More believable 'hard' sci-fi content, please: a rather lengthy request.
Blind Owl
Posts: 501
As a diehard sci-fi fan since about the mid 1960s, I'm mildly distressed to see little or no believable 'hard' near-future content (say, the next couple of centuries).
It seems most content creators take their cues from cartoony 'B' movies in which no one in the future cares about ordinary creature comforts (i.e. sterile living environments more suitable for droids than humans). And to get from planet 'A' to planet 'X' they simply hop on a hyperspace sled with artificial gravity somehow built into the design. Not to mention all sorts of weird but funky-looking excrescences sticking out of the hull and bulkheads without any apparent (or even conceivable) function. Plus everyone in the future fights all the time, wearing weird but funky-looking body armor, wielding weird but funky-looking weapons, and driving weird but funky-looking vehicles, whether land, sea, space, or air. Oh, and all future air vehicles have anti-grav built in, so they don't need to actually fly. Presumably the excrescences take care of that.
This is all very well for a 'galaxy far away' (as if any aren't), and for those who fancy that sort of thing. I'm certainly not (repeat not) knocking the creators or the consumers of such stuff. Different strokes etc., variety is the spice etc. And there are some notable exceptions to my feeling that the imaginary future has taken a wrong turn somewhere, e.g. a fairly plausible early-stages Mars settlement.
But where are the L5 colonies, the lunar catapults, the later settlements, communities, and cities of a maturing, growing human presence on Mars and the asteroids, the outer system, etc.? Where are the passenger-carrying spaceships that must spin to produce artificial gravity, where are the vehicles that ordinary people would use to get around on e.g. Mars? Where are the pressure suits they would have to wear? A helmet with a funky half-visor simply won't do. (Of course this doesn't mean that fairly plausible near-future clothes can't be sexy as hell. I hope not, anyway.)
So this thread: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/163121/real-world-spacesuits-for-genesis-3#latest definitely rang a bell for me, and helped provoke this response to what I think is a gap in content that's practically begging to be filled.
Surely there must be other diehard sci-fi freaks who would love to plunk down their hard-earned coin for some plausible nearish-future content of the kind I've been longing for...
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I for one like that idea. There's been a thread in the recent past about ship design, like how many ships evidently use antigrav because everything is oriented like an airplane.
It's a LITTLE high sf, but here's one of my renders: http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Quadman4-Drift-668484799
Heh
He's a grippy fella, isn't he?
I have to think Quadman is the result of genetic engineering, since his lower hands couldn't have got that way by Darwinian evolution.
Nice render, btw. Ah, free fall, how sweet it was...
There can never be enough sci-fi. But I'm dead tired of the female-only outfits, suits, and setups, and the pin-up focus or the mechanized woman stuff that seems to be incredibly popular.
I could certanily use some real world outfits and hairstyles futuristic stuff that doesn't look at home in a Buck Rogers cast.
I would love to see these products too!
Not sure if any of these are in the right period you are looking for, they are all basic technology, but perhaps:
https://www.daz3d.com/space-base
https://www.daz3d.com/m3-space-suit
https://www.daz3d.com/mars-colony
https://www.daz3d.com/mars-vehicle
https://www.daz3d.com/mars-habitat
https://www.daz3d.com/romulus-01-rover
https://www.daz3d.com/remus-02
https://www.daz3d.com/robot-mars
https://www.daz3d.com/mars-explorers-for-genesis
https://www.daz3d.com/mars-explorers-for-genesis-2-female-s
https://www.daz3d.com/mars-explorers-for-genesis-2-male-s
https://www.daz3d.com/zero-gravity-for-victoria-4
https://www.daz3d.com/planet-explorer-for-genesis-2-male-s
https://www.daz3d.com/p-u-g
https://www.daz3d.com/moon-rod
https://www.daz3d.com/moon-lander-2
https://www.daz3d.com/starship-astra
That is a pretty nice list of resources sriesch, thank you. My main complaint is that in most cases bases and spacecraft either have an interior or an exterior, but not both. I would like to be able to do images and animations with both interior and exterior scenes.
On another note, I wonder if midnight stories would be willing to make an updated Mars Explorer for Genesis 3? I know I would buy it.
Hard sci-fi.... hell yeah, bring it on :)
Yes, scriesch, thanks for the list. Mars Colony and Mars Habitat are plausible nearish-future assets, the vehicles less so, i.e. expedition or military grade rather than personal transport. But what would a Mars colony or a Mars habitat look like 50 or 100 years later? How will relatively ordinary folks live then, how will they get around, and how will new immigrants get there? And what's going on elsewhere in the Solar System?
