centrifuge builds (ESS-Arroway)

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    • Railman
    • Wired for Logic
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    After seeing this episode of PBS' space-time and the release of rails and rotators, I'd been jonesing to build some proper centripetal acceleration / Coriolis effect-based structures in Starmade.

    ESS-Arroway:

    note: this screenshot and the others below make use of plusnine's fancy starmade effects

    The ship is a sort of sequel to the ESS-Olamina, which was featured in the Shroomiverse! episode Tomino_sama and I shot back in December 2014, long before rails were a twinkle in schema's eye. I do a lot of post-NASA/pre-Trek inspired builds, so this is in line with what I tend to do thematically.
    I went through my youtube favorites to look for inspiration for what to do with rails, and was particularly inspired by this animator's mockup of NASA's Natilus-X spacecraft:

    At first I thought about attempting crazy unfolding solar panels, but gave up due to how many logic blocks needed to be exposed to keep the panel 1-thin and how much wireless logic would be needed for a reliable retraction system.

    After some experimentation, I had two internal sections docked and rotating flush to the primary hull with enough room for whatever mass enhancement and timing systems i would need.

    It is worth nothing that my goal is to create a beautiful, cinematic ship rather than anything that has impressive technical starmade specs for the ship size. I know I'd get eaten alive in a combat situation, and am fine with that. I tend to build peaceful exploration ships anyway. I hope you find this thread useful, inspirational or interesting. Please feel free to post screenshots and videos of your own coriolis-style builds in this thread, I would love to see them!

    Completed features:
    • rotating comm dish, angled at 45 degrees
    • rotating 73m rotating torus ring timed to produce an artificial 1.0 g
    • solar panel flywheel with adjustable solar panels mounted to it
    • an animated shuttle undock and redock sequence

    To do:
    • finish sketching exterior frame
    • needs more wedges
    • furnishing and details
    • some sort of gimballed arm or tow laser deployed from the rear hangar.
    • escape pods!
    • see what other kinds of toys i can rail up

    Animated GIFs and movies:

    If you are interested in making centripetal acceleration structures yourself, here's a handy tool to help you get spin calculations for your rotations to "produce" 1.0G. I take the answer in rotations per minute, then calculate 60/x to get the number of seconds per rotation and time my rotations with a stop watch until they are pretty close.
     
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    really nice, just one small nitpick: the Coriolis force isn't what you want, the Centrifugal force is.
     
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    • Railman
    • Wired for Logic
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    right on: things and people may be subject to Coriolis forces within the centrifuge structure (causing things that "should" move in a straight line curving with no apparent reason from your frame of reference, inner ear mishaps, etc).

    i'll edit the text of the OP to make that clearer.
     
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    are you saying centrifugal force is implemented in starmade? or is this purely 'aesthetic'?
     
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    You can sort of get a similar effect with directional gravity, but that's only on four planes really.
    Would a Gravity Block connected to a rotation give you an extra four directions of gravity or would it just do weird things.
     
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    Do you mean put an extra entity rotated 45 degrees with a few gravity modules inside? I don't see why it wouldn't work. Sounds a bit awkward to make it look like one entity though.
     
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    • Legacy Citizen 4
    Build a symmetrical version of this, get it spinning on a rail rotator block and you have a pseudo-centrifuge.