Antihydrogen Containment Unit

North American Union - Project Hammerfall

Description:

The Antihydrogen Containment Unit, or ACU, is unitized container vessel designed with the purpose of holding antimatter (in this case Antihydrogen) for transportation and storage purposes. Its development came as a result of Project Hammerfall, a top secret research and weapons testing initiative led by the North American Union Defense Coalition. Through the course of Project Hammerfall’s development, researchers were able to discover and invent new means and methods to produce usable quantities of antimatter. Most of the research in the project centered around harvesting stations orbiting the gas giant of Jupiter, which were capable of gathering limited quantities of anti-protons that naturally formed in planet’s massive magnetic-field-derived radiation belts.

Because production operations were a significant distance away from the labs and testing facilities in the Earth Moon System, it became necessary for samples and yields of antimatter to be transported between the two regions. Moreover, researches needed a way to store the valuable, yet ludicrously volatile, resource in a safe and efficient matter. Thus, the ACU was created, with its redundant magnetic chamber, ruggedized build, and modular design, to solve logistical puzzle of antimatter transport and storage.

Idea:

The ACU was the next piece in my pursuit to flesh out the worldbuilding of project Eleran Eclipse. This particular item serves as a plot device in the story and it was important to me and my co-writer to have a solid idea what the ACU would look like. I decided to continue with the faux-3D style I utilized for the design of the MS-16 Rifle and followed the same creative process of rough sketching the design in Adobe Fresco.

Process:

Like with the MS-16 Rifle, the initial artwork was drawn Adobe Fresco for the iPad. Using perspective lines and some rough estimation, I created 3D-like representations of the container. During the process of creating the full unit, I though it would be interesting to see how the item would look like when exploded into its component parts. Subsequently, I sketched out the subunits of the container as well.

After reaching a finishing point with the rough, I exported the file to Adobe Illustrator. There, I put the pieces together using vector shapes and roughly matched the reference artwork. Through this process I as well added color and made some final amendments before setting the infographical layout for the complete art piece.