Why the ISV Venture Star is a Brilliant Design
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- čas přidán 28. 12. 2021
- Spacedock delves into an exceptional ship design from James Cameron's #Avatar, the ISV Venture Star.
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Give it up for Hooj on his first Spacedock thought piece!
I thought this one turned out really great. - Dan
Can you please do more ships from The Expanse?
Have always liked this ship. Vid on the Necron World Engine maybe?
Very well done and well presented! Was a good first piece of his!
If this is his first, I'm looking forward to many more!
He reminds me of Orac from Blake's 7, love his stuff :)
Never realized how much actual engineering design went into this ship.
I think they hired actual engineers to design it. Avatar had a huge budget for all the world building.
@@matthewconnor5483 Incl. recruiting biologists for the fauna. Every plant has a latin name and a description.
A lot of Real and cleverly thought out science and engineering went into basically every aspect of Avatar its absolutely insane and the main reason why I love the avatar universe
@@blckwtr2880 Not every part.
Charakters where awful! To trust that douchebag of protagonist is plain stupid :/
It seems almost everything in that "shared" universe is extremely well thought out. From "Aliens" to "Balder Runner" to "Avatar" everything seems really well considered to a point that it is even plausible.
These looked so sick in the 2nd movie. The landing sequence was terrifying.
Literally, that landing sequence was arguably one of the best shots in the movie. It was just amazing
yea just watched it and those engines really are insanely powerful
I especially like the part where the whole fleet was slowing down accordingly to Pandora with their very bright and powerful engines.
Dude it was so fucking awesome
thought those massive engines were designed for vacuum, never thought they can actually perform a landing burn inside atmosphere.
RDA on the first movie:
"Well, these ships are among the most advanced tech mankind has built. As such, it doesnt come off cheap either. Lets have it stationed on the pandora just one at any given time and have it arrive and depart at regulated intervals."
RDA on the second movie:
"In fealty to the God-Emperor, our undying Lord, and by the grace of the golden throne..."
To be fair, as the General mentioned, the stakes are now much higher then simple mining ^^
this time is for colonization, because earth was already considered unsustainable
@@LtCWest Yep, chips were down, and it was all or nothing.
@@edba1.037And it would be only the people who killed earth in the first place who’d be rich enough to go to Pandora. It’s a shame that people don’t see that the RDA is betraying humanity as much as Jake is. Giving how low the quality of living is for middle class folks as Jake mentions in the first movie, I don’t assume that they’re gonna invite some of the regular joes to live on Pandora.
@@Ned-nw6ge They absolutely will bring "regular joes" lol
Watching that ISV fleet decelerate towards Pandora was amazing! That was basically humanity saying, "we're back, and we ain't playing nice this time."
So far the Navi have fought a mining groups security and a fisherman boat.
Wait until Jake reminds them they’re basically going easy.
it's gotta be the most impractical way to land to. no landing zone is safe when you scorch the entire bottom like that. would of made more sense to have a crew come in and clear actual landing spots.
@@Mike-jv8bvI disagree, scorching everything was safer considering that all the wildlife wants to destroy humans.
@@Mike-jv8bv nah the whole point was to just remove everything from that area and build a base there. Way easier to just burn everything down
It was cool, but don't be such a Imp sounding degen.
I recall reading somewhere the Venture Star was originally designed _much_ longer, maybe three times longer, for a more realistic distance between the engines and crew but was shortened so the thing would fit on screen.
Great design, my favourite part of the whole movie.
Pegasus from BBC Voyage to the Plantes hasn't had that problem :)
The design was based on Charles Pellegrino's Valkyrie, in which the cable between the engines and the crew pod was 10 km long.
@@theresafisher8781 I was wondering if anyone else was aware of that book.
@@piotrd.4850 It wasn't an Interstellar ship, nor was it designed to be viewed in IMAX sized and 3D Silver screens. Still though it was a great design and entertaining Mockumentary. It even inspired a short-lived series on ABC called 'Defying Gravity'.
MY favorite part of the movie is when the Humans blew up the navi's tree.
Mankind all-the-way baby.
I saw Avatar 2 today. At one point I thought: "Damn, SpaceDock will love those radiators"
and i will too
@@littlesneez9002 and seeing the radiator plumes burn the forest...that's like some Halo shit...when Covenant Ships use glassing beams to burn the surface of a target planet.
In short, the Venture Stars pulled off some Covenant method of...burning the Pandoran Rainforest.
@@scarecrow108productions7 You mean exhaust plumes? Those were the engines doing the burning. But ya, that shot was incredibly awesome. Especially later when they show the settlement and you get a sense for just how damn big the area was that it scorched.
@@scarecrow108productions7 And remember those trees being disintegrated were as big as Kelutral (Hometree). Basically a nuke.
@@Big_Red1 Compared to the size of the destruction shown, that settlement is way too tiny. From the height that the ISV was hovering, the distance between the 2 exhausts was way larger than that scorched area. I believe either the landing was elsewhere, or the plants on Pandora grow quick enough to cover kilometres of scorched land in a year. There is no way the scorched area could be that small.
This has the hands of James Cameron all over it. He's not perfect but in every film he makes everything has a lived in feel and a sense of reality, even in sci fi.
Cameron became an electrical engineer first before he became a filmmaker. That's why his visions in his movie have an underlying sense of realism.
@@Juice-chan And a truck driver! Fascinating dude.
The world building is what makes Avatar special. And it's one of the reasons why Avatar isn't just Dancing with Wolves or Pocahontas in space. I've always found this argument absurd. Plenty of movies borrow from each other
@@jackiemortes well frankly id rather have his derivatives over the crap Disney keeps churning out.
@@jackiemortes I don't think it's absurd to wish for a better story when the world building is that good.
Considering how much the story focused on the human-na’vi conflict, it’s insane how well thought out this world and its tech is
Had a fair amount of time to think about it!
Avatar worldbuilding is nothing simple like other big franchises. Cameron actually hired a biologist to create/design the plants of Pandora, he also hired a linguist to create the Na'Vi language based on Austronesian languages in Polynesia and other Native American languages.
