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The Valkyrie Shuttle Excerpt
From The Art of Avatar Book
Transcribed by SFMZ


"I love the fact that I got to work with a director that did want to know what kind of bolts were holding these fusion engines on and if it's going to vector," recounts senior illustrator Ryan Church of his collaboration with James Cameron.

A member of an advisory board on NASA, Cameron really "knows his birds," says Church (himself a fan of aviation since he was young). He was thrilled to be chosen to spearhead the shuttle's creation, and he designed the entire shuttle - "my signature contribution" - from scratch.

"A lot of what I did was draw things out. It may take longer, but it's also more satisfying." This vehicle, in particular, took some time to finalize. Conceptually, it was very realistic and well conceived, but there were many specifics the script called for that the Valkyrie shuttle had to perform:

First it had to detach from the ISV; then it had to re-enter exo-atmospherically, coming down to land like our space shuttle. All the various technical requirements for this had to be taken into consideration.





From the Original Scriptment

The LOCKHEED-SAAB TAV-37 "VALKYRIE" CLASS SHUTTLE is actually a heavy lifter, a workhorse several times larger and many times more powerful than today's space shuttle.

The Valkyrie shuttles are the heavy transports of the operation, packed with troops, volunteers, and powersuits. The ships enter the shadow of Mons Veritatis. In the jungle, regular troopers and volunteers run to the ramp of the Valkyrie shuttle which was their landing craft.

The pilot hears screaming and yelling from the back compartment. He panics, and starts an emergency takeoff. The huge ship rises into a hover and accelerates forward. Out of the trees comes a shiny black shape which leaps onto the nose of the shuttle.

The Manticore fills the ship's front windows. The pilot screams as the tail slams right through the canopy, shattering it. Outside we see Zuleika and the manticore drop off the accelerating ship from a height of 20 meters. The manticore crashes down through foliage and lands agilely. The shuttle accelerates out of control-- It climbs out of the forest--

Inside, the pilot is dead at the controls, the co-pilot gagging on the poisonous air. The shuttle hits the underside of Mons Veritatis. It explodes, and hundreds of tons of flaming debris drop back into the forest.





From the 2007 Script

CLOSE ON ISV -- two massive “VALKYRIE” SHUTTLES are mated to a DOCKING NODE. One of them separates from the starship and moves away, its thrusters FIRING in short bursts. Visible beyond the gun towers, the VALKYRIE SHUTTLE roars in across the treetops.

VECTORING NOZZLES change angle, bringing the ship to a SLOW HOVER. THE VALKYRIES blast the ground with their powerful lift jets. They land. The ramps drop. Troopers pour out, weapons leveled, advancing in a cordon. HUNTERS LOOK UP as a dark shape hovers overhead. The downblast of the VALKYRIE’S lift jets shreds the forest.



OPERATIONS:


Hell's Gate


RDA Mining Operation


LAND/AIR CRAFT:


SA-2 Samson


AT-99 Scorpion


C-21 Dragon
Assault Ship


Valkyrie
TAV Shuttle









You should already be familiar with this galactic bus since it hauled your rump down here. The Valkyrie TAV (trans-atmospheric vehicle) is a delta-wing space vehicle/aircraft used to transport equipment and personnel between ISV Venture Star and Hell's Gate on Pandora and its chief purpose is to bring Unobtainium to the spacecraft.

It's also capable of deploying large amounts of equipment and personnel with it's spacious cargo bays.

Typically used as ferries or small scale gas harvesting vehicles in the atmosphere of nearby Polyphemus, Valkyries are equipped with little in the way of weapons, though the rigors of trans-atmospheric flight and maneuvering requires a durable airframe. Valkyries also have an operational range of 2000 kilometers in Pandora's atmosphere. The Valkyrie's official name is SSTO-TAV-37 B-class shuttlecraft, however the Na'vi name for it is Shah-tell. The Valkyrie has a payload of up to 60 armed troops, 25 amp suits, 25 tons of refined unobtanium and/or supplies.

The two Valkyries carried by the ISV are used for transfer of personnel and cargo between the orbiting ISV and the surface of Pandora. These vessels are left at Pandora. The old replaced Valkyries craft have been re-purposed to serve as automated gas harvesters, skimming through Polyphemus’s upper atmosphere to obtain hydrogen and deuterium for refueling the ISV. Each has VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) capabilities by pivoting the engines for landing on the planet. As seen in the picture, a Valkyrie is landing at Hell's Gate.





