Oh what the heck. This is Raindance Station. It was originally concieved as an asteroid-made-drydock facility, and things just moved from there. Like most things I do, there's a sort of internal fiction that goes with this. It started with East Rock, which has the three reactor cores, main concourse, and three drydocks. Eventually, more room was needed to add large ship docks, so South Rock was towed into place and the Shipworks was built on the interior surface. The addition of the shipworks required the addition of North Rock as a sort of habitation, facilities support and waystation area. West Rock was added for future expansion, and to balance the layout. Two parallel high speed tram tubes were built to unify all the asteroids into a coherent structure. I've got four images here:
This is the view from front to back, so East Rock is on the left. For scale, the three small things in the middle are 1.1km long Waterdancer class cruisers.
This is a view from outside the ring, looking directly at East Rock, where you can see the three main reactor cores. West Rock is hidden. Up top you can see North Rock in profile, including the Main concourse to the right and the habitation to the left. Down below, you can see South Rock, with its shipyards for super-vessels, such as dreadnaughts, colony ships and even small asteroid stations. To the right of South Rock, you can see the Shipworks campus.
In this view from above and to west of the station we can see both the main concourse of North Rock, the original facilities of East Rock, and--if you look closely--North Rock's auxiliary reactor cores. They appear as three groupings of six 'blisters' on the west side of the Rock.
Finally, we have the last view, also from above, but a reverse of the previous angle. From here you have a much clearer view of the main reactor cores, the Shipworks campus, and the habitation areas of North Rock. You also have a better view, perhaps, of the banana shaped tram stations on the aft ring.
This version of the Raindance Station mesh has been massively trimmed from 230k polygons, to about 153k. This took about a month to construct, piece by piece. During that month, several versions of North Rock and South Rock were discarded. All up, more than fourteen asteroid nodes were built, and only three survived the process. West Rock remained the same throughout. All of the work was done in Truespace 3.1, at true scale.
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--Mik
http://www.404error.comruhkferret on ICQ/AIM
"Your guy was a little SQUARE! You had to use your IMAGINATION! There were no multiple levels or screens. There was just one screen forever and you could never win the game. It just kept getting harder and faster until you died. JUST LIKE LIFE." --Ernie Cline
