Why the ISV Venture Star is a Brilliant Design

hey everyone who joanna from space dog here today i want to talk about memorable spacecraft in science fiction focusing on one in particular there are a lot of standout designs in sci-fi like the constitution class from the original series of star trek whose design language of saucer engineering and nacelles is so strong that anything using them is instantly recognizable as being from a star trek even the real life space shuttle was iconic the huge bright orange external tank with the two srbs and black and white orbiter strapped to the side of it was so odd and interesting looking that it's outshone even the apollo program saturn v it had such a deep cultural impact that if i say the word space plane you're probably thinking of something that is two-tone black and white like the shuttle but for many people myself included their favorite ship is one that was only on screen for maybe two minutes out of a two hour film if you cheated and looked at the thumbnail you'll know what this is the isv venture star the enormous cargo ship that goes between the solar system and alpha centauri and james cameron's avatar it's one of the twelve ships built to carry people and materials to pandora and bring back the highly prized but stupidly named unobtainium to earth but why a gigantic corporate cargo ship and not normandy or yamato or serenity or resinante or swordfish well for starters and the most obvious thing about it the two gigantic radiators an often overlooked feature that spacecraft need to have this is because out of the three ways to transfer heat conduction convection and radiation only the last one works in vacuum and even then it is a slow process so ships need to slowly radiate the heat away with large external panels without radiators the waste heat from the crew electronics reactor and whatever other hot things a ship has will build up and cook everything the shuttle had its radiators built into the cargo bay doors which is why it's always had the bay open after reaching orbit these white panels on the international space station aren't more solar panels they are the radiators for the external active thermal control system which collects waste heat using liquid coolant and moves it to the panels for whatever reason radiators are often left out of sci-fi designs the expanse despite its many other realistic elements doesn't include visible radiators which is kind of a shame the discovery one from 2001 a space odyssey was originally supposed to have some on its engine section but they weren't included due to fears the audience would mistake the big flat surfaces for wings the fact that the venture star does include radiators makes it stand out especially since they even glow it's not shown but the huge massa antimatter engines built using an obtainium from pandora one of the reasons the magic floaty rock is so important we're burning for nearly six months to decelerate the ship before its arrival with a lot of that heat still slowly leaving the ship after it arrived another reason i love the design is its size now there are a lot of large ships in sci-fi though they tend to be big just to be big rather than for any practical purpose but for the venture star it's more that it's long rather than huge there's plenty of other long craft in sci-fi like the hermes from the martian but that in particular seems to be a weird jumble of rearranged iss parts with a centrifuge shoved into the middle of it and an engine section glued to the back to its credit it does have two kinds of radiators but in my opinion it's still kind of an unimaginative nasa punk design especially compared to the hermes from the book older sci-fited long spindly truss spaceships too like the valley ford from silent running which is just so cool looking with those six domes at the front of the massive red spine going back to 2001 the discovery one was deliberately designed to be long as the crew section had to be kept far away from the nuclear reactors in the engine section radiation protection can be done with a massive shield like a big lump of lead or huge tanks of water but as any kerbal space program player knows the more mass you add onto your ship the more engines you need to push it up which needs more propellant which needs more engines which needs more propellant and things just get worse from there by pushing the crew far from the radiation source means the discovery one uses the inverse square law which sounds complicated but really just means that radiation exposure drops off rapidly over distance the venture star does exactly the same thing as the engines chuck out radiation while active but unlike the discovery the star takes it a step further it tows the payload passengers and crew far behind the engine section rather than pushing them ahead this again goes back to mass we know the crude section needs to be kept far away so why not build what would essentially be the burj khalifa on top of the engines well the burj khalifa weighs about half a million tons in earth's one g of gravity during the venture star's acceleration and deceleration phases it hits 1.5 g so such a structure would be three quarters of a million tons that needs more propellant that needs more engines things get out of control so instead of building a big heavy compressive structure on the top the venture star just pulls the payload below it on a lightweight tensile structure those are the big reasons why it's cool but there are so many little details that show how well thought out everything is for example while the passengers spend the entire six-year subjective travel time in cryosleep there were three crew teams that rotated through 20-month tours of watching over the ship they need artificial gravity thus the centrifuge which also folds down flat when under thrust and by subjective time i mean that's the length of time the ship experiences as time dilation has to be taken into account to an observer at earth the objective travel time to cross between the two stars is nearly seven years just under a year longer than what the ship experiences some more neat features the truss has shielding near the engine nozzles to protect it from the exhaust it has two different types of fuel tank for the hydrogen and antimatter there are robotic arms for loading and unloading the cargo section into the valkyrie shuttles remember what i said about black and white space planes the valkyries also get left behind when the isv returns to earth leaving more payload capacity for the precious unobtainium there is also that huge mirror on the back of the ship what's that for well the craft can only carry so much propellant which is used entirely on the alpha centauri side of the route for leaving and arriving earth and the solar system the ship instead uses a 16 kilometer diameter laser sail which attaches to the connection point between the radiators at the very top of the spacecraft that big mirror shield at the bottom of the ship protects it from being toasted by the laser as well as detaching during the coast stage and moving in front of the ship to protect it from interstellar dust all those features are why design constraints are important whether they're realistic or not for example the romulan de dairodex class has that huge negative space in the middle of it because it was designed with the constraint that the warpness cells had to see each other the battlestar galactica was built during a time when networked computers were very vulnerable to cylon hacking which translates into a surprisingly low tech but extremely characterful vessel when constraints are ignored you end up with things that can do everything and are boring because of it or don't fit in with the setting or situation they are in like with voyager and its seemingly bottomless pit full of torpedoes and shuttlecraft constraints can also be applied too literally or without care like that stupid mini warp nacelle that pops out of the top of the prometheus class because every part of the multi-vector attack mode just has to be its own vessel what happens after a battle when the middle part gets blown up can the top and bottom join together does starfleet have spare middle sections just lying around if they don't do they just shove in an oversized mckee raider in between and call it a day if you might need three ships for a situation just send three ships anyway the venture star follows mostly real science for its constraints so ends up being one of the more realistic spacecraft in sci-fi where form almost entirely follows function but that is exactly what makes it such an interesting design everything has a purpose everything has thought and consideration behind it and it still looks amazing this is the core of why i love the ship so much and i hope that maybe now you might too thanks for listening this is huji from space doc signing off [Music] you

