M40 ACE Redux

Back in 2010 I had a lot of strange and ambitious ideas for games, mods and designs. None was more ambitious at the time than Space 3102, ACE's Void, a flight sim/first person shooter featuring the M40 Asteroid Class Explorer. This tiny shuttle was a research vessel, designed for high maneuverability in dense asteroid fields and capable of spending weeks in deep space before returning to base. It featured laser cannons, traditional cannons, advanced collision avoidance systems, had lots of scientific equipment on board and was piloted by the best scientists/astronauts the Earth Space Administration and Defense force (ESAD) had to offer. A real Swiss-army knife of spacecraft.

In this old blog post I looked at the ACE and some of the story behind how I came up with it at the time, but I also challenged myself to create a third iteration of the design I had at the time. Perhaps it wasn't the greatest design I had ever made but then again I had only been doing 3D modeling for about two to four months or so.

So now, twelve years later, I have finally revisted this design and hopefully improved it a bit, I think that even my seventeen year old self would approve.

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I started with Jovor Long's signature contribution to the M series, the M40 engines; Capable of being airbreathing in atmosphere, closed cycle in orbit and using advanced magnetic fusion propulsion in deep space.

The M40 HAMP (Hybrid Airbreathing Magnetic Propulsion) engines are a highly advanced form of hybrid propulsion.

These engines form the backbone of the ACE and enabled it to be effective long past its scheduled retirement date.

The variable-pitch propeller blades suck in air into the highly efficient heat exchanger where the air is cooled down and the compressed in a turbo compressor after which the compressed air is mixed with highly combustable fuel.

Built-in computers maintain optimal flow through the engines and ensure faultless operation separate from the ACE's onboard flight computers.

Secondly I started working on the cockpit and other internal systems. The M40 ACE features both analogue and digital instruments to ensure that no instrument is without backup. Two separate computer systems operate simultaniously to prevent errors from slipping through and should one fail, the other is more than capable of taking over.

Finally came the rest of the interior and the renders (the animation took several days to render because I don't know how to optimise my 3D scenes):

Overall this has been a fun side-project, even though I rarely got to work on it, I actually started this project back in December 2021, but I'm happy to call it finished. Maybe I should revisit some other ships from this era, like the Aloadae II, the massive paddle / delta wing passenger shuttle or the Athena, my personal space yacht. We'll see!

Until next time, and as always have a nice day.