Shipbucket

A sci-fi design. The Lucifer class TAV is a medium SSTO powered by a closed cycle gas core nuclear thermal rocket, also known as a nuclear light-bulb drive, A very powerful nuclear reactor is contained inside of a transparent quartz housing and is used to heat reaction mass for rocket propulsion. No radioactive material is released during flight, however the reactor is only shielded from the front, anybody approaching from the rear will be exposing themselves to hazardous radiation levels. It uses liquid hydrogen propellant in space, and regular air during atmospheric flight. It does not have enough delta-v for interplanetary travel, but has unlimited flight time in atmosphere.

The Lucifer is designed to transport cargo too and from low-tech worlds without established star-ports, as such it is designed to land as a seaplane and refill it's propellant tanks with hydrogen extracted from seawater. It is sometimes used by private military contractors, and can be armed with an array of VLS cells, and a 120mm raillgun. It also features a microwave area denial system as a safety feature to prevent the locals from getting too close to the rear end, and it's only partly shielded nuclear reactor.

uniun is pronounced Union, (written that way so it reads the same no matter how you rotate it) and is short for Union of Space-fairing entities. They are a cybernetic consciousness seeking to promote interstellar trade and unite all space-fairing civilizations. Lucifer was chosen as the name of this spacecraft because it means light bringer in some old earth language. It's the future so the religious connotations would be similar to naming something after ancient mythology would be for us.

The basic shape was traced from the X-43. I might draw a cross section latter.

Nice start and welcome to sb! Perhaps too scifi for me, but you've really found a proper name for this vessel

Nice start indeed. The concept looks interesting and could be worth developing.
Couple of questions on the design in no particular order:
- Is it meant to have a human (or other organic) pilot inside? If so, how do you access it?
- Where does the cargo go exactly? And how do you unload it on unprepared landing spots? Top drone bay, or somewhere on the sides/bottom?
- How does it land, and where? You mention landing without star-ports, but what is the alternative for such a design? IRL, a high-delta SSTO design like that would need a very long and smooth strip much like a space shuttle, which is more low-tech than your design but not exactly Bronze Age either
- Or is it supposed to be sea-plane only?
- Is the intake on the bottom supposed to be for the intra-atmospheric air feed? If so, how does that fit with the sea-landing part? It is much too big to act as water scoop for the hydrogen separation, and the circuits would be different anyway.
- All in all, particularly if there is no meatware pilot, it would help your design to be more symmetrical top-down, for weapons coverage, access and intakes.

Now make of this what you will, but I could also see it with more detail, such as:
- Attitude thrusters for exo-atmospheric maneuvers
- More flaps for aerodynamic maneuvers, if that is what the lines in the vertical tailplane are about
- Sensors, comms antenna and so on...
- Access doors all over the place, for ingress, landing gear, maintenance...

Sorry if this sounds overwhelming or nitpicking, it is all only meant as constructive criticism!

- It can be equipped to carry a human crew inside, but is piloted by a sentient AI and can be completely autonomous. In either case there are no windows for structural stability reasons. If the meat passengers want a view, they can wear VR goggles for a simulated view. Either way, not much to see when flying at hypersonic speeds as the vessel would be enveloped by an opaque plasma sheath.
-The rectangle under the helicopter is supposed to be open cargo bay doors. It loads from the top like the space shuttle.
-When it's floating in the water the nose is partly submerged, allowing amphibious vehicles to roll onto it and into the open cargo bay.
-Yes it is a seaplane only, Landing it on solid runways would be problimatic because of it's large size and stubby wings, not to mention the radation coming off of the back end.
-The bottom intake is for water and air. Both get sucked up, flashed into plasma by the reactor, and then jetted out the back by magnetic nozzles. The engine doesn't care if it's breathing air or water, it all gets turned into ionized plasma. Hot salt water is corrosive but with the magnetic nozzles, physical contact is minimized. Once in space, the intakes close and the craft uses liquid hydrogen as propellant for the orbital insertion burn.
-The ship has an up-down bias because it spends time floating in the ocean. The MADS are only needed to keep locals away from the reactor, and the Raillgun and VLS cells allow it to defend itself from low tech (20th century equivalent) navies. In flight all this gets retracted and it's best defense is absurd speed. In orbit, it can deploy the raillgun or ASAT missiles, but it's not really designed for a fight between equivalent technology warships.
-I Think I will add nozzles for Attitude control jets. It's main fuel tanks are completely depleted getting into orbit, so it probably needs a backup set of OMS thrusters as well. I'm thinking they have to be monopropellent because it doesn't have the radiators to keep it's reactor running in orbit (in flighty they are cooled by the fuel flowing through them, otherwise they have to be shut down)
-Those lines are indeed flaps.
-The antennas are phased arrays hidden under the skin, covering the entire surface. Not much to look at.
-The rectangle is the main cargo bay door. I think there might be some more emergency hatches along the top.

