We’ve started to see the first rough cuts come in! And they look great. Backers will hear from us soon about Kickstarter rewards.
Woo! Also, first look at a new-and-improved Overture model:
Looks pretty much like the previous one, though with a snazzier two-tone color scheme, with the “gantry” (or whatever it is; that’s what I’ve been calling it) in black. Also, the antenna is significantly skinnier.
Well, this screenshot doesn’t have the texture applied. It’s basically just a wireframe. The colors and lighting are going to look very different in the final version, but this wireframe shows off a couple of architectural changes.
Neat! I’ll hold off on trying to read too much into the appearance of this model, then. It’s hard for me not to try to figure out what the “couple of architectural changes” are, though.
The curve-y thing that I’ve been calling the antenna is definitely narrower in this version than in the previous one. Other than that I haven’t been able to find anything so far that looks obviously different. But I’ll keep looking. 🙂
We’ve started to see the first rough cuts come in! And they look great. Backers will hear from us soon about Kickstarter rewards.
Woo! Also, first look at a new-and-improved Overture model:
Looks pretty much like the previous one, though with a snazzier two-tone color scheme, with the “gantry” (or whatever it is; that’s what I’ve been calling it) in black. Also, the antenna is significantly skinnier.
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.”
Overture has come a long way. On top is our current model. Below is our original concept art model, from October 2014. If our Kickstarter reaches its goal, this is the kind of dedication to detail and improvement you can expect from the Personal Space team.
Personal Space’s first trailer is out today! Support our Kickstarter here: http://kck.st/21cKsHx
Reblogging for the official release of the teaser trailer. I’ve got a lot to say about the flyby of Overture (the antenna, the red color, the rotation…), but it will have to wait until I have time to obsess properly. Also, first trailer? Does that mean there could be more?
The recutting to use actual Reagan quotes is cool. Clearly that’s the main reference in the ship’s name (”the opening overture of a symphony in space”), but I still like to think an echo of the 2001 title card might be in there at least subliminally.
They’re at $24,759 out of $45K with 9 days to go. So hope they get there.
The latest in a series of posts in which I obsess over a tiny little ginormous fictional spaceship. including a Read More as a courtesy for the non-obsessed.
As previously discussed, Overture seems to be designed to spin on its axis to make artificial gravity. Looking “back” at the ship from “ahead” in terms of its direction of travel, it looks like this:
I was curious how fast it spins. So I did some math.
According to this post, Overture has a diameter of 448 meters. I wasn’t sure if that was just for the big donut with its presumably-habitable pods, or if it includes the antenna structure sticking out to the side. Fortunately the space shuttles docked on the hub provide a handy yardstick:
Using copy-and-paste, I confirmed that Overture’s big donut is about 19 shuttle wingspans across, or 456 m, which is close enough to the official figure of 448 m for me to assume that the difference is due to my sloppy measuring.
According to the Wikipedia article on artificial gravity, the following formula is what we need:
I’m going to assume that Overture is designed to produce 1 g at the outermost (lowest) deck of the inhabited big-donut pods. That gives:
R = 224 m, a = 9.81 m/s/s
Plug those in and do the math, and you end up with:
T = 30 seconds
So Overture spins at 2 rpm.
I bet it would look pretty out the windows. I think those might actually be windows in the two big-donut pods at either end of the gantry that connects the donut to the hub; they’re the only two pods that have them:
If those actually are decks it looks like there are 10 of them in the pod. Using my handy shuttle-wingspan yardstick, it looks like the decks are about 15 feet apart, which sounds a little big, but maybe it makes sense if the ceilings are high or there’s a lot of stuff taking up space between the decks.
Each deck would have slightly less artificial gravity than the one below. If I did the math right the middle of the pod would have 8.25 m/s/s, or about 84% of normal, while the top deck would have 6.67 m/s/s, or about 68% of normal.
I also figured out the gravity for the smaller donut’s pods: 6.05 m/s/s (62%) at the bottom (outermost) part of the pod, 4.74 m/s/s (48%) in the middle, and 3.42 m/s/s (35%) at the top. So the crew will definitely feel a lot lighter if they spend time in there.