That's why the "Dances with wolves with Blue space cats Pocahontas" criticism is very stupid.
I know there's some similarities but dismissing the other elements of the film just because you hate similarities with other films is not really a good criticism. It just makes you look shallow and not capable of digging deeper to analyze the film with serious criticisms.
@@randomly_random_0 going to quote this comment next time someone argues with me about Avatar.
I wouldn't even surprised. Cameron had this story on his notebook since late 1980s. He's is waiting for the right moment for the media technology to improve and it did that's why he made the first film.
Wasted potential
I remember when Avatar came out and we watched it, my father commented how production thought about the design and pointed to the dual rotor choppers which seemed to be made for a jungle enviroment. So it's not just the spaceship that is realistic :D
The choppers design is interesting. The idea of using ducted fan over open rotor was bounced around and tested a few times, but it seems it never really launched. That said, with lower gravity it would be easier to implement. As for the rest of the design, they are clearly designed to invoke hueys, and, by assosiaton Vietnam.
I love those Scorpion helicopters. Only thing they messed up was the sound - they sound just like a regular 4-blade helicopter, whereas dual contra-rotating ducted fans would sound more like a turboprop commuter plane. Less wop, more buzz. But anyway, what really impressed me about them was a little detail I saw. I was thinking to myself, "Yeah right, how are they doing to drive those silly rotors?" And then I saw that it has a tube running from the fuselage between the rotors to the center, obviously containing a driveshaft going to a gearbox which I'm sure would contain a very simple set of bevel gears. Sensible, simple, rugged, easy to maintain, just like it should be. Straight out of a truck axle! And like the other commenter said, they get away with the small rotors because the gravity is lower. Large, slow blades are more efficient than small fast ones, which is why a helicopter can hover but an airplane with the same horsepower and weight can't stand on it's prop. But giant blades are a huge PITA so it'd be nice to skip them if they're not needed. Pandora gravity is lower, so they're not needed. And I just LOVE that things are designed so well in this franchise that you can have these real engineering conversations about them, as opposed to most sci-fi stuff where the design is like "It's bubbly shaped because it's made by squid people."
@@JETZcorp oh i forgot about my comment but I love these replies. Im more of a digital electronics guy and mechanics are a bit lost to me so I dont fully understand all the things you said but Its always nice to see people geek out about something they love. Agree on the last part, scifi is my favorite genre and seeing some explanations just being techno babble or "space magic" is so tiresome and lazy. Attention to detail in worldbuilding isnt important for the story and the majority of the audience but my god does it make it so much better because its thought out and believable!
It's a shame the actual "Avatar" concept makes no sense at all
@@davidelrizzo I mean, science fiction always involves some form of unobtainium and bullshido. The Dune series is science fiction royalty, but hoooo boy there's so e weird shit going on. I don't think the concept of Avatars is nearly as ridiculous as navigating folds in space-time using the mental capacities afforded by Space Cocaine. The Force in Star Wars is turbo nonsense. None of this stops these series from being excellent. At least Avatar does have a pretty extensive technical lore behind everything, including the Avatar Program itself.
If you want something more believable, perhaps a historical fiction like Titanic is more your speed. It's a real challenge to find inaccuracies in that thing. Even the wardrobes are straight out of period catalogs matching where that character would have gone shopping.
So many artists fail to grasp this. Everyone loves to call out the 'rule of cool', without taking into account that designs built on the rule of constraints and science end up being far cooler and more endearing over time. The human brain just likes things that make sense. Regardless of how pretty a nonsensical design is, it'll never get the same level of attachment from people as one where form follows function.
No, the biggest problem is that radiators look, to the uninitiated, look almost like wings.
obviously any design made for science and constraints will be cooler, they include radiators.
@@TheTrueAdept Interestingly, while that's not what the wings on the Normandy are, they do have radiators on them.
Yep. Realistic designs oftentimes turn out to be gorgeous looking and age really well, while the "cool" ones sometimes look stupid from the get go. I mean, there's a lot of absolutely beautiful planes and other hardware that are not designed to be good looking, but they are.
But Venture Star does look awesome even if we disregard the realism of the design. The warm color of the radiators on the cold background of the planet, the overall proportions, the curves etc. It's simply a good looking ship.
@@lurgee1706 That's a good point, I hadn't thought about it, but you seem to be right. Functional designs do seem to age well, and those stylized ones just go out of fad fast. I can think of many cars that fall into this, while most modern military vehicles are heavily function over form, and all continue to look good. Even the classic military Jeep still has its charm over countless commercial knockoffs.
Sigh. Just as I swear every engineer must take some basic art courses if they design things people interact with, every artist that's doing art of technical items must understand some basic technical concepts.
Unobtanium was a common term used in materials engineering for quite some time. The American version was Wishgrantium.
Basically they are short hand for a material that had to have properties beyond current technology.
Can-not-obtain-ium :D
Un-obtainable-ium :D
Thank you for the hint! I did not see it.
That makes sense for theoretical materials -- another example is 'exotic matter' -- but they'd probably rename unobtanium after they've found it. It's a small gripe to have with the movie, but a gripe none the less. It makes sense but at the same time, it doesn't.
@@araknas3981 Maybe it was called that by someone when it was first discovered and it just stuck because, y'know, people are dumb?
@@araknas3981 You do not yet convince me. Yes, they'd _probably_ rename unobtanium after they've found it, but only probably. The name still is well imaginable. It has a natural foundation, and on top of that, one which allows for a great amount of mystical ivy.
Another thing that's great about the design is that it was clearly intended to never see any sort of atmosphere. I'm not talking about the wings, but rather that every bit and piece is exposed and not behind fancy but heavy fairings or cowlings. This is especially evident with those fuel tanks. Spheres are the most efficient storage method for using minmal materials for maximum volume, which is mostly unlike "NASA-punk", where tanks are cylindrical with hemispherical caps due to having to be sent up in the package of a rocket body.
Numquam femina eris.
Yes! Sci fi is held back by the trope that every spacecraft has to be sleek and aerodynamic.
