/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11829930

>Psyche and Ceres at war (again)
>Earth-funded battleships hover kilometers over the surface of Psyche, turning any troops there into glass
>Martian destroyers swoop in en masse, but are swatted out of the sky by the massive battleships.
> MDN Mariner DD-772 has been damaged due to debris. Life support has failed. The ship’s reactor is coming apart and turned the lower decks into molten metal
>Mariner began her service twenty years ago. As a part of her commemoration, actual pieces of the space probe Mariner 4, which had to be hunted for in interplanetary space, were melted down and turned into her first structural panel.
>In the present, Mariner’s captain realizes his ship is going to die, and fired her engine one last time directly at Psyche itself
>Mariner hits Psyche at 1.5% the speed of light
>Debris from the impact devastated Earth’s fleet in Low Psyche Orbit
>Mars gains another foothold in the Second Asteroid Cold War
>Appalled by this loss, Earth accelerated the development of their new antimatter-fueled Battleship in the depths of the Kuiper Belt

Im trying to write a short story collection about an alternate history where the Cold War goes nuclear and thirty years later the remnants of The US and Russia are trying to establish dominance in space (for some reason. I haven’t figured it out yet).

What would a realistic space battleship with modern technology look like? I’m willing to accept Nuclear Thermal Rockets and space Fission generators.

The main ship in the book is named “Mandom”. It’s like a Space Shuttle but with armor and a large liquid hydrogen tank in its payload bay.

How can I design realistic warships guys? How can I get a ship like that to orbit? Is SSTO viable or can I do something like the TSTO-Spaceplane concept.

Also it takes place in the 2010’s, so there is no SpaceX.