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GitHub mirror archived — active development is here on Forgejo.

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ships-vehicles-designer

Products: https://blog.gi7b.org

Mneme Ships and Vehicles Designer

A mass-based, delta-V-centric spacecraft and vehicle construction framework for the Mneme setting. Compatible with Cepheus Engine / Traveller-style tabletop RPGs.

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Overview

This repository contains the Mneme Vehicle Design System (MVDS) — a physically grounded engineering framework that replaces the traditional displacement-ton abstraction with realistic mass budgets, propulsion analysis, and procedural generation.

The system serves as:

• Reference tool — model historical rockets (Saturn V, N1, Energia-Buran, Falcon 9, SLS, Starship)
• Design tool — build new vehicles within realistic engineering envelopes
• Mini-game substrate — simulate political, financial, and human-capital tradeoffs of space programs
• Procedural generator — seed-based creation of companies, engineers, and programs with Features and Bugs
• Knowledge base — human-readable methodologies for agents and humans to follow

Core Philosophy

The physics is non-negotiable; the politics is everything.

We can predict theoretical limits with high confidence. We know chemical rockets will never exceed ~470s Isp. We know steel pressure vessels have known failure modes. We know how much energy a solar panel can collect at 1 AU. These limits are bounded by physical law.

What we cannot predict is which nation will fund the breakthrough, how many prototypes will fail, or whether a pandemic redirects budgets. Therefore, MVDS provides hard physical ceilings, conservative engineering estimates, and economic modeling to bridge the gap between what is possible and what is achieved.

Growing the pie is not just altruism — it is survival of the species.

The technological participation required from our 8 billion population to achieve spacefaring and world-fixing capabilities is very high. Modeling the infrastructure and development economies need is part of our goals.

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Final Functional Goals

Vehicle Design & Planning

• Design and plan 3D models for vehicles that can be expressed in the system
• Build most vehicles from TL 7 to TL 9 using constraints and function
• People need only know a similar ship and express needs in constraints to build vehicles

Complexity Levels

The system breaks down into 3–4 levels of complexity:

• Level 1 — Base concepts (mass, delta-V, thrust)
• Level 2 — Subsystems (engines, tanks, avionics)
• Level 3 — Integration (staging, mission legs, economics)
• Level 4 — Advanced (procedural generation, multi-ship comparison, combat integration)

Knowledge Indexing

• All methodologies are human-readable and linked to algorithms
• Agents can use the knowledge base to help humans follow the design process
• Save / Save-As / Load / Import / Export allows anyone to update and share designs

Future: Godot Integration

• Procedural 3D ship and vehicle builder
• AAA-game-quality visualization
• A layman can learn everything in small chunks and start playing with it

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Vehicle Designer — Feature Request & Driving Vision

This repository is being developed as the Vehicle Designer for the Blender Ship MCP Projects. The plan below is the current feature request that shapes development. The detailed program document lives in Mneme_Vehicle_Designer_Launch_Rockets.md (Category 1: Launch → Rockets), which supersedes nothing and extends MSDS v0.1 with geometry validation through Blender and a growth path into non-rocket vehicle categories.

(This is a soft update to the feature request — defer to it as the latest intent.)

Priority: the Vehicle Designer is the foundation

The Vehicle Designer is the unblocking dependency for everything downstream. The chain is strict:

Vehicle Designer  →  3D Ship & Vehicle Models  →  Godot Game
   (the foundation)     (built from the mass/geometry the   (storytelling)
                         Designer validates)

• Without a Vehicle Designer, there is no basis for the 3D models of ships and vehicles. The app owns the numbers (masses, volumes, mass fractions, ΔV); Blender and Godot only shape what the Designer already validated.
• Without ships and vehicles, the Godot game loses its main vehicle of storytelling. The vehicles that carry the characters around a planet and across a star system are what create immersion and scale — the player's sense of distance, of being small against a world, and of a journey worth taking.

So the Vehicle Designer is not one feature among many: it is the thing that makes the 3D models and the Godot game possible at all. The mass-and-geometry loop comes first; the Launcher Rockets and Orbiters validate it; the cislunar economy and Godot game are the payoff.

Mass-first, geometry-second (the feedback cycle)

• Use the Vehicle Designer's mass-focused design system first.
• Validate the Launcher Rockets first, then later the Orbiters.
• There is a feedback cycle: the mass physics is validated first, then the geometry is validated in Blender. The app owns the numbers (masses, volumes, mass fractions, ΔV); Blender owns the shape (measured volume, surface area, skin mass). Because stretching a tank in Blender increases surface area → increases skin mass → reduces ΔV, the player feels structural mass fraction as a consequence of shape, not as a number from a table.

Final outcome

A set of tools to design realistic rockets, working with:

• Payload and orbit — mission legs and ΔV targets, sized to what a given payload actually needs
• Tech level (TL) and Program Maturity Rating (PMR)

From that basis, create a cislunar economy:

• Rockets become common across various nation states
• The resources needed to reach a particular performance level (a capability band)
• Model the costs and the frequency of launching (catch-up model, cost-per-kilogram to LEO, launch cadence)

Godot conversion

With the physics and vehicle design mechanics validated, move to Godot and have elements ready to be converted into a game where players build ships procedurally.