@@joratto2833 Well B5 tends to disagree (look up the Earth Alliance Starfurry for instance, or the Omega class destroyer)
Well now that I think about it, all the human spaceships in B5 except the shuttles and the thunderbolts are basically bricks, designs only valid outside an atmosphere :-)
@@srenkoch6127 there are definitely cool sleekly ships. It’s just good when that’s not the only thing that exists. Space bricks can look cool and practical and atmospheric drag is a limiting factor to a design.
In reality spacecraft do need heavy fairings and cowlings even if they don't see atmosphere. Look at the ISS for example. Space debris has huge velocity and will destroy anything unprotected.
I really hope we get to see the ISV Venture Star again, or even better, multiple of its class or even newer developments. And hopefully they adhere to engineering constraints as well as the original.
We might see it again in Avatar 2. Or maybe, an upgraded version!
@@MatterBeamTSF I would love to see that!
They will come back escorting some modified ship or big rock who will kill pandora life when striking it at 0.2c, after what happened in the first avatar, earth will go full genocide, plus a dead planet is easier to mine than a hive mind controlled one.
@@AemerFactory Why use up so much vauable propellant? just unleash a bioweapon tailored to the ecosystem and be done, much less weight to throw around
@@alexanderbraun7887 bioweapon might have a bad habit of uncontrollable evolution, and then start to target everyone indiscriminately. Too dangerous to use it on the planet you intend to land after
I've always loved humanities design approach in Avatar. One of the most relestic takes on future Human space travel and tech. Care more about the tech than the blue monkey storyline.
With Avatar it almost seems like the less screentime something gets, the more thought out the design is in terms of functionality. As the stuff shown in atmosphere is all more fanciful or stylized than the Venture Star.
I get that they were going for a late 60s early 70s aesthetic akin to Vietnam era helicopters (even the dedicated attack ones seem based on the AH-1 Cobra more than anything else and that itself is from the late 60s and is literally developed from the UH-1 Iroquois aka the Huey) and whatnot. And that the shuttle was deliberately meant to look like the STS and it really seems like its looks were more to to with function than that of the rotorcraft but still pale in comparison to the Venture Star. It seems like most of the thought there was in looks, rather than in function.
But I guess this is to be expected in the end, one does afterall want to create something that people will identify with the movie/franchise. And you can never forget that the people who see any of these pieces of tech, are not people at war with blue catmonkeys.... they are people sitting in a theater or on a couch, watching a film.
yep most of those blue monkey scenes are stupid af.
@@whyjnot420 There's a video essay somewhere about the detail the film composers put into the music of the blue people, complete ethnomusicology based on harmonic series, the amount of objects in Pandora's sky, microtones and other crazy detailed concepts of biology that effects music which took literal years of research to create.... exactly none of which made it into the actual movie :(
@@musicalaviator it is an interesting topic. Generally speaking, aside from the actual, ripped almost wholesale from Ferngully story, a remarkable amount of thought was put into various aspects of the movie.
I think though, if the point you are making was in regard to that last bit I said about who is watching. Well, that does lead to stuff like what you are saying too and it can be annoying as all hell at times. But given that this is a product offered up for consumption in a capitalist market and that I am fully onboard with that as a concept, the real kicker is if it is done well or not.
Another thing to note is that the more screentime any one thing gets (all other things being equal that is), the better the chances of it being something focus groups will either comment on or be asked to comment on. I don't think I need to go on any further here.
You monster!
Seeing even more of this ship in action in Avatar 2 was great
I like what James Cameron did with the Venture Star. Like Terminator and Alien series, he creates a world that makes the nearly impossible possible, without playing the audience for a fool.
I always just thought of this ship as throwaway nasa-punk type stuff. I did notice the awesome radiators but that was about it. Cool to see it was actually a really well thought out realistic design :)
I didn't know those were radiators. I thought they were just some Hollywood magic space engines. Good to know that some competent engineering occasionally makes it to the big screen.
Its impressive that most of the vehicle we find in avatar are plausible and actually are grounded in reality. I recently watched avatar 2 and during the opening sequence i noticed that the dozers are quite accurate to what we currently have and are well animated
It’s funny that the most unrealistic vehicle is probably the c-21 dragon as it’s rotors are way too small to life it off the ground
@@omarbaba9892 Wings of a bumblebees are also to small, but they're flying :)
@@thejohnson2328 that’s different to rotors
The Dragon gunship also has thrusters for extra lift when needed, and the design is barely armored so it’s actually fairly lightweight for its size. Lastly, the rotors don’t need to be as big on pandora on account of the lower gravity and higher air density.
Same with the Scorpions, Samsons, Kestrels, and Seawasps. But due to the low gravity, large rotors aren't necessary like here on earth.
"We never see these engines firing." Yeah, about that...
Maybe my new favourite movie moment now.
Actually, there is a low render deleted scene of the Venture Star departing from Pandora on CZcams ^^
Hello guys. The Rocinante from The Expanse do have the radiators. There are six of them. Two located in the upper part of the ship hear the Antennas array, and four in the back of the engineering module, on the opposite side of the cargo airlock. They are not that big, probably that's why you missed them. And they work not just by radiating heat, but constantly evaporating small amount of water through them. When water sublimates in vacuum it is cooled to a 0C. Maybe it is not that efficient, but does not require the presence of huge radiators. Happy New year to you!!!
Also considering that the Rocinante was designed as an escort ship for patrols around Jupiter and Saturn the amount of heat and radiation is drastically reduced compared to that of earth orbit.
@@gold-818 most of the heat would be waste heat from electronics and engines onboard the roci not necessarily the sun cooking it besides you have to worry about interstellar radiation aswell.
@@hunterjames7786 The background temperature of space (interstellar radiation) is completely negligible, especially for systems that run as hot as humans. Point about waste heat from sources inside the ship still stands.