Interestingly, if a crewmember were to travel around the rings that connect the pods in the donuts, going in the direction the ship is spinning would make them heavier, while going in the opposite direction would make them lighter. That in turn made me wonder: If they had a bicycle on the ship, and Dr. Blasto rode it as fast as he could through the big donut’s connecting ring in an anti-spinward direction, could he achieve weightlessness and just sit there, floating, while the ship turned past him?
The answer turns out to be no, for several reasons.
For one thing, he’d need to have an uninterrupted passage to ride through, and I bet the ship’s designers wouldn’t make that easy. There probably isn’t a breathable atmosphere throughout the ring’s 1,181-meter circumference. Even if there is, the pods are probably isolated with airtight bulkheads for safety.
But on a 25-year shift I can imagine boredom setting in. After a while those fussy safety rules might start to look more like guidelines than hard-and-fast rules. So maybe Blasto would wait until Commander Gartner was asleep or busy doing Oort Cloud observations and open all the hatches to he could try his weightless biking stunt.
The faster he goes, though, the lighter he becomes. He’d still have air resistance holding him back, but there’d be less and less friction with the deck for the bike’s tires to push against. At some point before he’d achieved weightlessness he’d be unable to go any faster.
The real problem, though, is that he can’t go fast enough regardless. At the 188 m radius that I estimate for the outer ring, he’d need to go 39.4 m/s, or 87.9 mph, to cancel out Overture’s rotation. I don’t think he can pedal that fast.
But that figure of 87.9 mph made me think of something else: What if Dr. Blasto has a flux capacitor? Then all he has to do is go 0.1 mph faster and he can travel through time! And for that all he has to do is descend to a lower deck. Way before he reaches the lowest deck, where the ship’s rotational velocity is a brisk 104.9 mph, he would hit the magic 88 mph and vanish in a burst of blue-white light, bound for temporal glory!
So, I rewatched 2001 last night, partly to see if I was wrong to think I remembered that somewhere in there was a title card that read OVERTURE. I really thought I remembered it being at the very beginning, before the MGM logo while the Ligeti was playing. But nope; no title card, neither there nor anywhere else in the movie.
So I googled, and guess what? I actually did remember it. It just wasn’t in the downloaded version I was watching. I think maybe the laserdisc version I had for many years must have had it.
So that made me happy two ways. One, because even if the ship in Personal Space isn’t named in homage to the film, this wasn’t one of those cases (increasingly common as I get older) in which I’m confronted by the fallibility of my memory. And two, because I got to watch 2001 again. Because man is that a great movie.
Our visual effects model of Overture contains more than 10 million polygons. http://kck.st/21cKsHx
What Happened to Overture?
The top view is the most-detailed image they’ve released so far (I think?). I haven’t been able to find a similarly high-res version of the side view; hopefully one will be released at some point.
If you pan around the top view at maximum zoom there’s an area I haven’t talked about yet that I find really interesting:
There are two things I wonder about:
What are those four nubbins, sitting in two groups of two on the upper/inner surface of that pod in the inner (smaller) donut? Using the shuttle for scale, each individual nubbin appears to be about 10-15 feet square. There’s interesting detail visible all over the ship, but the nubbins are unique in that they appear to be jury-rigged, something plopped on after the fact, rather than being part of the ship’s original design.
Why the red? It’s the only area on the ship that has that color. Everything else is consistently blue/gray/black. I doubt it’s a coincidence that the one place on the ship that has the odd-looking nubbins also has this anomalous color.
Here’s the same area, viewed (at lower res, sadly) from the side view:
You can see that the reddish color isn’t just on the inner-donut pod. It’s also on the adjacent part of the central hub and the gantry that extends out from it.
My guess is that this is all going to turn out to be story-relevant. Maybe the red coloring is a residue from some kind of impact or accidental breach that let material from inside the ship escape and accumulate on its outer surface, with the nubbins being related in some way to the repair. Part of the drama the show’s creators have hinted at involves King being unwilling to relinquish command to his youthful, untested counterpart Gartner, because of concerns that the ship won’t be safe in her hands. Maybe a dramatic accident that played out during first shift was part of what makes him feel that way, and the nubbins and red coloring are a legacy of the incident.
