes the film a proper Science Fantasy- fantasy based on scientific elements, unlike most 'soft' "science fiction", which tries to be science fiction but is based on fantastical elements...

If only the film didn't paint humans as evil bastards and the Na'vi as an entirely flawless society, it would have been far better (and made the suspension of disbelief of blue catpeople bearable). The original scriptment was far better in that respect, but it would have also made for something like an 11 hour film...

But the ISV should be made into a US-made vehicle... And the solar sail widened to like .5km... Fusion engines would be better than antimatter...

Why a US vehicle? There is nothing wrong with private spaceflight, after all, that is the path that the US space program seems to be taking. Since every human in the film seems american, one would assume that the RDA is an american company or is contracted primarily to the US.

The solar sail is 16km wide, it's folded up into a little box between the engines... you're talking about the shiny shield thing at the back which already looks large enough for whatever it's supposed to do (what it wouldn't do, however, is shield the rest of the ship from being vaporised by the waste heat of the engines).

The engines are already hybrid fusion-antimatter, fusion alone doesn't have the performance of antimatter, so it probably wouldn't be enough to execute the dV requirement. On the other hand, the actual performance of the engines is never described, and the description of them doesn't sound like any real antimatter concept (it sounds like some hybrid between using antimatter to heat propellant and reflecting gamma rays from anihillation, which doesn't make much sense since there is no known way to reflect gamma rays in that manner, or a way that is practical to use inside a spacecraft engine). When operating in fusion mode though, the engines use antimatter catalysed fusion, which uses far less antimatter, and is also a less... peculiar concept.
 
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Izack

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The original scriptment was far better in that respect, but it would have also made for something like an 11 hour film...
Fantastic! It's been far too long since an insanely long awesome movie was made.

Of course, to be decent would have required someone else assisting with the writing, and at least partially scrapping the James Cameron's Childhood Dream™ idea.
 

T.Neo

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Fantastic! It's been far too long since an insanely long awesome movie was made.

Yeah, only problem is that this movie would have probably cost 800 million dollars and would have been far too long for anyone to sit through all at once. :p

Of course, to be decent would have required someone else assisting with the writing, and at least partially scrapping the James Cameron's Childhood Dream™ idea.

The scriptment wasn't that bad though, though some of the lines are cringe inducing, such as "I'm your wingman, babe", and others... :uhh:
 

fsci123

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Well obviously what corporation would be big enough to buy at least one of these giants they in todays money would cost 100Trillion dollars an even assuming the cost to build it gos down it would still cost 10trillion...

The US has mo
 
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T.Neo

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No, it would probably not cost that much. Remember a trillion dollars is a thousand billion dollars. That is a lot of money.

The cost estimates for the ISS are between 35 to 160 billion USD. A lot of that is on orbit operations, in the case of an ISV you'd deal with those seperately. A large percentage of the construction costs are taken up by launch costs. Presumably the launch techology of the Avatar future world enables far lower surface/orbit costs than with current technology, and indeed, far lower surface/orbit costs than the ridiculously expensive STS.

Also remember that while the vehicle is large, it would actually be quite light, as the average density is low. The rear shields are very thin and thus light, the truss is lightweight, and even the pressurised sections are made of inflatable modules (or at least, they seem to be). The engines and radiators would probably be pretty dense though, they'd easily be the heaviest part of the ship (and they look like the heaviest part of the ship...). It would be pretty funny, with low surface/orbit costs you might actually have more money spent on constructing such a behemoth on-orbit than money spent getting the components there.

"The US has more" makes no sense. It's a vehicle owned by a business, that exists to turn a profit. It isn't some science mission with no economic return. Besides, the US operates and owns a lot of vehicles, that are built by contractors anyway, and there are a lot of instances where corporations actually own facilities, that are utilized by the government.

Maybe there is government, or international (more probable) funding for the start-up, but these ships are built to pay for themselves many times over. With the kind of revenue the RDA makes with the maguffinite Unobtanium, they should easily be able to afford such a vehicle.

There are other problems though, mainly the fact that the antimatter and laser array needed to propel such a ship would be of utterly epic proportions, and would be highly unlikely to cost little enough for the operation to turn a profit. It might be better if the ship didn't have such a high acceleration though.

Just because the US is a country (or even that it's a large and influential country), doesn't mean it is a super-entity.
 
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Gerdih

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Moreover I have read that there is a particle accelerator in orbit of Polyphemus to fill the antimatter tanks of the spaceships!!
 

T.Neo

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Yeah, that is a big problem too, such infrastructure back home is hard enough, but we must assume that such a large factory exists in the wilderness as well...

Apparently old shuttles are used to scoop deutarium from the atmosphere of Polyphemus for fusion fuel, but I don't think it talks anywhere of an antimatter factory. Antimatter might be present in the magnetosphere of Polyphemus, but not in high enough amounts to fuel the ship for the trip back home...

This might be a bit of a stretch, but the ship could also carry just the antimatter for the return journey, getting the matter fuel from local sources... you could still save a good deal of mass this way.
 
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