@E.L. Crisler no it's not, interstellar space has no reason at all to cook you, you have radiation though. We id not assume space in our system would be cold, rather that it would have *no* temperature, because it is vacuum, empty
That is interesting, I will have to look for those "radiators" on the pictures. Evaporating water is in essence open cycle cooling, it wastes coolant. Sadly these radiators could maybe shed the heat from living support systems, but not waste heat from the multi-terawatt Epstein drive. Thankfully, these engines are *magic* so no problem with waste heat
The Venture Star is IMO the best thing about that movie. Don't misunderstand-I liked Avatar, but the ship really is great, and I have got to be honest with myself that so much else in the movie was done elsewhere, sometimes much better. Not necessarily so with that ship.
Would love to see you guys take a look at Space: Above and Beyond. Yeah, it's another fighters-move-like-jets show, but so much else about the show was really well-it kind of had a Wing Commander vibe to me at the time with the fairly decent portrayal of different ship classes that I can forgive the notion of dogfights with fighters that fly like jets in space. I'd love a closer look at this mostly forgotten property.
Agreeing with pretty much everything you said and just wanted support for a little coverage of Space: Above and Beyond. I have quite fond memories of that short lived show.
Love SAAB. Always will. The gun turrets on fighters made a lot of sense and the Hammerhead design was amazing.
I always thought of Avatar as Dances with Wolves on Mars
@@mpetersen6 It's also Ferngully and Pocahantas and a couple of other regurgitations of the same "profound" and "important" Hollywood message.
@@knghtbrd
Well nobody ever said Hollyweird ever has an original thought.
Loved these in Avatar 2, they looked so human yet so alien with how destructive they were and those massive engines just turning everything within a 4 km radius to glass.
I’m glad that the Venture Stars returned in Avatar 2 and displayed the powerhouses of engines they have
Ever since watching the movie years ago I've been obsessed with the Valkyrie shuttle and space vehicles that resemble its design / aesthetic.
Interesting about heat in space. Makes you wonder why we don’t see heat seeking ship to ship weapons in sci-fi
Because most Sci-Fi authors don't know about this.
(some few know but don't include it for storyline purposes, even fewer do include it).
in the SF game, the Normandy has an internal heat sink that they can use to be "stealthy" but only for a limited time)
Probably because the process of dumping waste heat from spaceships is really slow and doesn't produce a large enough IR signature. It would be easier to track drive plumes or radar pings than weak heat signatures. Plus todays heat-seeking missiles are easily fooled by flares or good exhaust nozzle design.
It also doesn’t help in military sci-fi how the radiators would be large targets that would have your epic space battleship crippled after a few hits. It’s easier to just handwave it away with super tech or internal heat sinks.
Honestly I always thought there were so many ideas you could use this heat for in stories. Like say they have some super conductive future space metal that you could shunt the heat into to be used in the engine system or when you arrive at a planet you could remove and replace the heat sink in the ship so that the heat could be reused on planets as a fuel source or in helping to terraform frozen worlds.
internal heat sinks and retractable radiators are the only way you can have a warship that isnt made of glass, and then you'll likely end up with something massive
@@danadraper6773 on the contrary, flares and some nozzle design doesn't help you that much. It's a cat and mouse game but relying on such a quickly developing field to not develop a counter to you complicated nozzles is a waste of time. I'd go in the direction of active counter measures. Lasers to blind the seeker head, or anti-missile missiles and so forth.
"ISV Venture Star" is definitely one of the cooler names for a vessel like that.
I hope you do a follow up to this because of the new scene in Avatar the way of Water 👏
Everything about the design of Avatar, especially the human vehicles, is amazing.
and there's still no hyperdrives
Their choice if land warfare equipment was absolutely ridiculous however, a couple dozen of heavily armored IFVs and SP-AA would have taken out as many navi as they had ammo for, the killratio would be so extreme the only question would be if they had more ammo than the navi had bodies to bleed before capitulation.
@@EvitoCruor There's actually an in-universe reason for this. Despite being the most powerful NGO private entity, the RDA were under strict jurisdictions when it came to it's military prowess and what it could actually have in it's arsenal, by order of the UN and thus were heavily neutered. A lot of their equipment is actually late 21st century stuff and is considered outdated by modern/next gen hardware that Earth Gov use. Hell, most of their ground forces stuff is repurposed from the civilian sector, like the AMP suits which are basically bipedal forklifts.
Of course they still have the overpowered C-21 Dragon, but even then, its actually a nerfed version of the ones used by the UN, which apparently their versions can carry nuclear payloads.
This is to ensure that the UN remains the most powerful militaristically faction. After all, can't have a mega-corporation threaten your hold of power on the world/interstellar stage
@@FrostbiteDigitalthe na vi are fvcked if the UN decides to swoop in
@@FrostbiteDigital Man, makes you wonder. If the stuff a "mere" corporation (even if it's a megacorporation) has is already this formidable, imagine the rest of the arsenal that the UN and national militaries have in the Avatar universe.
Human technology by 2154 is clearly very advanced, it's just that the Earth is an ecologically devastated wreck by then.
I know lots of people don't like the "humans bad" cliche storyline it seems to be at first, but I believe Cameron will find a way to end the story with an ending that is satisfactory to both humans and na'vi, and doesn't include one side or the other getting wiped out. What that solution is, I don't know yet, but I would be disappointed if it ended any other way.
You have no idea how happy I'm that someone still loves and talks about this ship. Venture Star was always one of my favourite designs.
I found Unobtainium a brilliant pun meant to sound like the systematic element names, which are temporary designations for new elements using Latin numbers. Unnilquadium, Unniloctium, Ununbium, Ununseptium, etc
SR2 Normandy is still my favorite Sci fi ship, but this is a very good design. “Not following constraints” is EXACTLY how you end up Xyston-Class ISD’s.
Ignoring all in-universe continuity for the sake of CGI spectacle shock is how you end up with the Xyston ISDs...
I hope you do an update to this video based on the Avatar 2 ISV scenes, those looked so damn cool!
Loved seing more of these in Avatar 2, especially how they appear as a new star in the sky to people on Pandora becuase they burning the engines towards them for the deceleration
One of the first things about avatar that got me hooked was seeing this ship and its attention to detail and also when the shuttle enters the atmosphere of Pandora, someone remembered the thing about moisture over the wings so they even thought of adding the condensation cloud over the wings as it descended. One of the only movies I've seen that done without using actual aircraft.