No problem at all, I love this.

Starting over with three views, it's very wide and flat and that's not visible in the profile view.

I'll work on cross section next, then add external details.

Thanks for the feedback. I can get my head around the concept a bit better now.
I'm still a bit dubious about the seaplane-only part, and how it clicks with the SSTO shape, but well, it's your design and your decision, and you've justified it.
Regarding the shape, thanks as well for posting the top-down view, I hadn't figured the slab shape and was still thinking you were going for a pure spike shape. It makes a bit more sense like this.

Now on the drawing itself, you will really have to work on the colors and the shading. Surfaces with the same orientation should have the same brightness, so in your case the horizontal tail plane should be the same shade as the top of the fuselage. The different shade you have now makes sense on ly if the tail planes are canted. In turn, the top of the fuselage looks curved in the side view, so you can play on the brightness of the sides to show that part better.
I would also advise you to brighten a bit the base shade of the dark (thermal shielded?) part so you can show more relief. In that case, the edge of the nose would be lighter on the top, while the belly would be mostly darker on account of being in the shadow of the leading edge. Have a look at DarthPanda's latest Russian submarines in the "Real Designs" sub-forum for reference on how to show relief in dark shades.
And even though the three views help figuring out the overall shape, I'm not convinced that the views fit together that well. The light/dark limit on the side view slopes down significantly, but this shape is not visible at all in the front view. Meanwhile, the change in slope in the side view in the nose part doesn't fit with anything in the top view, and the front edge of the vertical tail plane should ends up closer to the "lateral line" in the top view than in the side view... Am I missing something here?

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Soviet Century/Cold War 2020 Alternate Universe: Soviet and other Cold War designs 1990-2020.
My Worklist

My color scheme right now is actually the solarized palette. It's designed for text editing rather than pixel art. I chose it because it looks futuristic and has offwhite tones.
I could probably do a lot better color wise.

As for the three views, I traced over this lineart of the X-43. My flat colors probably obscure a lot of detail though.

OK, I guess I see where some of the shape problems are coming from.
If you compare your side view with the original drawing, you'll see that you're lacking a hard line marking the mid-point of the leading edge profile, which meets the edge of the VTP. Not having a hard line there isn't a problem as such, but for visibility purposes I'd keep it as reference while building the drawing, and keep at least a highlight in the final version to enhance visibility.
Also, have a good second look at the front view, and maybe try a rough orthogonal projection of from the other two views to get the leading edge profile to match. The original drawing isn't really helpful in this regard.
Finally, a general remark: since you're shooting for a personal design inspired by this drawing: get rid of all lines and shapes you don't have a need for. Keep only what is mandatory to outline the shape of the vehicle, lose the panel lines, and then think about what's inside your craft and add panel lines that make sense. That might make your life easier in a first approach. Your first drafts will look like vast expanses of nothing, but I find it safer to first concentrate on shape when your design is on the ambiguous side like here.

Re. color: Since the final images are not indexed, you can create your own shades, particularly in cases like this where you're working on non-standard colors. I've found from uploaded drawings that highlight shades for the same color tend to be 8-10% brightness offset from the main tone.As an example, the darker beige you used for the HTP should be OK for darker highlights. For lighter tones, good examples of how to use this are to be found in radar and comms domes in a lot of official drawings.

_________________
Soviet Century/Cold War 2020 Alternate Universe: Soviet and other Cold War designs 1990-2020.
My Worklist

I have made some minor changes to the panel lines, but for the most part they are similar to what I'm intending. Themajor components are blocked out by the large panels in the center row (engines, reactor, cargo, crew) with the long narrow panels between them representing bulkheads. The side panels allow access to the the fuel tanks, and the very front is too thin to house anything other than avionics. (I imagine the nose is a large flat phased array antenna)