Thank you!
However as to the model itself I have some questions, especially as far as these huge parabola antennas are concerned. (1) What are they for? They are pointed roughly forward, so they are not meant as a means of communication with the ship's origin. This would require them to be pointed backward. Shall they scan the ship's destination? Permanently? Shall they find a destination (but I would guess the ship is aimed a a specific star right from the beginning)? Shall they just scan the sorrounding space, as an early-collision-warning? It's just so many of them. (2) Does their sheer size make them a likely design-feature for a Generation Ship? The ship is designed to travel literally hundreds of years... <snip>
The answer to both of those questions, really, is this: the large dishes are scoops to gather whatever gases, bits of debris, pieces of smallish space-junk, etc., the ship happens to pass through. The stuff is 'processed' in the large ovoids at the bottom and added to the fuel supply, to be burned immediately or stored for future use.
My thoughts were that while the ship may coast for much of its time, it would still need fuel: to power the onboard systems, make course corrections, and so on, and I really didn't think it even slightly realistic that it would be able to carry, and move, several hundred/thousand years' worth of fuel. The answer: provide a method to replenish supply.
I agree with your point about collisions: had I had the time, several of the scoops would indeed have been damaged. I was also thinking about having had an asteroid impact on one of the cylinders, but this just wasn't feasible. Time ran out, and my computer (a 4.2GHz AMD with 2GB RAM) was already struggling with the 3.5M polys, so that just wasn't going to happen.
A last remark concerns the size of the ships exhaust-plume. In the original genships.oxp it's very short. Huge (as the engine), but short. I like that. Therefore the plume in the animation seems very long to me. Obviously (if we're not in the Ooniverse) the ship is accelerating heavily at the time of the encounter. For maintaining its speed in the real universe it would need no engine at all. (Of course there is one possible design-scheme for a generation ship that would require it to accelerate for the first half of its journey, then turn around 180 degrees and decelerate for the rest of the journey by keeping its engines firing, thus maintaining a 1-g-gravity-environment inside the ship. But I guess in your ship the rotating cylinders are taking care of gravity, so no reason to accelerate all the time. (EDIT: No, on re-viewing the animation I see the cylinders don't rotate anymore. Why?)) Anyway, my very personal-taste point here is just that I like the short exhaust-plume more.
In the OXP the plumes were supposed to be bigger, but for some reason I couldn't make them
long as well as
wide: hence the smallish flickerflame.
I appreciate what you say about the size of the plume. However, in the clip the genship is supposed to be making a course correction to avoid a gravity well, hence the attitude thrusters also firing. And given the sheer raw inertia of the damned thing, it's not such a big plume:
Galactica is to scale. From central axis to the yellow points of the cylinder is radius 3.2 km; to the edge of the gantry, about 5km. She's 70km long. That's a
lot of mass to move.
And yes, the cylinder's don't move. This is because I'd turned the ship to get the right perspective relative to star and planet-moon, for the right look, and by the time I'd got it there it was in a very funny position. 3DS Max didn't seem to want to let me rotate it correctly, so frankly I gave up. Also, given the scale I've built her to, the rotation would be of the order of a fraction of one rpm: the rotation in the OXP is exaggerated.
For the rest of it (I like the huge fuel-tanks! definitively a good addition to the first design!) and the animation itself, just again: awesome!
*smiles and bows* Thank you very much
It just never appeared to me that they could be something else than antennas. But of course, some kind of collectors make perfect sense. And of course they have to cover an area as large as possible. So, thanks for the explanation!