I remember seeing it for the first time and thinking "Well that looks like it was built with science" because idk why they would make such a funky looking ship, but it was the structure and the heatsinks that got me questioning, i remember asking on Reddit and almost starting a civil war lol, apparently space ship nerds couldn't agree on how much was science, or science fiction, so when i saw this title i was immediately interested and pleasantly surprised to learn it was infact built with the science of spacecraft in mind.
The landing sequence in the 2nd movie was incredible. I always liked how they looked. More of a practical form compared to other sci-fi ships.
3:11 it's funny that you notice that the Hermes looks like a mishmash of ISS parts with engines and a centrifuge bolted on. They explain in a scene deleted from the script (or the supplementary materials, I don't remember) that that's exactly what they did to keep costs down; the centrifuge was an existing SpaceX project, too. It's still the single most expensive object mankind has ever built in the film, though.
No mention of the Babylon 5 station and its big, honkin' radiators - an iconic part of the design.
Really? Mind blown, I’d always assumed they were just solar back ups for the fusion drives but now you say that it makes far far far more sense.
2:40 They finally showed the deceleration cycle in the new movie!
The megaships and space stations in Elite dangerous have huge radiator arrays on them to deal with waste heat, a lot of good design details in that game.
Even small ships have radiators glowing red-hot!
I remember reading about the tech of the ISV on the avatar fandom wiki when the first movie came out. The articles are still there and some additional details are provided, like how the first trips required a ship four times as massive since there were no unobtanium available (that has room temperature superconductor capabilities).
if you're willing to dump mass you can definitely cool without radiators. not the best, but definitely something that a universe like the expanse would consider a consumable. however that being said, that's of no use on a long haul ship like this, as you're going to have a crossover where you need more consumable mass than that mass of radiators would cost, and it is a great point that we don't see enough of them
EDIT:
I'm actually reading through the expanse books again because the new one came out, and it's actually mentioned in a few places that some ships use radiators and some use evaporative coolers. (Tiamat's Wrath Chapter 19 happens to be the example I just passed)
EDIT2:
Yeah, they mention that they are using liquid helium boiling off to cool the ships. which makes sense because Rocinante is a combat ship.
The problem with the show's interpretation of that is that they were seemingly really short-changed on available spacecraft dimensions, because there's no way they'd be able to fit enough mass in for that.
there are actually semi open cycle radiator systems, where a fine mist of coolant is exposed to vac to dump heat and then recaptured, but you have to tuck those away during ANY manuvering.
@@wilemelliott Unless you are willing to lose the coolant.
@@dsdy1205 that's... not how any of this works considering heat pumps are a thing and there are a lot of neat physics tricks you can do with the vacume of space and various fluids. if memory serves, there's been a version of cooling on a space suit that used the sublimation of water though a special block to suck all the heat out of coolant that ran though it.
your suggestion implies air conditioning doesn't exist at all
@@dsdy1205 option 1 is exactly what I was referring to with heat pumps. Sounds like you just reinvented the maneuvering thrusters in the expanse... Superheated steam is exactly what they dump overboard. And as far as the ships structure is concerned, we've already got solutions that will keep a rocket engine dripping with ice on the outside of a running engine nozzle
Also, couldn't you use the same water as the reaction mass in the drive by?
Also, are you arguing a specific case? Because my point was that it was possible in general, which we've both just admitted. I've said no where about a reactor or anything. That's all from you. I was just saying that a radiator is not the exclusive way of removing heat...
I loved how the ships looked in IMAX. I think Jim Cameron would be able to direct a great space opera
I never thought about how well designed the ship and it's engines were. Untill it landed in the seconds movie. That scene was cool
I had no idea so much effort went into the design of this ship. I already had a feeling that there were some people working behind the scenes of the movie that are fans of realistic sci-fi. What with the alien designs on Pandora subtly showing a common ancestor (minus the Na'vi). But this kind of attention to detail with a ship that's onscreen for such a short amount of time is amazing.
I remember our debate with me, my brother and father about the space ship when Avatar was in theaters. I said something about the mirror is solar penal and brother was like "no its a solar sail" and my dad is was the closet too what you explained about being a shield for space dust
Something interesting is that a lot of sources call the other pre-Avatar-2 ISVs "Venture Stars" as well, but plural.
I think that the *ISV Venture Star* was the first of its class, and the other ISVs were Venture Star Class.
This makes me wonder what they'd call the DropShip ISVs from the second film, maybe "Drop Stars"? They are clearly shown as just a reinforced engine section and not much else, which considering their payloads were very heavy and massive cargo pods makes sense.
The class name is actually "Capital Star" and there were 10 of them, of which the Venture Star was one such model.
Often times, when people talk about a ship they dont know its class designation of, they will talk about the one prominant member and use its name as a reference, like "Ventrue Star type" and so on.
Also, the ship doing the drop pod insertion was called the "Manifest Destiny" ^^
Tbh the Scene in Avatar 2, was epic :D
I like to know your thoughts on the Venture Star(s) landing directly on the Pandoran surface in the new film. It was very cinematic but I'm not sure if the ship could ever take off after that.
Well, we know that pandora has lower surfave gravity than earth, and that the Venture Star (and its equivalents) can accellerate at 1.5 g. That should give it pleanty of TWR to land and take off, especially once depleates of most of its fuel and cargo
See.. Actually in Avatar 2 The "ISV Venture Star" doesn't not land directly on the pandora surface.. It just decelerates itself and stops in certain point in atmosphere or in midAir ..and it just drops that big cargo block on the surface of pandora by cables. The ISV Venture Star' engines thrust are so powerful that it just torches everything in it's radius on that surface of pandora.. The forest, the big trees , the ground instantly burned and turned into ashes in fraction of seconds.. and that is freaking insane. My god!! That's very powerful. If the ISV Venture Star decelerates and can cause that much destruction by stands in midAir.. I'm pretty sure that thing can surely take off from the surface.
