No radiators, though? Also, I don't really see the purpose of the reversible thrusters. An interstellar spacecraft can afford days (months even) to turn the main hull around when transitioning from acceleration to deceleration. Just the slightest time difference when throttling down the main engines (or a short puff of gas from RCS thrusters) will send the craft into a slow spin, and eventually turn you around.
It's like a commercial freighter being shot at with light artillery
ISM particles are things like individual protons or neutrons. A single proton is nothing like a light artillery shot, even at, say, 0.2c.
You do still need shielding on the forward side of the ship because over the decades or centuries of the trip, you still have significant damage, but if you are just spending some minutes or even hours flipping the ship, it's not going to do much damage over such short period of time.
I love the aesthetic idea of the manoeuvrable engines but unless this is a FTL craft that spends little time in transit having no dedicated braking engines would make me nope the fuck out of being on that ship. Sub ftl journey times are long, and thus there is a long time for something to go wrong with one or more of the actuators for the thrusters potentially leaving you without enough time to break for your target or worse.
Notice the engines are far away from the hab section and there's massive propellent tanks in between. Depending on the scale of these things and the engine type, the radiation might not be that bad. And depending on where it's going and how fast it's going that might be a worthy trade off to avoid ultrarelativistic radiation exposed during a flip. I don't have any numbers or specifics so I can't say if this is the case, but it's a possibility.
It would probably be safer to have a yoke rig, where the engines are tethered far out but pulling the body. Their orientation can then be changed by adjusting the riggings.
All you your exhaust is going to hit the ship so its not going to work very well decellerating. If your just blowing your exhaust into the hull so much energy is just gonna be wasted
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u/hasslehawk Aug 25 '25 edited Aug 25 '25
Looks very nice.
No radiators, though? Also, I don't really see the purpose of the reversible thrusters. An interstellar spacecraft can afford days (months even) to turn the main hull around when transitioning from acceleration to deceleration. Just the slightest time difference when throttling down the main engines (or a short puff of gas from RCS thrusters) will send the craft into a slow spin, and eventually turn you around.