I wonder what first-shift Engineer Lipschitz (now in cryo) knows about that. I wonder what second-shift engineer Freeman knows about it.
Overture is a massive ship, 448 meters in diameter and 1,100 meters long. She’s the only ship like this in existence, and it took a concerted effort to build her.
Now we’re talking. :-)
We get to see the pusher plate, yay! And more of that curved-arm thingy that does who-knows-what!
Excuse me; I’m going to need to go stare at this for a while…
Sparing the dashboards of long-suffering followers by putting my latest thoughts about Overture below a cut.
As I previously discussed, I’m pretty sure the curved-arm thingy is Overture’s radio antenna for talking to Earth.
Lately I’ve been thinking about another aspect of the ship’s design. Overture accelerates (and presumably decelerates) by setting off nuclear bombs beyond the drive plate at the bottom of the ship. They set off a bunch of them, one after another, a few seconds apart. But there’s a problem: The force of those explosions pushes the ship all at once, which causes too much acceleration for the crew to withstand. Those abrupt pulses must be converted to smooth acceleration via some sort of shock-absorbing mechanism.
At first I thought the shock absorber would be down near the drive plate. But looking at that part of the ship, I don’t see anything that looks like one.
Today, though, I realized that it would make more sense to put the shock absorber at the other end of the ship, up near the crew quarters, where it can be easily accessed and maintained. And there’s a great candidate for it up there: That massive tapered central hub that receives the long mast extending up from the drive plate:
I can imagine the mast sliding up through that hub when a nuke explodes, with some kind of braking mechanism being used to transfer momentum to the crew quarters. Then the hub would climb back up the mast using some kind of energy-consuming process (electromagnetic induction?). You’d probably try to engineer it so the initial braking stored energy, with that energy then powering the second, “climbing back up” phase. Like regenerative breaking in an electric car, only on a slightly (ahem) larger scale.
Looking at the top of the central hub in the overhead image, I don’t see anything that looks like a place where the mast would exit, but maybe it has a cap that we’re actually seeing here:
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the concept of Overture’s mission and how it would be experienced by the crew. With 25 years per shift and 1200 years to their destination, there are 48 shifts, and nearly 200 astronauts, each of whom has volunteered to be frozen for all but 25 years of the flight. Later shifts would be emerging into a world many hundreds of years in the future from their pre-cryosis perspective. But technologically they’d be flying the same (now ancient, by contemporary Earth standards) ship. In a way it’s like technological progress would stop for the crew on Overture, since they would be cutting themselves off from developments back home, other than what they could acquire via radio.
But would the crew evolve in step with Earth culturally? Would they try to use the materials on Overture to match the latest fashions they see in videos from Earth? Would their language evolve in step with changes back home? I imagine later shifts would face significant culture shock in trying to make sense of what they were seeing in the transmissions. Earth would become less and less real to them, their friends and loved ones dead and gone, the culture and language evolved until they were barely recognizable…
Would it draw them closer to their fellow crewmembers, who would share their Rip van Winkle experience and would be, after all, the only people they would interact with directly throughout their 25 years on watch?
I wonder, too, about the passing of the baton between crewmembers with corresponding responsibilities: commander to commander, doctor to doctor, botanist to botanist, engineer to engineer… You spend 25 years dealing with just three other people, none of whom share your background, then have a brief time during which you finally get to talk shop with someone who understands you.
Jeff Lipschitz, the first engineer, would have had a special role, one that subsequent engineers (until the last one) would not have had: firing the nuclear pulse drive. The Expanded Universe content the show creators have been including in the Kickstarter updates included a seriously cool mention yesterday of Lipschitz preparing to fire the first nuke as Overture completed its gravity-assist maneuver at Jupiter.
I wonder what that would have looked like. I love the fact that Tom and the other creators of the show care enough to make the technology of Overture believably complex, so that things like the communication antenna and the ship’s shock-absorber mechanism don’t necessarily jump out at first glance, but are instead visual anomalies, their form dictated by the actual engineering demands of the ship, rather than being dumbed-down versions more immediately recognizable but ultimately less interesting.
My favorite storytellers have always been those willing to carry their world building beyond the point where a less-obsessive creator would have stopped. I dig that obsession. I want to live in those richly imagined worlds. The more I see of Personal Space, the more I look forward to spending time there.