What I'd like to see is content that would be at home in, say, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, or Allen Steele's Orbital Decay, Lunar Descent, and Clarke County, Space (which takes place in an L5 colony). Other examples might include some of Larry Niven's early novels, Robert A. Heinlein's The Rolling Stones (which inspired the famous 'Trouble With Tribbles' Star Trek episode), Jerry Pournelle's Birth of Fire, and even Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (up to Bowman's encounter with the Black Monolith, anyway).
In the non-fiction line, G. K. O'Neil's The High Frontier, Robert Zubrin's The Case For Mars and How to Live on Mars might spark some ideas for a creative modeler.
And I would really, really like to see a spaceship interior where a room or corridor is curved vertically rather than horizontally, indicating that the ship is rotating to provide artificial gravity and not generating it by some mystical means. Those mystical means (along with FTL travel, force fields, space warps, wormholes, etc.) can wait another 1000 years in my vision of the intermediate future. Great if & when they arrive, but there's no shortage of that kind of content. I'm interested in what happens until then, and there's very little 'hard' near-future sci-fi content available at present.
Blind Owl,
I feel your pain. However, it is my observation that the majority of the hard-asset models (vehicles, equipment, habitats, etc.) are game-based and consumed by a customer-base that cut its sci-fi teeth on Star Trek, Star Wars, and subsequent media (Gerry Anderson's work excepted) rather than on Heinlein, Clarke, and Dick. With a few notable exceptions, most of the pioneering sci-fi writings were never made into a ... memorable ... visual medium. So, it's "artist's interpretation" as to what any of that really looked like. That in itself might limit the marketability for such a product. One of my favorite space ships was the Russian (Soviet) ship "Leonov" in "2010 Odessey Two". I still use the reference drawings for ideas.
Remember, too, that you can take a linear ship and tumble it end-over-end through space to create gravity. There is no up or down orientation and aerodynamics are good only for lift-off/reentry. I believe it was Phillip K. Dick who coined the phrase that the "most efficient shape for a space ship is a sphere". Efficient, but boring. Finally, as a story-telling tool, FTL (or some shortcut) is needed unless we want to spend the next millennium knocking about our own solar system.
I'm all for distant-future sci-fi content---FTL drives, gravity generators, interstellar wars etc. etc.—but there's no shortage of that (though much of it is B-movie/cartoony IMO).
What's lacking (again, IMO) is a ton of in-between 'hard' sci-fi stuff that could provide realistic props and backgrounds for the intermediate future in which humans establish a permanent presence elsewhere in the Solar System using known or easily extrapolated technology. Seems like a void begging to be filled.
Heck, if I had any 3D modeling and/or texturing skills I'd be cranking it out myself, if only for my own amusement.
Cheers, eh?
Stonemason has some nice sets that give a lived-in near-future look.
https://www.daz3d.com/sci-fi-crew-quarters
https://www.daz3d.com/containment-zone
https://www.daz3d.com/sci-fi-bedroom
Those do look pretty good, thistledownsname, thanks for pointing them out.
Ha! I'm already thinking that the Containment Zone could be stripped of props and re-sized & refurnished to make the kind of circular/centrifugal deep-space environment I've been craving. Will investigate further.
Cheers!
Interestingly, one of the locations I've been picturing for some of my eventual renders would be one of those giant, hollow-sphere space station thingies that someone else here mentioned in passing. It'd be one of those things where someone took a nickle-iron asteroid, hollowed out a shaft down the center of it, filled that completely with canisters of water taken from comets, surrounded the asteroid by inflating a giant bubble-baloon thingy around it, painted one side of the interior of that with a reflective surface, pointed that towards the Sun so that the sunlight was all concentrated onto the asteroid.... the outside of the astroid then hit the melting point of metal, with the heat working its way inward until those containers of water turned to vapor, went FOOOOMM!!!! ...and the asteroidal material expanded out to form a giant, hollow sphere. They then let THAT cool off, carved out airlocks and such, piped sunlight inside, spun the whole thing for gravity, and then wrapped an engineared landscape of lakes and hills and gardens and whatnot all across the inside surface of that, built buildings and roads, and brought in colonists. (I believe Niven described this process in one of his non-fiction articles about how space-stuff would work.)
So, a premade scene would be some sort of forced-perspective thing designed to look like you're standing inside one of those sorts of space-habs, with the "ground" curving slowly up and away from you into the "distance," but with the ability to add whatever style of lanscape and structures you want onto that upward-bending landscape behind you. It could come in the spherical form or the donut-station form, or even the Babylon 5 style spinning-tin-can form
It is highly unlikely that centripetal force (spinning on axis) would work for artificial gravity for 'short' trips - the spin would have to be stopped for maneuvering (try tipping a spinning gyroscope) at which point one of the 'walls' would end up as a floor when thrust was applied. More likely would be a continuous thrust to provide a limited gravity - assuming a suitable source of energy and fuel - ion drive, bussard ramjet, or possibly a solar sail. Absent such, most of the trip wold be in zero-G, with some advantages (any suitable area becomes a sleeping area; all that is needed is a mesh cocoon tied to the surface to avoid drifting in air currents) - seating can be virtually any orientation, but will need seat belts.