I also thought that the venture star itself dropped off cargo, but after a second watch I saw it's actually a secondary drop craft with similar thrusters seen dropping off a package via a sky crane type method!
The ships never actually touch the surface of Pandora only by proxy through the landing pods.
this modified ISV is supposedly single use and it just drops these big monolith thingies with all the infrastructure and mechs and humans from the sky
Thank you. I didn't know those were radiators. I thought they were just some cool sci-fi design feature for the sake of sci-fi. I think it's the coolest spaceship in sci-fi too.
I would love to see more of these breakdowns from the science point of view
The long spindly spine ships always had more character. I'd love to see a video on The Event Horizon!!
I was surprised he didn't mention the Event Horizon or the Proteus from the 1996 Lost In Space film. Both are long rail ships.
@@nel1962 I hope they do the ships from Lost in Space!
@@nel1962 and the ship USS Cygnus in the movie The Black Hole.
Welp in Avatar 2 these things made the scariest and coolest scene
The Venture Star was shown so briefly, just long enough to establish transport of the main character, not unlike a present day story briefly showing a 747 landing at its' destination city.
Quite a difference from earlier Sci-Fi movies - Star Trek the Movie, Silent Running, Alien, or 2001 where a lot of time was devoted to showing off the spaceships' exteriors.
Radiators are one of the reasons I always liked Elite: Dangerous. Your ship has them and they're integrated so well that your heat actually makes you easier to target. You can turn your radiators off, temporarily, in order to mask your heat signature a bit and you can basically turn everything off (even thrusters) to drop your heat levels so low that you're essentially invisible even without turning the radiators off.
conduction does work in a vacuum, in fact the shuttle used it. you bleed heat using sublimation cooling, co2 ice or water ice heats up and transitions directly to gas, releasing heat into the void, but this doesn't work for long term missions, or stations
Another amazing detail about why they built the ship so long is because the design would be much more stable in tension than compression. If the engines were put at the rear of the ship, the compressive force would be dynamically unstable, and it could easily cause the center truss of the ship to buckle if it bent too far; ESPECIALLY if the ship had to turn or rotate. But, because the engines are at the front, the truss is naturally pulled taught; making it surprisingly nimble in the event of an emergency maneuver.
Good point you make. My question is how how does it rotate 180 degrees in order to decelerate for the six months prior to arrival?
@@murdock6159 they would flip the WHOLE ship around using RCS. The bigger question is how they kept the ISV shielded on both sides when they used the light sail.
That mirror on the other end of the ship is meant to act as both a light shield to protect the ship from the laser when it's under photonic propulsion, and an impact shielf to protect it from objects and dust ahead of them while the ship is coasting or using antimatter propulsion. But that means whenever it's using the light sail, the entire front end of the ship is exposed to incoming relativistic debris that can rip the ship apart!
one of the few vids to delve into this ship. love it
Never knew about the heat issue! What a cool way to learn something new
Love it, i wish James Cameron would release a companion book showing what went into the ship design.
A quick correction: the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation provides that the delta v of a spacecraft is contingent on the exhaust velocity, specific impulse, wet mass, and dry mass of the craft. The "weight" of the craft under acceleration has no effect on how much the craft can change velocity. Two spacecraft of the same configuration with the same mass, one partially fueled and at rest and the other under acceleration with the same amount of fuel, have the same delta v.
Just saw avatar 2 and they show more of the voyager and it's impressive
I loved this class of space ships in the first movie and was absolutely terrified by their portrayal in the second movie, decelerating and destroying forests at the same time. Cameron managed to make humans the terrifying invading species in that landing scene. Brilliant filmmaking imo.
The only part of this ship design I knew before the video was the towing structure and the engines tilted slightly to the sides.
For some reason I never realised the radiators weren't just some part of the engines.
The ship seems so realistic (within its context) now that I know a bit more.
The second showcase of this ship in avatar 2 does not disappoint. Money shot of the movie, in my opinion
Yes, the entire opening went all the way to 12 in just those 30 seconds xD
Didnt love avatar the film (1 or 2), but i did love the attention to detail that the design of this ship got. for such a small part of the movie, its incredible how it got more love than the plots did
Plots aren't bad at all, they're a little flawed but they're made to be digestible for the target audience which is Disney viewers and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
i wAnT c0MpLex pLot
lmao
this is just nitpicking tbh
Not only is this ship a good design but its also something that looks realistic that we as humans can build in the near future to travel to another star like in the year 2100 or 2200.
I was really impressed at the engineering of the whaling vessel in Avatar 2. Even their explanation of the hunting process was realistically chilling.
Yup, I was glad ground effect vehicles are shown in mainstream media though sea dragon's purpose is something i despise
Awesome video, I'm doing my MSc in Space Systems Engineering currently so it's great to see a well thought out interstellar spacecraft. Two things I noticed are the thrust losses due to the angled engines (though the angle isn't large, it would be noticeable, interestingly, making the ship longer would allow a tighter angle and lower losses), and the fins on the radiators that point at each other reduce the radiator efficiency by absorbing some of the radiation from adjacent fins and reducing the amount from the flat portions that reach space. Admittedly, engineering, of spacecraft in particular, is all about compromise, those fins would make the radiators stiffer, and provided they can still dump the necessary heat, it may be worth the additional mass less efficient radiators require.
Yup, to didn't think of those protusions as fins when I first saw them but as structural elements, "ribs" to keep the structural integrity of such humongous radiators that given their position wouel be under great compressive stress in the times the engines are burning.
The RDA ISVs were based on the "Valkyrie" design by physicist and SF author Charles Pellegrino. His math dictated a very long cable between the engines and habitable cargo, yes, to minimize cosine loses on the exhaust and maximize the shadow effect of dense shielding proximate to the annihilation engine. The design for the movie makes some compromises to look good on screen to naive audiences (that's the inference, but I don't know if it's been explicitly stated by Cameron et al.). At best, you'd have a shot of the engines, then a looooong pan along the tether, then the cargo. (In the history of TV and movie SF, there are plenty of documented cases of ships that have been redesigned to be horizontal, to fit the orientation of the screen.)
