Across The River

Artwork.

Completed 2019-03-03. Available releases:

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Across the river, there is a rocket engine test underway.

This one came from an idle thought I had about drawing rocket exhaust in atmospheres. You get "Mach diamond"s due to discontinuous changes in the exhaust's properties at different velocities plus a feedback effect with the atmosphere's pressure.

I thought maybe I'd draw a close-up, but when I was looking at images for inspiration, I found some showing reflections on water, which was just as pretty. I figured I'd draw both features, but at the resolution I ended up with, the Mach diamonds aren't really visible (though I did try to draw them in). I'm fairly happy with how the reflection came out—less-so, the test building.

Scientifically, this is reasonably plausible. The clouds of re-condensed steam (I guess) are characteristic of a Hydrogen+Oxygen engine, such as the RS-25, although granted most of the clouds you see in real-world tests come from the extra water dumped on the test apparatus to keep it from melting (as much).

The flame color is a bit more exotic, suggesting perhaps kerosene. Although, it is fully consistent with, say, a Hydrogen NTR. In fact, if it were a water-remass NTR, you'd get enough dissociation to explain the purple threads, but also plenty of recombination into clouds of water, just off the exhaust plume.

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