The "science" in science fiction has tended to get a little blurry in recent decades. Mostly gone are the tales of things that we might actually do, that don't depend on magical ultrafuture technology to erase the inconvenient distances between the stars. Star Wars is fantasy, not SF. Even Star Trek is mostly fantasy. Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, Serenity, ect. all depend on FTL drives that might as well be a wave of Gandalf's magic wand for all we can know.
My SF is hard SF*. These are known and reasonably projected technologies. The heliogyro solar sail ship that graces my little animation above (and the background of this page) is known technology - not tested in detail, but based on sound scientific understanding. Given reasonable advances in materials technology, they virtually cannot not work.
I was raised on the Moon landings, for me hard SF can come true. It is not that I think space colonization is inevitable or even perhaps desireable short-term, but it is that it is possible, and sooner or later unless Western civilization hits the skids, we will do it. Because it is able to be done, because other societies are going to do it.
But even in hard SF, the technology is not the story. The story is the story. :) With that in mind, I wrote down all the background technology and society background information in "The Old Space Dog's Guide to the Commercial Ships of the Solar System" and am now writing a story that takes that universe for granted as the background for a story of adventure. This will be a story about people who live in a populated solar system, people who live in space full-time and have never been to Earth. People have tended to take the easy way out and make aliens live in other star systems: put people in space full-time for a few hundred years, and they will become alien. Socially for sure, and considering the ambient radiation levels in space, maybe genetically as well.
Okay, enough jabber for now. :) Here is the Guide, and my novel will be forthcoming when I finish it. Also stay tuned for more pics and possibly animations from the Guide's universe. Also, my interest is in popularizing a certain kind of hard SF, not personal reward, so feel free to write your own novels/comics/ect in the Guide's universe, just credit me somewhere as the inspiration. My novel will be my novel, but my universe is open-source. :) I couldn't have written about it without the unsung work of many scientists in space propulsion and related fields.
The Old Space
Dog's Guide to the
Commercial Ships of the Solar System
(pdf format, requires Acrobat reader)
(recommend right-clicking and "Save As")
Novel Harbin 6
Coming Soon!
Milkweed Blueprints!
The Photonics Milkweed class light freighter is probably my personal favorite of my ship designs, and now you can download
the blueprints! Just click on the thumbnails for a large (400-ish kilobytes)
image.
Full Color Side View
*Hard SF: SF which does not involve any violations of known physical laws and the technology of which is based on reasonable extrapolations of existing and known technology. In other words, although you probably don't want to explain your technology in detail in a novel, you could explain it in detail if you so wished. Unfortunately I am not a physicist, the hardness of my SF can only go so far, but everything is based on existing or proposed technologies that should actually work in some form in the real world.
Commercial Ships of the Solar System
(pdf format, requires Acrobat reader)
(recommend right-clicking and "Save As")
Novel Harbin 6
Coming Soon!
Milkweed Blueprints!
The Photonics Milkweed class light freighter is probably my personal favorite of my ship designs, and now you can download
the blueprints! Just click on the thumbnails for a large (400-ish kilobytes)
image.
Full Color Side View
*Hard SF: SF which does not involve any violations of known physical laws and the technology of which is based on reasonable extrapolations of existing and known technology. In other words, although you probably don't want to explain your technology in detail in a novel, you could explain it in detail if you so wished. Unfortunately I am not a physicist, the hardness of my SF can only go so far, but everything is based on existing or proposed technologies that should actually work in some form in the real world.