Channel: Spacedock

Views: 376,363

Keywords: Spacedock, space dock, sci-fi, science fiction, ship design, venture star, isv venture star, isv, avatar, james cameron, avatar 2, lore, rda, humans, navi, breakdown, realism, science, physics, analysis, realistic, summary, retrospective, review, space, alpha centauri, valkyrie, hoojiwana

Id: -ov-fqmf9Iw

Length: 8min 25sec (505 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Visara57]

Came across this video literally just now and had to share it. I know nothing about spaceships but this analysis has given me even more (like that's possible) faith in Cameron.

Is there nothing he didn't think of ?

[u/VonBraun12]

Dont get me wrong, the VS is a well thought out designe. But it falls into the same issues as virtually all other Interstellar designs.

The biggest issue is Energy and how much more Energy everything has if you move quickly.

You probably know that there is something called the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. This is essentially the afterglow of the Big Bang. The first light inprinted into the night sky. This CMB is very weak, however if you move very quickly something called Blueshifting happens.
Basically, if you move quickly you compress incomming radiowaves. Or just waves in general. Doing this is called the Doppler Effect. And what happens is that Incomming waves get an increased Amplitude. So they appear stronger.

In the case of something like the Venture Star, this Cosmic Blueshift would increase the Energy of the CMB and indeed all incomming light to such an extend it would turn into Gamma Rays.

This is bad for a lot of reasons. The main one is that now every particle you encounter has significantly more energy than it usually has. Imagine it like this, a Photon hitting you at normal speeds is like a Baseball. The same photon at 50% the speed of light would feel like a Freight Train.
This means whatever shield you have is constantly bombarded with Radiation similar to the levels inside a Nuclear Reactor melting down. This rapidly heats up a Shield and would cause it to disintegrate if not cooled.

This is why detaching the Shield for the Venture Star is a bad design decision. The shield has less mass and thus thermal capacity than the ship. So it would just melt away. Even so, the shield is not nearly big enough. The entire Hemisphere of the sky you are facing has increased levels of Radiation duo to the Blueshift. A realistic shield would look closer ot the one from Sunshine.
More over, a Shield would be layered. Stand off Distance is a nice idea but having multiple layers is better.

Of course, the bigger the shield the more Drag you experience. So that needs to be taken into consideration as well.

[u/Evangelion217]

Thanks for this video!