As far as 'uniforms' go - if the trip is of any duration, the outfits will need to be a paper or felt composition that can be recycled/re-constructed during the trip. There may or may not be something resembling a laundry facility (depends on whether there is any appreciable gravity or not). Figure on some type of coveralls - look at Star Trek or ST:TNG for probable examples. Depending on shipboard environment the outfits would be ankle/wrist length, above knee/above elbow length, or totally sleeveless with near legless shorts.
I'd like to see ships where the 'floor' is perpendicular to the axis of thrust, where sleeping areas have low-G or zero-G 'hammocks' , and the control room has couch-like seating with lap and shoulder harnesses and a full forward view (portals or screens).
That's the kind of thing I'm talking about, nomad-. In The High Frontier, Gerard K.O'Neill proposes building similar structures out of lunar and asteroidal materials ferried or catapulted to Near Earth Orbit for assembly. The hypothetical inhabitants would live in huge cylindrical spaces--complete with neighborhoods, parks, ponds etc.—lit by directed, reflected sunlight. O'Neill's ideas are probably impractical as hell, but what a setting they would provide! A feast for the imagination.
And if someone wanted violence and conflict, imagine autonomous space colonies warring with each other, whether overtly or covertly. Oh, yeah...
Hi, Namffuak, your comment came in while I was replying to nomad-.
It's true that putting spin on anything produces a gyroscopic effect, which would make a rotating spaceship more resistant to manoeuvre than a non-rotating one. This should be relatively easy to overcome: a gigaton monster ship couldn't be spun and de-spun readily, but lesser craft certainly could. And, depending what you mean by 'short', it would be worth doing even for e.g. a fast 180-day Hohmann transfer from Earth to Mars. Alternatively, the craft could be tethered to non-essential or disposable mission hardware (q.v. Zubrin, The Case For Mars), which would be jettisoned or perhaps even recovered on arrival.
As for Bussard's lovely ramjet idea, which would only work at velocities that are a significant percentage of c, later calculations seem to prove it won't work at all, even at 99.999% c ( *sob* *sniff* ). I'm still bummed out about that.
Ha ha, love your description of how to create sperical space craft from a nickle iron atsteroid. However, from a "hard" science fiction point of view, it wouldn't work. When "FOOOOMM!" happened the molten asteroid would be blown into trillions of small droplets (with some bigger ones of course) because the expanding bubble of gaseous water would not be uniform (see Chaos Mathematics Theory) and liquid metal is not made up of long chain molecules like a rubber ballon (which is able to even out the forces of expansion over it's whole surface), rather liquid metal is made up of individual atoms that will tend to form spherical droplets, especially in low gravity environments. Sorry to burst your ballon; if you'll forgive the pun. The idea might be possible if you were able to pump liquid water slowly into the center of the molten asteroid, allowing a slow and controlled expansion of the metal ballon. More like blowing a glass bottle :)
Another potential danger of high velocity ships is that if Unruh radiation is real (which is still debated), apparently it'd cook the passengers.
Oh geez, I'd gladly let the future worry about such trifling details...but then I can still enjoy reading some of Heinlein's juveniles.
Even so-called 'hard' sci-fi requires what writers & critics call the 'willing suspension of disbelief,' yes?
And we are talking sci-fi after all, not an actual space exploration & settlement program. In the meantime I'd be happy to have the sort of props, scenes, and structures that would fit into, say, the next 200 years of same.
Well, as for the nickle-iron-asteroid-to-hollow-spheres thing... I probably garbled the description of how it might work, since I only have hazey recollection of reading the Niven nonfiction article. It was expecting that the heat would reach the center of the asteroid, and the shaft they'd carved out and added all those canisters of water to, and that the water in those would be turned entirely into vapor well before the asteroid itself got all the way up to melting temperature, and that the asteroid would then expand out into a sphere on a controlled basis. Or something like that. As I said, it's been years since I read that article.
The main point I was making, though, was that various sorts of larger, permanant habitable spaces in the black would be hollow spheres, cilinders, toruses, and whatnot... so it would be handy to have a way to simulate that in the background of a rendered scene in a form that isn't just a static backdrop and that can be changed dynamically. Say, have rivers that can be seen to flow (because the water texture applied to them is moving), or there's blinking lights on the towers, etc, etc. Basicaly make various sorts of curved space-station-interiors that can be customised and adjusted by the end user, possibly with some way to automatically add buildings, trees, roads and other features selectively across the surface of it that contour themseves to match the curvature, and that one could add their own buildings and other objects to the available mix that could be placed across its surface.
