Favorite moments from the Personal Space trailer.

• That first blackboard you see, before the second one slides down and covers it, has a cool diagram. At first I thought it showed some event from early in the mission, but after looking more closely I think it actually shows the end of the mission. There’s the destination exoplanet, labeled “X”, with Overture in orbit and a shuttle descending to it, fueling “in situ” (i.e., on the planet), then rejoining Overture.
• I like von Braun using his slide rule as a pointer. I was born a smidgeon too late to actually use one in school, but I used to play with my dad’s when I was a kid.
• Another cool period reference: Dana and I’m-not-sure-who toasting with Tab. It kind of looks like they’re opening modern-style stay-tab openers rather than the ring-pull openers I would have expected; Wikipedia is a little ambiguous on exactly when that transition would have happened, and I don’t quite remember, other than a vague sense that it happened somewhere around the late 70s/early 80s. Of course this is an AU; maybe along with spaceflight the evolution of soda can openers was similarly accelerated in the PS universe.
• Showing a nuke blast to introduce Overture was SO COOL. I was expecting a fly-by, and when that burst of light came I knew exactly what it was and got embarrassingly excited. A+ for micro-budget SFX showmanship.
• The drive plate was cool. Seeing the antenna peaking around the edge of it was cool. Seeing the front end of the ship reveal itself as we swung by the drive plate was cool. Basically it was all cool.
• It’s kind of a silly thing, but I loved getting the answer to something I’d wondered: which way the ship rotates. The answer: clockwise as you face forward. Which means that for crew standing at the windows, the sky will perpetually appear to be rotating slowly counter-clockwise as they look forward.
• The ship appears to be rotating a little faster than I expected. I thought it would rotate once every 30 seconds, so as to provide 1 g of artificial gravity at the radius of the outer (lower) deck in the big donut’s pods. In the trailer, though, the ship appears to complete a rotation in about 21 seconds. (And the camera appears to also be circling the ship slowly in the same clockwise-looking-forward direction, which I’d expect would make the ship appear to rotate more slowly, rather than more quickly.) So maybe I made an incorrect assumption or a math error when figuring the ship’s rate of spin. Or maybe it just looked cooler spinning a little faster, and they (sensibly) decided that was more important than hyper-technical realism.
• I was thrilled to finally get a good view of the antenna. I’d been confused about its structure; in some previous views I’d thought its sections looked big and boxy. Now, though, I realize that the individual sections are relatively thin. But they’re staggered with respect to each other. I wonder if that’s to let the connecting struts be arranged at the same 45-degree angle that the supports connecting the big donut and the small donut are. If so, I think it might be for the same reason in each case: The struts need to be able to handle forces from two different directions: The rearward force generated by the Orion drive, and the outward force generated by the ship’s spin. By putting the struts at a 45-degree angle they can handle forces from both directions equally well.
• I was very interested in the red coloring. What I previously thought might be residue of an accidental hull breach now clearly appears to be a reflection that shifts as the ship rotates. It’s hard to tell exactly where the reflected light originates; it looks like maybe it’s coming from somewhere on the inner edge of either the big or the small donut somewhere around the part of the ship that has the antenna attached to it. I haven’t been able to think of anything that would cause that. Maybe a nuclear reactor located in one of the smaller donut pods produces the light as a side-effect of its operation? Or maybe it’s not meant to represent anything in particular, but is just a red highlight applied to the rendering to add visual interest. If so it definitely worked in my case. :-)
• I thought the rulebook floating by was cute. I’m assuming it’s meant as a visual gag referencing how the crew or the people at Actaeon or whomever have “thrown the rulebook out the window.”

Okay. Enough obsessing for now.

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Tags: gifs, my gifs, personal space show, overture.

This entry was posted by jbc on Sunday, May 22nd, 2016 at 8:55 pm and is filed under Tumblr. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.