Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Seeking: an easy to use & free drawing tool to draw the insides of spaceships.

16 comments:

  1. What sorts o features are you looking for?

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  2. Ohh, yeah. Mapping. Deck plans and shit

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  3. The single best mapping tool out there - simple, powerful, neutrally themed.
    deepnight.net - ANAmap: a free RPG Map Editor

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  4. Oh, and something just occured to me. I want to do non euclidian spaces. Essentially, I've got an idea for levels of a cylinder, peeled outward like an onion. Thats probably substantially harder.

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  5. This should work, Sławomir Wójcik. For sure as a baseline. Thanks!

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  6. If you're doing onion layers of a cylinder, I actually just recommend a little math.

    Say the layer height is three meters, plus some small margin for floor thinkness and structural soundness.

    We can choose a small margin to conveniently be 10m/pi -3m.

    Now you have a series of floor plans that line up at both edges, each of which is 10m shorter than the last.

    Place access points proportionally along their surface, and then draw in the rest.

    Not unlike mapping a Tesseract by color-coding the doors. Hard to visualize, but easy to navigate.

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  7. Jesse Cox I've not done 3d geometry in a while.

    I can treat the layers effecively as a rectaliniar plane (sure), such that:
    Innermost layer 0: 20m by 20m
    Layer 1: 30m by 30m
    Layer 2: 40m by 40m

    Supposing that each layer is 3 meters and the approximate space between each layer is ~0.18m. Or, that each is 2 meters and the space between each is ~1.18m.

    Is that correct?

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  8. Oh, no -- for a cylinder, one dimension is constant.


    So the innermost layer is, say 10m x 50m. It's floor is it's ceiling. It's probably solid.

    Next is a 20m x 50m layer.
    Then 30m x 50m.
    Then 40m x 50m
    Then 50m x 50m
    Then 60m x 50m

    The 50m dimension isn't curved. You go from one end to the other, and then walk back.

    The variable-length one is a loop, like a PAC-MAN map.

    If there are support columns every 10m on the 50x50 layer in the middle, they'll be 4m apart on the 20x50 layer...but only in the round way. There will still be 10m between them as you walk the set dimension.

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  9. S'ok. Things like this are why I did math tutoring. : ' )

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  10. Maybe something like this:
    The spaceships of the Third Regularium are expanding cylinders, designed for zero or low-G, with engines that produce a slow but constant thrust.

    A simple ship may be only 10m long, and include 3 layers:
    Inner core: Power systems
    Layer 1, 10m in circumference: Living, controls, etc.
    Layer 3: 20m in circumference, cargo attachment hardhholds, for cargo containers that remain in space for storage.

    At one end is the engines. This is a cylinder 10m long and 30m in circumference. There's about 100 m^2 of space, sufficient for a spacer family.

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  11. Large ship are available, in a variety of ways:
    1. The 10m sections can attach, forming an air-tight seal. One way for two spacer families to join together is to merge their ships.
    2. Expand outward: Expand towards more layers, allowing for more attachment and, of course, weapons.
    3. More powerful ion engines at the rear, taking more space than the standard.
    4. Larger power supplies. The small variety provides sufficient power for most of what a ship needs, but weapon, higher instantaneous thrust, etc require more power. Instead of 10m, some are 20m in circumfrence. There is rumor some are even 30m or 40m of power generation.

    Any combination of these. You could have a 30m power supply attached to a 10m habitation module on the other side. That'd be wonky, but it's not like space cares about aerodynamic design.

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  12. Jesse Cox You and me both! And ten sometimes the brains break.

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  13. William Nichols oh, totally. I trend toward being way verbose, and am really good at misjudging how much background my audience has.

    We call'em brainfarts. And I have a number of doozies to my name.

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