Despite their civilian nature, Valkyries also feature modular dorsal hard-points for the installation of automated defense guns or manned gun-nests for use as defensive weapons during atmospheric flights into hostile territory. It has also been surmised that the durable airframe, coupled with the powerful lift capabilities of the Valkyrie, would make an excellent ad-hoc bomber should the situation call for such tactics.

A Valkyrie was fitted with machine-gun nests on the wings and cargo ramp, and was going to be used to deliver two Daisy Cutter explosive packages to the Tree of Souls. It was destroyed when Jake, in his Avatar form, threw grenades into the engine intake after the explosives had been armed, causing the entire ship to disintegrate in a massive fireball. The second Valkyrie was seen being used to ferry the remaining base personnel of Hell's Gate back to orbit.

In the Vietnam war, giant improvised daisy cutter bombs were delivered by C-130 Hercules transports which were kicked out of the cargo ramp and descended by parachute to create instant landing zones ("LZ"). The resulting explosion left a distinctive crater in the shape of a daisy. The Hercules was used to "shuttle" supplies to forward bases such as Khe Sanh. Machine guns are sometimes mounted on the cargo ramps of C-130 and CV-22s for self protection in the absence of dedicated gun turrets.





Real Life Equivalent to the Valkyrie TAV: The Space Shuttle Endeavour
By SFMZ Webmaster | References: nasa.gov, wikipedia.org


There are currently three operating shuttles: Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour. For the sake of simple labeling for this article, I will use the Endeavour as the example so that you can differentiate between NASA's shuttle and the RDA's shuttle.

Obviously the Endeavour is not an 'equivalent' to the Valkyrie due to technological differences, but it's the closest craft existing today that resembles Avatar's orbital ship. While the Valkyrie is a larger vessel, the Endeavour is still a sizeable shuttle with a wingspan of 78 feet and weighing in at approximately 4.5 million pounds (varies on payload).

The Endeavour is also likely a slower craft than the Valkyrie with a maximum velocity of 17,321 miles per hour and an orbit range on 115 to 400 statute miles. The one thing that it does share in common with the Valkyrie is that it too is a reusable spacecraft and is designed with the same purpose of being capable of traveling from orbit to planetary atmosphere. They are both cargo haulers, with the Endeavour primarily transporting large satellites both to and from orbit. The Shuttle lacks the Valkyrie's ability to launch from ground to orbit, it instead requires the use of detachable rocket boosters to launch.

The Space Shuttle consists of three major components: the Orbiter which houses the crew; a large External Tank that holds fuel for the main engines; and two Solid Rocket Boosters which provide most of the Shuttle's lift during the first two minutes of flight. All of the components are reused except for the external fuel tank, which burns up in the atmosphere after each launch.

A closer real world equivalent to the Valkyrie might have been the Rockwell X-30, a next generation shuttle capable as a viable single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) spacecraft, but the project was cancelled prior to the first craft being built.

The X-30 configuration was basically a highly integrated engine. The shovel shaped forward fuselage generated a shock wave to compress air before it entered the engine. The aft fuselage formed an integrated nozzle to expand the exhaust. The engine in between was intended to be a scramjet engine. At the time, a scramjet engine had never been successfully tested.

The aerodynamic configuration was an example of a waverider. Most of the lift was generated by the fuselage through a phenomenon called compression lift. The "wings" were small fins that provided trim and control. This configuration would make for efficient high-speed flight, but would have made take-off and slow-speed flight difficult.

Despite progress in developing the necessary structural and propulsion technology, NASA still had substantial hurdles to overcome. The Department of Defense wanted it to carry a crew of two and even a small payload. The demands of being a man-rated vehicle, with the necessary instrumentation, environmental control system, and safety equipment, made X-30 larger, heavier, and more expensive than was required for a simple technology demonstrator. The result was a cancellation of the X-30 and a move toward a more modest hypersonic program that culminated in the unmanned X-43 "Hyper-X", which is virtually an unmanned scaled-down X-30.

In any case, James Cameron was certainly on the right track with the pairing of the Valkyrie shuttle and the ISV Venture Star - much like Winnebego travelers who tow along a small / compact econony car for when they reach their destination, they can use the small car for local trips. If our astronomers ever to get to travel to another planet, it would seem logical that the Space Program would employ this same format by attaching an orbital Volkswagen to an interstellar Winnebego, so to speak.



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