Sunday 10 March 2013

HummingBird Starfighter part I

Hello all. After another short hiatus, this blog once more forges forward !

    Below is the near-finished humming bird star-fighter, a very classic take at our beloved and highly unlikely little space fighters. Starfighter is a lot sexier than short-range autonomous manned interceptor kill vehicle, so we will stick to the less elaborate but slightly more appealing naming, shall we ? :)




 As stated above, the design is very conservative, both shape-wise and architecture-wise. It is the smallest hull that can take an interplanetary engine and house both a small laser and a particle beam gun (the grey rectangular pod on the right side). With every economy of mass still made and extensive use of lightweight materials and structure, the humming bird is still beyond the 200 metric tons mark, without long-range tanks -that's the weight of a large cold-war bomber. Not exactly the flimsy little ship most would imagine.



I have not included the propellant mass tanks as they would have cluttered the views. Still, there isn't a cubic centimeter not crammed with systems in this design: the powerplant and engine weighting more than two thirds of the total mass.


Operating the vessel for long times (say beyond the asteroid belt or with orbital slingshot technique) is beyond the capability of the crew endurance -even short transits between planets painfully showed that the primitive accommodation made the crew more or less useless on arrival.

There will be a more detailed description of this ship in the next post, where I will polish the texture and add a few details.

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