mario spaceship
I want to read more mid 20th century hard SF with this kind of art on the cover where the characters smoke and are mean to women (while lamenting the latter)
Edit: and everyone is sending video telegrams and the internet and social media haven’t been invented and the ultimate fate of the galaxy is a roman-style empire with jealous rogue generals in remote “corners”
Ignore my comment: artwork that requires the viewer to be incompetent at the technologies depicted, has rights too.
You do not put jet-engine-intakes on spacecraft, let-alone facing the wrong way.
You do not have that many HUGE rocket-nozzles, without having the fuel-storage to back them up.
You do not create suspension-of-disbelief when you violate basic competency in the technology depicted.
This is why stories, visual-art, etc, NEED to get things like cultural-logic, emotional-logic, engineering-logic, etc, right.
Grumble.
You’re making a lot of assumptions about their intent. For all we know it could just be openings for smaller ships to reach the landing decks. Or they could be openings to capture asteroids. Who knows what the artist intended. Ultimately it’s all fantasy. If artists constrained themselves to known technology we wouldn’t have so many instances of unexpected life imitating art.
What are some sci-fi artists / visual artists who do get it right when it comes to portraying futuristic tech that’s practically designed? I’m genuinely interested to know
The technology depicted doesn’t exist, and, in my mind, it goes fast as shit!
Actually, there is a drive concept called Bussard Ramjet, which relies upon scooping up hydrogen ions while the ship is moving at relativistic speeds. The intake is augmented with conical magnetic field to extend the range of the scoop. You don’t need huge fuel tanks to power such engine either - collected ions are compacted to produce thermonuclear fusion which is used to propel the spacecraft.
However, I don’t see sense in having more than one such intake. Maybe a second one for redundancy…
It’s fun to discuss plausibility of some purely hypothetical design on an imaginary spaceship 😃