Overture is a massive ship, 448 meters in diameter and 1,100 meters long. She’s the only ship like this in existence, and it took a concerted effort to build her.
Now we’re talking. :-)
We get to see the pusher plate, yay! And more of that curved-arm thingy that does who-knows-what!
Excuse me; I’m going to need to go stare at this for a while…
Random thoughts on Overture, the Personal Space generation ship:
I wonder what the name is from. I was thinking I remembered a title card that said OVERTURE in 2001, which would be a cool thing to have named it after. But this page doesn’t mention it, and I didn’t see it when I took a quick look just now. I’ll have to do a full re-watch to look for it. (Any excuse to re-watch 2001.)
Looking at the space shuttle docked on the central hub for scale, that really is a big spaceship. Because a space shuttle isn’t exactly small:
…but it looks tiny docked on Overture:
Since I found the higher-res version of the overhead view at http://ift.tt/1QC8yDU, I realized there actually are two shuttles, on one each side of the hub:
I speculated before that the drive plate/pusher plate (whatever you call it) was at the lower end of that long boom you can see extending downward in this image:
After reading more about Project Orion I realize there also needs to be some kind of huge shock-absorber mechanism so that the nuclear explosions that power the ship have their impetus converted to constant acceleration that won’t squish the crew.
I also realized that since the two donut-shaped rings with the crew quarters have empty space surrounding them, that’s actually the drive plate/pusher plate that I’m seeing behind the rings and crosspieces in the overhead view.
I’ve been wondering about that structure jutting out to the left in the overhead view. What is that? Maybe something to hold an antenna array far enough out so it can “see” past the drive plate to communicate with Earth? Hm. Except once they’re coasting they should be able to reorient the ship however they want, shouldn’t they? And it doesn’t really look like a boom to hold an antenna; it’s a lot more substantial than that. And why does the rendering show it getting darker the farther away from the ship it is? Is it curved? Definitely a mystery.
If Overture is similar to the “momentum limited” version of Freeman Dyson’s design talked about at that Project Orion Wikipedia page, they would have set off something like 300,000 1-megaton explosions, one explosion every 3 seconds, causing them to accelerate at 1 g for 10 days, eventually reaching a speed of 10,000 km/sec, or 3.3% of the speed of light.
Then they would coast for as long as it takes to reach their destination (not counting deceleration time at the end). Reaching Alpha Centauri at that speed would take 133 years. If it’s 25 years and 4 crew per shift, that would mean they’d need 6 shifts and 24 crew. Presumably they have more people in stasis, though, so they can be revived for colonization after arrival.
There’s no particular reason to think they’re going to Alpha Centauri, though; it could easily be (probably would be) some other exoplanet-containing system further away. And they might be traveling slower than Dyson’s estimated speed. Either of those factors would make the trip longer.
I’m curious about the stuff on the chalkboard in this shot of von Braun (Mark Tierno) describing the mission to his team:
12 lightyears and 1200 years’ travel time? So maybe the ship is doing 1% of the speed of light, rather than Dyson’s 3%?
There are 12 stars within 10 lightyears of Earth, so 12 lightyears seems like a reasonable distance for Overture’s destination. That would mean 48 shifts’ worth of crew, or 192 astronauts, plus however many more colonists. That’s a lot of cryosis tubes to look after. No wonder Dr. Blasto is a little neurotic.
Ooh; I didn’t appreciate the three-dimensional aspect of Overture’s design from that end-on rendering they’d shown previously. So it has that big torus, and then a smaller torus in a different plane. And that long boom thingy extending down (in this view) along the axis of rotation.
It must rotate to provide gravity, which means the big torus has relatively high gravity (one G?), while the small torus has lower gravity. Unless they rotate at different rates? But no, I don’t think differential rotation would be smart from an engineering standpoint. If I were designing a generation ship I’d try to reduce moving parts as much as possible to simplify maintenance and improve reliability.
I hope more information will be made available about the ship’s design. It’s nuclear powered; fission, I’m assuming? I wonder if the reactor is out of frame, at the end of that long boom extending down in this shot. Having it far from the crew quarters would reduce the need for shielding.
