We’re over $25,000! So we’re announcing our new reward: 3D printed models of Overture. A limited number will be hand-painted! http://ift.tt/1SFoxW3
Oh you guys. You’re gonna get me in trouble.
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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.
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So much Overture!!!
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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!
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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.
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If you’ve checked our Kickstarter page recently, you’d know that we just hit 52% of our goal!
Thank you all so much for your support. Here’s to the next 48% :D
Whoa. They picked up a $5K backer. Thank you, whoever you are.
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We’re working hard to bring Personal Space to life. Please back us today, and join us in space! http://ift.tt/1X2jx0t
When I’m anxious I analyze.
They’re at 40% of the $45K goal, with two weeks remaining. Things will pick up toward the end, but it’s making me nervous.
Here’s the corresponding graph from Poeparty:
One thing that was genius with Poeparty was the way they used the cast reveals every $5K to maintain interest. Also, there were the weekend livestreams that let you see the creators being excited and let donors squee collectively in the comments. (It also didn’t hurt that they got several multi-thousand-dollar individual donations.)
It’s an apples-to-oranges comparison, obviously. Personal Space doesn’t have the pre-existing content that Poeparty had (ATTV, I mean), including a trio of beloved characters to do an in-world video for the Kickstarter. Poeparty had more bodies to work the campaign, too, with Sinead, Sean, Sarah, and MK pretty much dedicating the whole month to it, and lots of participation from the rest of the cast.
Obviously Tom and Dana and Zack and the rest of the folks behind Personal Space are working hard to make the show happen. It’s just that their show is a different sort of thing, one that until now has existed only in a few peoples’ heads, and that’s a harder sell. What could they do that they’re not already doing?
Maybe try to leverage the cast more? I know it’s hard when you’ve lined up relatively big-name talent who don’t normally do webseries to ask them to donate time for promotion. But maybe record some brief, low-budget videos from some of the cast talking about what attracted them to the project, and release those at funding milestones?
I don’t know where the Battlestar Galactica fandom hangs out. I was talking to my daughter, who is very much a BSG fan, and she was excited when I explained the show to her. Maybe try to get the word out to that fandom more than has happened already? There was talk a few days ago of releasing a teaser trailer; maybe that would help.
Now I’m just being annoying, I realize. They’re already doing everything they can think of. The train is in motion and they’re laying down track in front of it as fast as they can. They’re doctors in surgery, and I’m the anxious friend in the waiting room who wants to burst in and try to help.
I need to chill. Let the professionals do their job.
I upped my pledge. It’s not much, and I’d been saving it for the end, but I think now is the time.
Anyway, good luck guys. I’m pulling for you.
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Tom Pike talks about Personal Space, including some details I hadn’t heard before about casting and story.
There also was a mention of a certain obsessive fan on Tumblr that I very much enjoyed. :-)
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Tim Russ plays Jeff, who makes the best guac this side of the heliosheath. http://kck.st/21cKsHx
More than anyone except Sean, he’s the one I’m most looking forward to seeing. His character meant so much to me in Voyager.
If you’ve been thinking about pledging but haven’t gotten around to it, this would be a great time. They’re in those middle-of-the-kickstarter doldrums, and I bet even the smallest puff of wind would mean a lot right now.
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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:
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.
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As promised, our new reward tier is out! Up your pledge and get audio episodes with the main cast.
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Tom Pike talking about how to make a webseries look good for not too much money.
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Spoiler alert: the Star Destroyer would definitely win.
In fairness, the Star Destroyer was built as a tool of conquest. Overture was built only to do science and/or boost reality show ratings.
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lies:
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.
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The best space botanist since Mark Watney blew himself up.
Kickstarter is at $14,793 out of $45K; 22 days to go.
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Personal Space is the work of a big team. Here’s what the show means to one of its writers, Dana Shaw.
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If the size of Overture is too much for you to wrap your head around, enjoy this smaller model, made of what appears to be a toilet plunger, a flower pot, and a paper plate. This would never be used in the actual show, so why’d we make this? You’ll see soon enough ;)
Thoughts about the Mystery Curvy Thing
I noticed that the model has four long thingies sticking out from the crew area. They appear to correspond to Overture’s Mystery Curvy Thing (henceforth MCT):
I’ve been thinking a lot about the MCT. From the beginning I’ve suspected it involves communication with Earth, and that it needs to be out there outside the radius of the pusher plate at the back of the ship so its line of sight to Earth isn’t blocked.
