HOW THE WORLD OF 2050’s NEW YORK WAS CREATED (2)
No wings and a new electrical ion drive = a new vehicle paradigm?
I started over, thinking of the Hopper in three pieces: cabin, engines and power supply with the overall aesthetic being crude and industrial …
… and the design developed, a bulbous cabin with great visibility, then some form of truss or duct connecting to the engines at the rear …
. . . which over days of iterations developed into this more detailed design; a forward cabin, heavy truss, and rotational engines to the rear allowing the Hopper to hover as needed. The VTOL capability would be very useful for ‘hopping’ between the blade-towers hence the name . . .
The sketches were a good start, but weren’t enough to let me sleep.
It’s too easy to ‘fudge’ a sketch, to say the engine is a certain size because it looks good. No, I needed to work those suckers out in more detail, and so modeled a Hopper in 3d. It took a loooong time to get the details right!
... I started with the cabin—this version able to carry two people—then worked backwards. The truss is modular, crude and robust holding a compact fusion reactor and twin Dyson engines away from the car’s occupants ...
... more and more detail was added until the design was complete—this video shows the final two-seat NYPD Hopper ...
... once the design was finalized I used the line work to render the final image. This shows a NYPD Riot Hopper working in ‘crowd control’ configuration with its rear Dyson Engines in vertical alignment...
Three years—and three novels—later, I find myself with hundreds of illustrations and 3-d models, and hours of time lapse video of the Cortex world being designed.
I hope you like the designs and the theories behind their development. At times it’s been a long, lonely road doing this and I’d love to hear your thoughts on these pieces. If you have equipment designs of your own—or comments on how I can improve mine—join my mailing list and let me know at jim@jimkeen.com! I will do my best to incorporate them into the next book .. .
Now for something completely different …