Unlike SimpleRockets / Juno: New Origins — where you need to know so much about ratios and hardware to design something — this system works off basic requirements: energy needed and mass to move. The barrier was requiring players to know about ratios and hardware. We want to offload all the hardware and memorization to the algorithm and focus on letting players think in trade-offs.

Habitats

Then proceed to detail the Habitats, starting with:

• 0G habitats
• early Spin habitats
• early Lunar Habitats

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Documentation

Core Specifications

• Mneme Ship Design System — Complete v0.1 specification covering decimal TL framework, vehicle taxonomy, mass budget & delta-V mechanics, BOM structure, propulsion tables, Features/Bugs system, procedural generation, and Saturn V calibration data
• Vehicle Designer — Launch Rockets — Program document (v0.1 planning draft) for Category 1: Launch → Rockets. Adds the Body = Payload + Propulsion model, the parametric-geometry/Blender validation loop, an era-by-era historical calibration program (Apollo → Shuttle → Soviet → Energia-Buran → Artemis/SpaceX), the program catch-up model, trend lines and theoretical ceilings, and the surface-area lift model
• TL Fraction Mapping — 0.1 TL granularity with year ranges (1950–2075+), component dating, calibration anchors, and PMR interaction rules

Knowledge Base

• Knowledge Base Index — Overview of all knowledge base documents
• 01 — Delta-V Budget — Mission legs, Tsiolkovsky equation, gravity losses, reference budgets
• 02 — Impulse and Engines — Isp, thrust, T/W ratio, thermodynamic cycles, engine types by TL
• 03 — Powerplants — Solar, RTGs, batteries, nuclear, theoretical maximums
• 04 — Mass Methodology — Mass fractions, propellant fraction, dry mass budgets, margin philosophy
• 05 — BOQ Methodology — Component costing, assembly trees, learning curves, PMR cost multipliers
• 06 — Staging and Structures — Stage separation, geometry simplification, structural margins, reusability impact
• 07 — Material Science — Steel to carbon composites, strength-to-weight, thermal limits, cryogenic considerations
• 08 — Procedural Design — Vertical layout, fuselage constraints, spin habitats, generation pipeline
• 09 — Economic Analysis — Infrastructure demand, technology participation, innovation economics, world-fixing capabilities

Taxonomy & Archetypes

• Vehicle Taxonomy — Complete classification system (kind, size, crew suffixes)
• Rocket Classification — PROP-ARC / STG-CFG / MIS-ORG axes
• Spacecraft Archetypes — 13 vehicles across 5 archetypes with TL assignments
• Vehicle Terminology — Single source of truth: propulsion/mass terms, launcher lift classes, spacecraft classes, 3-level BOM rule, CE TL / MTL / MSDS-legacy-TL reconciliation
• Design Validation Loop — Estimate → Blender-measure → compare policy, procedural & operating cost models, decade-step projection methodology, per-pass acceptance criteria (±10 % mass / ±5 % ΔV / ±25 % cost)

Conversion & Reference

• SimpleRockets Conversion Rules — SR2 craft → MVDS vehicle conversion with 30 real-world calibrations

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Application Features

Design Screen

• Build vehicles structure-by-structure
• Add components (engines, fuel tanks, avionics, crew modules, etc.)
• Real-time mass and delta-V calculations
• Component library with 7 categories

Compare Screen

• Side-by-side comparison of up to 3 vehicles
• 3 view modes: Standard, Compact, Super Compact
• Row-aligned metric comparison with diff highlighting
• Top-line performance summary per vehicle
• Optimized for 1920×1080 displays

Library

• 48 pre-built vehicles including historical rockets and converted SimpleRockets crafts
• Saturn V/IB, Apollo CSM/LM, Orion, Artemis HLS, Falcon 9/Heavy, Space Shuttle, Soyuz, Proton, Energia-Buran, SLS, Starship, Long March 5, Ariane 6, and more
• Filter by type, TL, and origin

Save / Load / Import / Export

• Save vehicles to browser localStorage
• Export designs as JSON files
• Import JSON files from other users
• Share designs via file exchange

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Project Status

• Current Version: v0.3
• Display Target: 1920×1080
• Library Vehicles: 48 (17 hand-crafted historical + 31 SimpleRockets conversions)
• Build Status: ✅ Passing

Recent Milestones

• ✅ Multi-ship comparison with 3 view modes
• ✅ SimpleRockets conversion system (30 vehicles, 93% validation pass)
• ✅ Save/Load/Import/Export system
• ✅ Knowledge base (9 documents)
• ✅ Spacecraft archetype definitions

Next Milestones

• Multi-structure BOM support (staging)
• Procedural vehicle generation from constraints
• 3D visualization bridge
• Godot engine integration

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Related Projects

• CE ShipGen — Mneme combat and encounter system (RAW-compliant combat engine, tokens, deckplans)
• Mneme World Generator
• Name-Place-Faction Generator
• Cepheus Engine Character Generator

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License

This project is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0).

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Part of the Game in the Brain / Mneme RPG ecosystem. Justin can run Mneme at 2050–2100s and see how the world was reshaped by the technologies — with humanity surviving all that happened after the pandemic and the slide to fascism and techno-corporate feudalism.