That means Overture’s crew is keeping Earth lined up directly behind them, even after the relatively brief period at the start of the mission when they were accelerating. I said previously that they could reorient the ship once they were up to speed. But now I think that was wrong.
One problem with reorienting the ship is that maybe it matters what part of the structure they present to the interstellar medium. Space is mostly empty, but it’s not completely empty. Maybe there’s special shielding on the forward part of the crew-quarters donuts, such that the “bow” of the ship has to stay the bow in order for them to travel safely at 1% of the speed of light.
Or maybe it’s important to keep the (presumably radioactive) aft side of the pusher plate behind them. I assume the ship generates some kind of “bow shock” with a teardrop shape as they plow through the interstellar gas and dust; maybe it’s best for the crew if they keep the radioactive aft side of the pusher plate “downwind”, so any radiation is left behind as quickly as possible.
I also wondered how important it was for Overture to spin on its axis to provide artificial gravity. It certainly looks like it’s built for that, with those donut-shaped crew quarters. But did it have to be built that way? Could they have generated artificial gravity by designing the ship to tumble end for end, for example, with the pusher plate and crew quarters orbiting their common center of gravity?
That seems like it might cause issues in terms of those “bow shock” concerns I was talking about. But the big problem, I think, is communication.
Staying in touch with Earth is essential. How do you keep an antenna lined up to do that? If the ship were tumbling end-over-end it would be really hard. So the ship has to rotate on its axis. But even then, if the axis weren’t pointed directly at Earth, you’d have to constantly re-aim the antenna. With the axis pointed at Earth, though, you’re good. The antenna just points aft, and as the ship spins the antenna is always pointing the right way.
Which brings me back to the MCT. When I first was thinking about it as an antenna platform, I wondered why it was built so robustly. Using the docked shuttle visible in the upper right-hand corner of this image for scale, you can see that the MCT is roughly twice as wide as the shuttle’s 78-foot wingspan:
That’s huge. If the MCT is just a boom to get an antenna far enough outboard to see past the pusher plate, why make it so big?
One reason might be access. You need to maintain that communication equipment, and that means crew members need to get to it. The MCT might be shielded and pressurized, such that crew members can travel through it safely and easily. (Though they would experience extra-high g forces when they were out there. I bet they would have to reduce the ship’s rotation during antenna maintenance.)
But it wouldn’t need to be that big. There must be something else going on. And why is it curved? That’s the weirdest thing. Here it is again in the side view:
The MCT needs to hold up to the stresses of the ship’s rotation. It being curved makes that much harder from an engineering standpoint. Having it be so thick top to bottom makes that part easier – though again at the cost of having a much larger, more robust structure than you would need just to get an antenna out there far enough to see around the pusher plate.
So I’m looking at the curve, and it hits me: It’s a parabola.
The MCT isn’t a structure to hold an antenna out past the pusher plate. The MCT is the antenna.
I bet its lower surface is made of radio-reflective material. It bothered me for a minute that there’s no receiver unit visible at the focus of the antenna, out in space “aft” of the MCT, but then I realized that that actually makes sense: The crew could extend the receiver when they need it by “lowering” it on a cable from a suitable spot in the central structure, then reel it back in for safe-keeping and maintenance.
The more I learn about the thought that went into this story, the more excited I get about the parts I haven’t seen yet.
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The first successful test flight of the V-2 Rocket, on October 3rd 1942. 71 years ago today.
After World War II, the V-2 Rocket paved the way for future manned space exploration.
Wernher von Braun’s research was critical to space exploration.
#wernher von braun#science#science fact#science fiction#alternate history#sci fi#personal space#webshow#webseries#personal space show#pretty sure that the date is wrong though#wernher von braun defected to the US way before WWII after all#this probably launched in the early 1930s (via @personalspaceshow)
ps!universe leakage in the tags
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Support a project that’s been in the works for nearly two years!
It’s not like I’m saying it’s LBD in space. But it’s totally LBD in space.
Kickstarter’s currently at $12,606 (out of the goal of $45K, with 26 days to go).
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