One interesting thing is that many asteroids are probably not big solid chunks but concentrations of, essentially, gravel that loosely clumps together.
Yeah, I saw that. Too bad, Larry Niven and Cordwainer Smith got a lot of use out of the ramjet.
I need to dig through my old Analogs again - I can't remember if the design was by G. Harry Stein or if he just reported it - but the ship design was elegant. A 600 foot diameter deuterium ice sphere at the nose, with some number of 150 foot diamater 300 foot tall passenger/freight modules stacked below it on a 20 foot diameter core (all modules removeable/re-arrangeable at trip end) and a nerva nuclear engine at the rear. The ice ball was the fuel, and the result was a steam-powered rocket run in continuous thrust mode, suitable for anything from Mars trips up to interstellar - just size the ice ball and the number of modules accordingly.
Nomad, if you can remember the title of the article, I'd be happy to know. Niven is my favourite hard SF author, so I'd like to read the article. I should however point out that he has been known to make mistakes in the science used in his novels. There is the classic case of the Ringworld. SF fans at a convention pointed out (chanting, I believe is the phrase used ;) ) that the Ringworld was unstable in the plane of spin. The acknowledgement of this was the basis of the sequel.
In principle, many of the large scale objects that are iconic to certain SF stories, like the Ringworld, the Pupeteer Klemperer rosette of homeworlds, the Raman spaceship etc could be made quite easily in terms of geometry. The difficulty is to make textures which make these things look realistic.
A bit more than "probably" — some of the smaller odds-and-ends moons of Jupiter and Saturn with wide, irregular orbits are thought to be captured asteroids. Their average densities are well below the density of the rock they're made of, so there have to be gaps and empty spaces in there, under a "crust" most likely of rock dust and ice. All the comets we've had close looks at so far are the same, except they have more ice in between the rocky chunks. It's suspected these chunks might be planetesimals that are the intermediate stage between a dusty disc around a star, and protoplanets that collide and grow to become planets in their own right.
The piece is called Bigger Than Worlds and you'll find it in Niven's Playgrounds of the Mind. Yr welcome.
...but to return to the original topic, it seems I'm not the only one who wishes there was more nearish-future hard (or at least semi-hard) sci-fi content. Any ideas who we could poke with a stick to start cranking it out?
Thanks Blind Owl... book is ordered :)
Poking a PA with a stick is rather likely to produce unexpected (and undesirable) results. They are much like cats; the more you poke, the less responsive they become (unless it's to render the stick, your hand, and most of your arm useless for weeks).
All right, then how about a carrot? The more people who express an interest in this sort of thing, the more likely someone will see a marketing opportunity.
Think of it! Maybe some day we'll see NEAR-FUTURE HARD SCI-FI CONTENT as a featured item!
If so, I'll wait till it goes on sale at 70% off.
You may want to check out the New Colony. It has textured interiors and working doors(I own it and have verified it). You will have to provide your own furniture and the walls can't be made invisibe, but it's a very good buy since it's a PC+ item. There is also a props expansion and a set of poses for Genesis 3, both male and female.
https://www.daz3d.com/new-colony
https://www.daz3d.com/new-colony-props
https://www.daz3d.com/trouble-brewing-poses
Does anyone own Space Base, Mars Colony, or Mars Habitat and can verify whether they have textured interiors with working doors?
Edit: From close examination of the promo images, Space Base probably has basic interiors as well. Petipet has a lot of interesting scifi items, including a spacecraft with several interior compartments. A lot of them are PC+ items.
https://www.daz3d.com/spaceship-antares
https://www.daz3d.com/sci-fi-cockpit-interior
https://www.daz3d.com/psi-barracks
https://www.daz3d.com/psi-medbay
https://www.daz3d.com/sci-fi-engine-room-a
https://www.daz3d.com/sci-fi-hanger-a
https://www.daz3d.com/sci-fi-corridor-a
and https://www.daz3d.com/sci-fi-lab could work as part of the Antares.
https://www.daz3d.com/oberon-station another space station.
Edit 2: just realized that the Antares is arranged so that it probably has artificial gravity.
Thanks, Zylox.
I looked at these and they seem very well done indeed, and a bargain at the PC+ price. I'll probably pick up The New Colony in the near future because there may be some elements I can use, but...
The overall design is suited to planets with a significant and presumably breathable atmosphere (i.e. no dome over the whole settlement, no airlocks on individual buildings), which kind of rules it out for e.g. Mars. Could the ideas in this thread possibly interest you in producing content of the sort that some of us seem to crave? If so, you may find a ready market for it. Seems to me there's a void that's just begging to be filled.
...and while I may suck at 3D modeling, I'm a fair hand at sketching. As for ideas & concepts, I've got a million if you need 'em. Hell, some are even semi-original.
Cheers, eh?
Blind Owl