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Headdie — HT - LTCV 38 Backstop
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Published: 2013-03-02 23:00:22 +0000 UTC; Views: 1064; Favourites: 7; Downloads: 14
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Description
HT - LTCV 38 Backstop is a combat vehicle designed for operation on low tech worlds with only basic manufacturing capability. Designed so that all components with the exception of the on board fusion reactor being replaceable with civilian equivalents and manufacturable on words early in colonisation from any suitable material to hand.While the design is less than optimal in a combat sense it is easily maintainable with many external components often repairable enough with a big enough hammer and a welding kit to limp back to a safe place.
The vehicle features a forward heavy laser turret, rear quad light laser for AA and CIWS carry platforms for infantry with variable height ladders and variable height blast shields to protect the wheels and provide infantry cover when disembarking.
Technical
Created for weekly competition 38
Preview mesh at [link]
WIP shots at [link]
Created and rendered in Blender 2.49 with GIMP post processing to composit the additional renders and no texture
Time taken 20 hours
Final Render 40 mins
451243 Verts, 337263 Faces 2 lights
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Special Note
This piece was created in response to the 38th weekly competition which was a vehicle round with the theme of "unstoppable war" which on first note sounds simple but when I considered the theme more deeply I started to ask how do you represent the concept of an unstoppable war in a vehicle. after some thought I came to 3 conclusions.
First. do a Warhammer 40K Imperium of Man style so big and heavy that you can hit it with a rocket and it's still shiny,
Two flip that and do a post apocalyptic scene where the war has taken nearly every thing from us and yet it still rages on with ramshackle home brew machines held together with tape and string,
Or third, humanity has spread to new worlds, taking war with us requiring the availability of heavy combat machines that these starter colonies can maintain locally from what they have to hand.
This third concept is the one I eventually went for but I want to say a special thanks to Concept World and who ever dreamed this one up it's been a real challenge both technically and conceptually
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Comments: 7
Very nicely done.
At first blush, though, I question the basic assumption behind this work. Large, heavy machines are very vulnerable, just because they are large and heavy, just as large, heavy organisms are the most vulnerable; they are the ones that die first in a mass extinction. The unstoppable ones would be the size of bacteria or less.
By the time we are in the business of colonizing remote worlds, nanotechnology will be mature, and we will be making self-replicating machines on all scales, including especially those smaller than bacteria. Manufacture and repair won't be the primary problem. The problem will be control.
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Certainly a fair viewpoint and one I hadnt considered though you also bring up another point in a way when you mention control.
As I understand things developing a way for the nanites to store and process complicated instructions would be impossible under known physics which means instructions will have to be processed by a macro scale device and then transmitted to the nanites which then opens the door to things such as signal jamming and how to develop countermeasures for that.
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Communication and control will certainly pose problems, and we don't yet know what the solutions, if any, will be.
A couple of avenues for investigation: It has recently become known that bacteria communicate in rather sophisticated ways among themselves by chemical signals. Genetic modifications to neurons enable them to emit light and be controlled by light, which suggests a possible control mechanism for nanites.
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I had missed that one, will certainly look it up. The idea of emitting and relaying light signals would be very useful and I imagine tricky to block on a wide scale.
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SPOILER ALERT
There's a science fiction series running on the Science Channel -- maybe you've seen it -- about first contact of Earthlings with aliens. I was surprised and gratified at how well it tracks my own ideas of how our colonization of some remote world might go.
Shortly after first radio contact, a craft from interstellar space arrives at the verge of the solar system and warns of when it will be arriving at Earth. It appears to be driven by a solar sail. Some time later it halts in low Earth orbit and goes silent, but mysterious near-spherical pods appear here and there on the surface of Earth and begin to replicate themselves. Their function is not yet clear, but they seem to have a certain affinity for people.
Note: no giant flying saucers hovering over major cities with no visible means of support. No craft wandering around shooting at people, wrecking cities etc. All such standard cliches are abandoned, thank goodness.
Earth sends up a probe, a modified Mars rover, to investigate the mother ship in orbit. The mother ship obligingly opens up, as if to invite the probe inside. What the probe finds is not remotely like what is expected. It does not appear to be a mechanical ship with a hollow interior inhabited by a crew of intelligent organisms of some kind. It appears to be a machine melded with one giant organism at its heart. Little else is yet known.
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