Avatar: ISV Venture Star Analysis

An analysis of the extensive design of the ISV Venture Star from James Cameron's Avatar.

0:00 Intro
0:09 Overview
0:59 Propulsion systems
2:02 Structure
3:19 Cargo, Earth to Pandora
3:59 Cargo, Pandora to Earth
4:53 Flight plan
6:14 Problems
7:04 Conclusion

TWITTER:

FONTS:
Monitorica by 4th february
Licensed under CC BY-ND 3.0

Copyrighted material such as footage and stills are used under Fair Use for the purposes of criticism, analysis and discussion.

[MirandaAndUh]

Only James Cameron would bother putting this much conceptual realism into a ship that appears for only a few minutes of screentime. Bless that man's devotion to tangible world-building.

[XenoRaptor-]

That ship also has a hydroponics module for growing fruits and vegetables to feed he skeleton crew and passengers on ship during the 5 year fight time and between Earth and Pandora.

[wearandtear]

This must be the best fictional spacecraft ever and mostly within the realm of established science while not stretching engineering too far. Also it feels like a risky piece of tech, just like the sailships of the past were very vulnerable and fragile. Epic design!

[matchesburn]

2:47
Well... That's grim. Where the... where the occupants told of this little "safety" measure?

[HFilip]

I though they will skip the ships this time in TWOW. BOY was I wrong, they banked on it BIG TIME.

Mild SPOILERS for the beginning of the movie below:

The are multiple ships decelerating towards pandora. The whole burn looks like a major star on the night sky. And then they show one of them (presumably stripped of its nimble stuff) landing on Pandora. Its antimattter engines nuking everything living miles underneath. DAMN what a start of a movie.

[pocok]

I'm not a fan of the movie, but my appreciation for it have just increased by 475%. There are entire movie franchises out there with less thought put into them.

[Falince]

Daamn, thanks for this detailed explanation. I recently rewatched Avatar and I was confused about the propulsion system of the Venture Star for a long time actually (the movie doesn't explain all of it). Thank you so much for this great video.

[dsdy]

The ISV Venture Star is very heavily inspired by the Valkyrie, a similar design of antimatter ship without the photon sail, designed by Charles Pellegrino who consulted on the movie

[simonmatousek]

I'm really excited about this one, did not expect you to look into spaceships from something like Avatar. Great content!

[stevesun]

Finally found someone who can explain all these engineering designs. As an engineering student, the most fascinating thing in these science fiction movies are not the plots, it's these excellent designs based on current tech with only a few futuristic tech settings.

[TheExactlyatmidnight]

I never notice they had put so much thought into the ship Avatar

[shogun]

I think the most unrealistic part of this film was the fact that 'Unobtainium' was only found on Pandora.

[debott]

Most likely the coolest space craft design there is. Too many other sci-fi stories feature ugly blocks of metal or air craft in space, when instead there is a very prominent real spacecraft to take inspiration from: the Apollo LEM.

[scelonferdi]

I might be wrong here, but I seem to remember that the mirror actually gets moved between the two ends of the vessel depending on the phase of flight. So, IIRC it's actually installed "in front" of the engines during the Centauri to Sol accelaeration phase. For the Earth to Pandora speed up however, the Sail itself seem to work as the particle shield.

[youtubeisapublisher]

The radiators are probably only used during downtime between firings of the drives, drawing off the heat of a small onboard reactor that manages things like life support, lighting, recycling, etc. When the drives are in operation, waste heat can be extracted by the reaction mass you're dumping into the drive plume, by becoming part of the thrust plume that excess mass is itself stealing energy (heat) from the drive, which will lose some of it's Isp in exchange for increased thrust.
Granted this still wouldn't get rid of ALL the waste heat from the drives, but if the drives are bimodal and can run as fusion plants with much less power generation you will need at least significantly smaller radiators, though not no radiators at all.

[loopslytle]

An excellent presentation and explanation of this ship.

[betariffic]

The amount of antimatter required for this trip is astonishing, and the power of the drives is approaching solar flare levels. Just to have enough solar power to power antimatter production on the needed scale is Dyson swarm level. I do love the idea of laser propulsion, though, it'd probably be easier to build a laser station on the polyphemus side than it would be to use antimatter for half the delta-v.

[paulzuk]

Note that flying this thing would require the infrastructure to generate mind-boggling amounts of energy, like "More than we've ever used as a species up to 2021" mind-boggling.

I feel like the state of Earth shown in the director's cut of the movie is kind of a comment on that, because with this sort of wealth they could, in fact, fix it. But don't, because why bother if it won't make money...

[Tallacus]

When Grace said to Jake that Pandora was the most hostile environment known to man, I was like "you both survived the interstellar journey to Pandora, that was far more dangerous then anything Eywa's world can throw at you"

[michaeljf]

You need an extremely powerful energy source for the laser. Big sail to catch the photons. Then protection from interstellar dust. Then how to decelerate. Then cryo pods for X year journey.
90% of scifi: "Ha ha spaceship go woosh"