Nov 182011
Modeling of the Space Station V is done. Still a bit of work yet… the photoetch layout (it will be steel, not brass) is being tinkered with, and the Orion III spaceplane needs a few more details. But the station CAD model, all 220 meg of it, is basically done.
11 Responses to “Ta-da…”
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Since you’ve done all the dimensions, could you give a guesstimate on the capacity? How many rooms does the Hilton have, and how many people does Howard Johnson feed?
> Since you’ve done all the dimensions
Meh. I’ve made a CAD model that is as accurate to the *relative* dimensions of the original movie-model as I could make it. But the actual dimensions of the station elude me. Could be a thousand feet in diameter, could be 2000. Without knowing that, the rest is impossible to guess at.
Might be neat to continue tinkering with the CAD model to include the interior arrangement, designing for at least two different diameters. Not really sure what I’d do with the result, though.
I’ve never understood the scaling issue here. Never mind relative size of the Orion…we SEE HUMANS inside the windows of the docking bay, which shot is one point perspective pure & simple.
THIS page has a black and white image of what is claimed to be a Doug Trumbull production photo showing the Orion nearly in the bay, in which the Orion and the visible heads seem of a consistent size. How big’s the station? That big.
http://www.britmodeller.com/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t58047.html
Here’s the “scaling shot” huge and in glorious color. What’s the problem?
http://nho.ohn.free.fr/celestia/Cham/2001/003.jpg
> hat is claimed to be a Doug Trumbull production photo showing the Orion nearly in the bay
It comes from Doug Trumbull’s website, but the image is simply a photo of the Orion physically pasted over a photo of the docking bay, and pretty much useless for scaling.
> What’s the problem?
OK, so what’s the diameter?
Hmmm.
Looking at various stills, using a window height of about 6 feet, I estimate a torus height of about 60 feet, and a diameter of about 900 feet. So 1000 foot diameter sounds close, +/- 100 feet. Different views (models?) seem to vary a bit.
Thus, it is “big” in the sense that’s it’s the size of the Eiffel tower and IN SPACE, but nothing remarkable in it’s dimensions compared to civil engineering works on Earth, today.
I wonder if the Clarke estate will ever publish his notes?
Then again, using the apparent 90 second rotation rate seen in the docking sequence, and the apparent 1G experienced in the station, it would work out to 3600 feet diameter.
I suppose it’s possible that Hollywood just did things that “looked good”, I’ve heard rumors to that effect…
I wouldn’t say the Orion in bay shot is “useless for scaling;” presumably it was created to give a visual ideal of relative size (which it seems to provide; i.e., the docking bay figures look the right size in proportion to the Orion). Sure, we can’t tell where the Orion is in relation to the slot entrance…but given its OWN derivable (and derived) size, it can’t be farther than…some figure it’s beyond my capacities to calculate (but which CAD skills could, I presume, provide).
As to the station’s own size, given that Ian Walsh independently produced a similar pasteup to illustrate HIS calculation — well, I’ll let him say it:
With the 244ft. deep slot as the ‘Driver’ for the size of the Station docking port ,the Station becomes 1,836 feet in Diameter (1760 ft is 1/3 of a mile)…With a Hub 309 ft in dia. and a ‘slot’ 230ft wide (greatest width) by 244ft deep…and 63ft high. This gives Aries a ‘clearance’ of 11.5 feet each side and so my ‘made-up’ pictures (above) would be about right !
http://www.planet3earth.co.uk/2001%20page%203.htm
My impression is that his is something of an estimate (he says “too big” at several points, which sounds more like opinion than calculation), and a 63 ft high slot seems small to me in relation to the figures…which brings me back to the in-film scaling shot. One-point perspective, clearly visible heads, whose location along the depth of the slot can be determined by intersecting horizontal “depth into slot” lines with the shot’s own vanishing point lines, thus giving the width-to-head multiple precisely. I don’t work in pixels, and have yet to firm up my calculations; “research” has consisted in measuring head and width from a DVD projected onto a full-size movie screen, from which I derived a number I don’t have handy at the moment…
You draft with computers, Scott, as opposed to my own hand-driven methods; does the derivation method I’ve described seem invalid?
More than a decade ago, I used the same process to try to estimate the diameter of the station:
http://www.up-ship.com/blog/apr/2001/ssvsize.htm
Using the in-bay photo (well, a low-rez screenshot), I came up with a bay height of 44 to 49 feet, and an overall station diameter of 1196 to 1332 feet.
When comparing the size of the station to the Orion 3 spaceplane in a screenshot, I came up with a diameter of 2240 feet. When comparing the station to the O3 in Robert McCall’s painting, I came up with a diameter between 909 and 1121 feet.
Given the handwaviness of the estimates, I’d say that this more or less kinda confirms that the station was meant to be 1000 feet in diameter, but then Kubrick optically resized it to be twice as big compared to the O3.
Scott, that is a thing of beauty. May it be popular and profitable for you!
Then again, using the apparent 90 second rotation rate seen in the docking sequence, and the apparent 1G experienced in the station, it would work out to 3600 feet diameter.
As long as there were no adverse physiological consequences, I’d rather stay in a station with 0.6 standard gravity instead of one with a 1 G environment. I can get 1 G right here at home! A smaller station with lower pseudogravity probably would be easier and less expensive to build, too. Do we know that Space Station V was supposed to have a 1 G environment?
Too bad that even after all these years, we never built a rotating station to test the long-term effects of, say, 3/8 G …
M:
Well, the interior gravity looked like, say, that you might see on a sound stage in England. But it could have been lower.
Similar to what Scott said, anywhere between 1000′ and 3600′ might work, though I incline to the lower end.
As I recall from O’Neill’s Settlement in Space stuff, the inner-ear threshold was 3RPM, so a 90 second rotation is well below that.
I miss the L-5 society.
Congratulations on making a very good looking Station. It may or may not be of the exact scale as the one in the movie -but then the one in the movie isn’t consistent with itself either.
Next Babylon 5?
😉