Prize Blogging

What day is it?

It's Thursday?  What the heck?  How did that happen already?  

Last night turned out to be a good evening but not exactly a productive evening as I had imagined.  I did however get a little inspired for the ship design project for Mr. Froyd after reading an article he sent me.  It turns out my theories about space ship design back in high school were quite on the nose according to the physicist that wrote the article.  Balls.  Yes, balls.

The standard space fighter in popular culture is based on combat aircraft that we are used to.  Dogfights are action packed and make for good movies and television shows.  However they don't actually mesh up with what physics in space would allow.  The closest I've seen is Babylon 5, where the the little X shaped fighters would rotate rather than turn to achieve optimal firing position while they drifted along.  This is a good way to fight, however the ship designers didn't really make the ship the ideal shape for it.  Their ships were longer on the horizontal axis than the vertical axis.  This makes no sense because if you are using rotation to aim in a three dimensional space, you should have the craft be able to rotate to any point with the same amount of force and in the same amount of time.  A craft that isn't symmetrical along nearly every axis would then rotate at different speeds depending on which axis it is rotating on.  This is detrimental to training a pilot as they would have to learn all the various rotation rates of the craft.  If all the rotations possible take the same amount of time, the pilot can then simply deal with the disorientation of three dimensional space and will have increased reaction times.  So the best shape you can use to achieve this universal rotation time is a sphere.  Balls.

So I came up with a design in high school that was a center spherical cockpit that was surrounded by a ring connected to the cockpit on the Z and X axis.  I figured the outer ring would be the place to install the weapons and auxiliary engines.  You could then simply attach different outer rings to the central cockpit sphere for different missions or for rapid redeployment.  Also, if there was a problem, the pilot could simply disengage the out ring and fire the main engine.  The sphere alone would be a difficult target to hit and they would be leaving the ring packed with ammunition and possibly a remote detonator, essentially making it a space mine.  Neat.

Anyway.  I must go now.  Good day, sirs.  

Good day.

Froyd wins!

Sorry Lars...your prize is coming...I promise.