Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2010/07/26/spaceship-engines-not-real-ones-3d-ones-for-games/

cool, from wikipedia

My spaceship (the one I’m creating for *Vega Strike (whether it ever ends up being used there or not, it sure is fun designing it)) is intended to be *Andolian. As you can see in this part of the design thread for my spaceship on the game site forums, there has been a very beautiful 3D model done for the Andolian faction before.

Chatting with REBEL3 – one of the contributors to the thread – we decided that it would be nice to give the franklin some feature in common with the existing Andolian model. The previous model has some very distinctive engines, which I immediately took a shine to and so I’ve decided to give the engines on the franklin a quick makeover to bring them in line with this previous spaceship from the Vega Strike game.

So I want to make my engines spiky like the engines on the existing Andolian spaceship model, but at the same time it would be a nice idea to know something about spaceship engine design in the real world, as some kind of basis for the spikes on the game spaceship engine. First I read the wikipedia page about spaceship propulsion. And after following the links I think they might be magnetic vanes for producing vectored thrust.

*Vega Strike is an open-source space simulation game similar to Elite – but hopefully with much better graphics. It can be downloaded (for free) here, but be careful the full game with sound is a huge download.

*Andolians are ‘by far the most heavily industrialized of the human factions, living dense, highly coordinated existences across over a hundred star systems, linked together by access to shared memories and information. The Andolians are well known for both their technological prowess, their passion for abstract and collective, rather than personal, progress, and a willingness to take extreme measures in order to achieve complete solutions to issues deemed problematic.’

According to their entry in the game wiki.