Love the Smack-talk on the Star Trek's Prometheus class at 7:12. Had me laughing out of my chair! 😂
Huh, I never gave that ship much thought, but now that you've mentioned it I do appreciate the practicality of it.
Can you do some videos on some of the new vehicles from Way of water ? Such as the Mako sub,crab suit , seawasp and sea dragon? The videos you made on the vehicles from the first avatar were amazing and it would be great to see a breakdown of the newer designs and ideas from the films .
I'd definitely love a video on the sea dragon. I watched the movie a few weeks ago and I immediately recognized what it was.
deceleration in Avatar 2 was so nice, i want to see that again :D
All the design in that movie is so incredibly well done. Its not always the greatest (cough mechs cough) but building mechs for jungle combat isn't the dumbest thing and real life humanity has build dumber things in the past.
From what I've heard, the mechs were primarily intended for industry and were repurposed for a secondary military role. Kind of like mounting guns on a bulldozer because you really didn't anticipate that your iron ore mine was going to become a de-facto military base, "and yet here we are." Not what you'd bring to fight The Soviets, but probably good enough when the enemy has bows and arrows.
This has already been written but I gotta say, I Deffinitely didn't think that ship had so much engieneering done Right, for once in a sc-fi movie!
Honestly, thanks for the video! I'm also a big fan of scientificely correct and practical built ships!
I though they will skip the ships this time in TWOW. BOY was I wrong, they banked on it BIG TIME.
Mild SPOILERS for the beginning of the movie below:
The are multiple ships decelerating towards pandora. The whole burn looks like a major star on the night sky. And then they show one of them (presumably stripped of its nimble stuff) landing on Pandora. Its antimattter engines nuking everything living miles underneath. DAMN what a start of a movie.
My mouth was hanging open at that scene. It's so unbelievably epic for a space movie, and it's NOT EVEN a space movie! And then every other vehicle in the movie is just all killer no filler. You get the palpable sense that the director of this movie is the type of dude who designs submarines in his spare time.
It was epic, I just wished they used some other ship design for Maybe a heavy duty bring your whole planets assets kind of ship because its weird that all those ships carry that many people and equipment to build an entire city
@@julianforrer478 Wouldn't be surprised if we see something like that in the next couple movies after the mentions of Earth dying. Like some kind huge colony ship. Thus far, what we've seen seems to be for the sole purpose of exploration as opposed to colonization. That and the mention of the spider bots constructing buildings in a week. Would eve kind of follow with the direction of the story and the parallels to the colonization of North/South America.
Well, bridgehead city (the RDA base in way of water) is designed around San Diego harbor and is eventually supposed to be able to support 2 million people, so yeah, colonization is going to play a massive role in the next movies.
I love the Prometheus design 😈
I just watch the new avater. This ship is really underrated. I saw it land and drop a crew capsule in the movie. Kinda cool.
Nice! Although, I think fleshing out the laser sail mechanics would have been a little more helpful. With the ship diagram flipping around while talking about top and bottom, I got a wee bit confused and had to rewatch that part a couple of times until I got it (I think?). 😉
The theory behind laser sails is that once you get to a destination you set up lasers in solar system. Then they can be used to accelerate and decelerate craft. Obvious problem is getting to new destinations. So the movie covers that by the ship having an antimatter drive. I think the other problem is that its probably slow to accelerate and decelerate with laser sails so depending on the cost of drive propellent it might just be easier to use the antimatter drive in some circumstances depending on time/politics/payloads
The radiators are the front and the mirror like structure (shield) is the behind. In the acceleration process a foldable sail is deployed from the front of the spacecraft and impulsed by lasers shooted from earth, with the shield at the back protecting the ship from said laser.
Then comes the confusing part. The sail is retracted, the ship flipped and the shield extended forwards to protect from space dust. From this point on the ship travels "backwards" because you need the shields at the front and because you need a long period of deceleration using your main engines when closing it to Pandora.
Upon arrival, the Venture Star will orbit the planet, unload crew and equipment, load Unobtanium and fire it's engines again to accelerate towards Earth, and once it reaches cruise speed will flip again to deploy the shield and be ready for deceleration upon arrival.
Thanks, guys! I knew about laser sails, but was getting confused by the diagrams flipping around. It's definitely an unusual ship! 😉
@@grantwhite3044 Nit pick here, but it should be stellar system (which translates directly to 'star system'). Solar system refers specifically to the Sol star system, which is the one Earth redides in (our stars name is Sol).
@@moteroargentino7944 thanks you, now I understand.
Good job as always guys, and congrats Hooj! Sorry to change franchises here, but Season 6 of the Expanse has given us a ton of new ships and zero lore. Obviously its more complicated with Amazon owning the rights to the show, but I think I speak for everyone when I say that Force Recon, even though maybe not-quite-canonical, would be wildly appreciated if it made a return. Love you guys, and keep up the good work!
Yes I absolutely agree with that statement. Give us more Force Recon
If you haven't read the books, the design lineage of those new ships won't be obvious, but the lore is there. The problem is that they're trying to compress two or three different books into the final season, which doesn't leave much room for worldbuilding.
@@talideon I think the series is going to end with the book Babylon's Ashes due to the time gap between that comes between that book and Persepolis Rising. I suspect however we might get a new series that cover the later books given some aspects in this season.
James Cameron is a very good world builder and ship builder.
They use this thing as a fucking skycrane in avatar 2, its cool as fuck
All I can think about is how that looks like it has an even weaker neck than the original Enterprise, lol. I just see it snapping apart and the crew compartment is left drifting as the drive core flies off. I hope it's made of super tough metal.
It'd only be an issue if spacecraft actually maneuvered as kinetically as starships in Star Trek or Star Wars. Trusses are extremely strong for their weight.
@@vmpgsc and in Star Trek ships have get-out-of-the-jail card called inertia dampeners and structural integrity fields (bw: quite in-universe cohesive concept, along with navigational deflector, shields and gravity plating ) and _generally_ do NOT depend on innate structural strenght of materials, or would have to be BSG-impractially heavy.
