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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The cast: If you’re a fan of literary-inspired webseries, you already know (or should know) Sean Persaud (A Tell-Tale Vlog, Kissing in the Rain, I Ship It, I Didn’t Write This).Brent Bailey was Alex Knightley in Emma Approved. I’m into literary webseries, so those are the first actors I noticed. But I’m also an old-school Trek fan, and I remember Tim Russ’s Tuvok as one of the best things about Star Trek: Voyager. I’m not familiar with the rest, but Battlestar Galactica fans will be excited about Nicki Clyne, Richard Hatch, and Tahmoh Penikett. There’s a nice mix of ages and ethnicities; it feels like a real space crew. I can’t wait to meet them.
Behind the scenes are more people who’ve been involved with things you may have loved. Dana Luery Shaw, writer and transmedia producer, worked on Classic Alice and Welcome to Sanditon. Zack Wallnau, credited for story and as director of photography, worked on most of the past projects from Shipwrecked Comedy and Yulin Kuang.
It’s sci fi (and gives every indication of being intelligent sci fi, which means a lot to me) but it also sounds like they’re approaching it from a vlog-series perspective, with a focus on characters and relationships rather than technology. Science fiction was one of my first loves; I grew up obsessively reading and re-reading Heinlein, Niven, and Zelazny. Later I fell equally hard for musicals and period drama, which led to Austen and eventually to a quirky modern-day YouTube adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. So bringing a literary webseries sensibility to sci fi is just, like, everything I didn’t know I needed.
I’ve talked elsewhere about how excited I am about the transmedia. Everyone remembers that LBD won an Emmy. But they forget that it won mostly for how groundbreaking and immersive the transmedia and world-building were. The hints I’ve seen make me think this show could be a worthy successor.
And the top reason to support the show: Because of how adorably choked-up Tom Pike gets in the Kickstarter video when he describes talking to a real-life astronaut.
The Space Shuttle Endeavour docked with the ISS, as seen from a… http://ift.tt/1SkFupY from @humanoidhistory
Can you spot the shuttle in our stills of the Overture?
I totally didn’t realize you could see it in there! That is so cool! (Biggest version of the image I could find is from this tweet; image file itself here.)
Shuttle location after a cut, to avoid spoilers if you’re playing along at home.
#personal space #personal space show #space shuttle #we had asked our visual effects guy to put the shuttle in there #and we genuinely didn’t realize he did until he pointed at it #BUT IT’S SO TINY #you…you know you’re the ones who gave me the ship’s dimensions and measurements right? #our literal conversation (via @personalspaceshow)
I thought it would be cool to know how the audience for webseries differs from the audience for traditional television. There are a lot of things that prevent me from doing a real statistical study on that, so in the mean time, I looked at an interesting case study involving Battlestar Galactica and an upcoming webseries called Personal Space.
Friend of the show Madelyn has written about the differences in the audiences of Battlestar Galactica and Personal Space! Check it out!
This is an interesting discussion about webseries tending to have a higher proportion of women in both on-screen representation and in the audience.
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.
Personal Space: A Science Fiction Webseries – Astronauts aboard a generation ship have no idea their therapy sessions are broadcast on Earth as reality TV. – http://kck.st/21cKuiG
The Space Shuttle Endeavour docked with the ISS, as seen from a… http://ift.tt/1SkFupY from @humanoidhistory
Can you spot the shuttle in our stills of the Overture?
I totally didn’t realize you could see it in there! That is so cool! (Biggest version of the image I could find is from this tweet; image file itself here.)
Shuttle location after a cut, to avoid spoilers if you’re playing along at home.
