A modern Mellanoid Slime Worm spacecraft, the Ice Giants Explorer. Intended to launch in 2383, it ended up fast-tracked and launched under a completely different mission. It would have explored the four ice giants of the Zwo-Nmu system: Glarpi, Shpler, Euaua, and Flible, with a possible mission extension to distant, never-before-seen planet Schmidt. It's depicted here using its T.E.N.D.R.I.L. (Teleoperated extendible-node robotic interface limb) to deploy one of its many robotic probes to land on a small captured satellite of Shpler, S/2351 S2.
The spacecraft has two main propulsion systems, a fission-impulse drive and a pulsed warp engine. The fission-impulse drive are modified solid-core nuclear-thermal-rockets utilizing subspace field coils on the exhaust end similar to those utilized on starfleet impulse drives. However, the power generation for those impulse coils is provided by a fission reactor, instead of a fusion reactor. This results in approximately a doubling of the specific impulse of the engine while preserving thrust characteristics.
The pulsed warp engine uses a bank of high-density capacitors charged using the fission reactors, to provide short bursts of warp speed. Modern mellanoid transwarp coils can provide speeds of up to warp 5 on the new scale, but are bottlenecked by the power generation and storage rate. As such the pulsed warp drive technology is currently not usable for interstellar exploration, but it does allow for much faster intra-system manuevers. (The bright photon-wakes visible from many astronomical units away, and their associated radiation hazards, are considered an acceptable risk.)
09:33:22
26-09-3311
Inner Scutum-Centaurus Arm | Eephaills WY-A E1
I have arrived at the large nebula that I'd intended on going to, which you saw a glimpse of in the previous entry, but as I was looking about the area in the galaxy map, I saw a beautiful blue planetary nebula close by! I just had to go check it out first before I started taking pictures of the much larger (and pink-er) nebula. It of course has a neutron star as the main star, and has just a few planets inside of it. I didn't take many pictures but the ones I did take are marvelous.