They tried to use the "its towed" logic but that fails anyway. Accelerating towards the destination its towed. But decelerating before arrival it's actually pushing into the drive section.
Those forces are very different in how they are applied, and the designs needed to compensate for them. At this point you may aswell have pushed it on the way out, as in the way in your been pushed by it. It really doesn't matter which end you put the drive/habitation section, as it swaps sides half way through your journey.
The only part that is important there is towing it means your now pointing your radiation spewing drives at it directly, so now it gets a radiation bath whenever the drivers are active. Pushing it allows you to point the drives away from the habitation section.
It also has 1 other effect. A towed section can't be safely released to fly on if you have an accident, as it needs to pass through the towing section to keep going. There is no effective "lifeboat" scenario here for the whole habitation section. Admittedly should that accident occur, there is no practical way to rescue the habitation section anyway, and anyone aboard it would be dead before a rescue could arrive as it lacks those same radiators needed to regulate its temperature. The excess body heat generated by humans alone is going to eventually cause problems, nevermind all the electronics.
This in turn raises an issue, the "teather" seems not to be designed with heat conducting capacity to transfer the excess heat from the habitation section to the drive section. Its not just drive/reactor heat you need to manage with radiators, it's all heat. The ISS doesn't have a drive system or large reactor, it has humans and low voltage electronics, and it needs a cooling solution with a surface area larger than 2 American football fields.
@@vmpgsc oh and it does have to manuver, once per trip. At the half way point it needs to flip 180 degrees on its axis. Fortunatly this doesn't actually generate alot of stress if done right. You deactive the main drive, use precision computer controlled thrust to spin about its axis, and your sorted. You just need to place the thrusters in locations that allow you to limit the lateral load on the spine.
@@cgi2002 > I'm curious where that notion came from, since I seem to recall from a Steve Burg (one of the designers) interview that turning the ship mid flight would be a potentially deadly maneuver, the Whipple shields must face forward at all times during the flight.
Their solution was to have the engine/radiator pods swivel, so they push the ship at the start of the journey, then rotate to the position we see them in the film for the deceleration burn.
Any plans for a breakdown of the Expanse S6 Ep3?
3:50 this is why in space manufacturing is important
When I watched the First movie a few years ago I didn't really care about the ship design. But when I watched the second movie yesterday and saw it again when decelerating and later how it operates, I WAS STUNNED
And to add it even more, I just found your video on my recommendation feed 😆
The landing scene in the 2nd movie is my favorite part, also “spoiler alert” it kinda makes everything pointless. Just land one spaceship or make it hover on top of the giant tree to kill the na’vi and get the material, since they show how it burns an entire forest when it’s landing
there's a pretty good reason not to do that, it would poison the planet with assloads of fusion fragments from their swanky antimatter doped engines, apparently it didn't. guess thats a little hard to write around so they ignored that bit of science.
Do you really think it's that easy and cheap? You need an infrastructure and corporate defense force to mine, extract and defend the whole process.
@@SHVRWK no I was just talking about getting rid of the na’vi
@@haramberinokripperino7770 They can't do that without destroying the environment and the resources they need, also it takes many more ships and fuel than they have. I think specifically engineered biological weapons and viruses/diseases as well as manipulation of the indigenous would be a better alternative. Should learn from the European colonialism, it wasn't just genocides and slavery.
@@SHVRWKwell if they only need unobtanium there is no problem in simply glassing the planet and mining it afterwards
I think they use deployable heatsink in The Expanse books. They are used for stealth purposes. I am not sure if it is ubiquitous on all of the ships or some high-tech military ones. But, there are.
I just want to add.
3:04 "It's more that it's long rather than huge." 😏
Wow! I love this ship too! I had no idea about all of the little tiny and well thought out details of this ship. Since we only get to see it for such a short time in the movie, I didn't hardly know anything about it!
Well done video!! Thanks for this!
That is sadly the case with essentially all the human equipment and the biology of Pandora. So much of it actually is well thought out, practical, and realistic. But no time is actually spent on it.
and now we know those ships have enough thrust to drop giant fuckin cargo boxes right on a planet if they dont mind scouring the surface with fire and death.
Yet another thing about this movie I absolutely love, and yet another reason why I wish more people thought more about this movie instead of just recognizing it's the highest grossing one. There's a lot of good stuff in it, a lot of details like this that most people would never even think about.
Too bad the story is is so generically stupid. Seriously there is so much lore behind the humans tech and Pandora's biology. And so much of it is cool while still making sense.
@@hanzzel6086 Generically stupid? Never seen a movie about taking control of alien bodies to interact with the actual aliens whilst negotiating to end a war and establish mining rights, but whatever you say. I don't give a shit how many people say, "It's just Pocahontas in space," or, "It's just sci-fi Dances With Wolves with aliens!" It's a fine story and I really liked it and the characters in it.
@@ODST_Parker I agree. Most many movies share the same 20 plots, why is this one singled out for it?
@@xronalmighty Exactly! Star Wars was an extremely generic plot, but what makes it great is everything else. You can do so much to make a story unique and amazing, it can be the simplest, most basic story in the world.
Very cool video, I appreciate you taking the time to research this and telling me what you like about it!
Amazing effort putt for such little time on screen and relevance on the story
Not going to lie, that ship has balls.
while I agree that more sci-fi ships should have radiators, I also feel that there's theoretically ways for to justify the heat and use it for other purposes, i.e. thermo-electrics
If you use energy, eventually it *all* becomes waste heat ("waste" as in "low quality" as in "not enough of a thermodynamic difference to extract work"). If you don't build dedicated radiators, your ship's surfaces will be radiators by default -- which probably means your interiors won't have the temperatures you want (liquid hydrogen cold, humans well below boiling, etc.).
Happy to report it came back greater than ever in avatar II
Excellent! The best analyses I have ever seen. I remember reading about the general cooling aspects (sunny side of the ship heat's up while the shadow side is near to absolute zero) in pre-Appolo books about spaceflight and always wondered how that sort of stuff was tackled in practice. Now I know at last that those surfaces on the ISS are not only solar panels. Thanks!