Holy hand grenades. That basicly one of the pods on fally........ its folly to underestimat Neal's ship

Hmm, teeny tiny.

. . . one day I should finally finish that station that's been sitting on my hard drive for years now.

Is it a 3D model?

The base mesh that I wanted to plant entire city on. Due to $reasons never got to it.
The model itself is rather simple, a 10km diameter torus station with a ring mirror around the central hub, perfect to plonk right on some L5 point.
The goal was to have a nice little animation showing buildings and fields on the inside from the point of view of a craft passing through the ring but I ran into trouble making the interior.

I'm guessing any level of detail quickly ran you out of memory? I've had to back down on the number of extras/props/toys to get some things to render.

Nah, the problem was dealing with polygons that were literally a kilometre square each.

And putting enough detail on each one?

Positioning the detail. Clipping issues galore, weird bugs in displacement and bump map systems, the whole nine yards.

Actually I should probably redo the whole thing. Getting it properly lit without resorting to Dirty Hacks was an interesting challenge in itself and nowadays even Modo has a hdri/pbr engine built in.

Looking back I realise now that I did some stupid mistakes, like trying to work on this torus in too big chunks at a time. Most 3D modellers are not designed to operate freely on the inside surface of a torus, when that surface stretches out, up and back for kilometres at a time.

Over my head!

Good luck and have fun with it!

So you got me back into the groove. Not fully done yet, but most of it is there
https://my.pcloud.com/publink/show?.....RV65P93fXFlcBy
https://my.pcloud.com/publink/show?.....i94kQl70AUM6py

Looks like a very interesting start.

The Borg, with training wheels!

Not quite, but it would fit in a pod if you break it down a bit.

Probably the box it was shipped in.

Speaking of which, could this be a version of the "space habitat" Neal stuck inside the corncob as extra living space?

Not the rings bits, but the rest of it is bits and pieces you could bash into however much of a station you want.

I thought it was described as a cylindrical stack of rings? (It would be quite the "brick joke" if it was later revealed -- maybe by Shadowchaser going back to hir old room? -- that it was actually the guts of an old "habitat pod"?)

From chapter/book one:

They were soon presented with a downward looking view of the space habitat and discovered it was a donut shape with a large ‘hole’ through the center of it.

And you can make a doughnut shape out of square/rectangular blocks ...

Imagine the space that sits in that box

Room enough for a good-sized apartment complex.

I have.

By old Traveller (RPG) standards, you can fit about two single-person staterooms in a standard cargo container (such as Neal uses in the story) and a couple thousand of those in a 60x60x60m pod. Now consider that at standard city block in Manhattan is 80m × 274m, and you quickly realize that one pod is roughly equal to a 20-story building covering a quarter of said block solidly and you get an idea of how massive those things are.

Seriously. I've tried mocking one up in Minecraft to validate my thoughts on how to stack containers. I'd try to mock up Folly herself, but her diameter exceeds the available building space.

opps, auto grammar wasn't working

Imagine the space Cat that sits in that box.

It actually looks really cool with just a giant high contrast box clipping thru it.

Since Foster's freighter Folly can move hundreds of 60 meter cube shaped shipping pods I thought I'd show just how that station compared.