Celestia Forums

OK, I now have a website to load files on. The zip file for all of the spacecraft from the Hollywood film 2001, a Space Odyssey, is now ready and available for download. Just unzip directly to your Celestia folder. A read-me file accompanies it. All meshes, textures and ssc files are in the zip.

The file includes the following ships:

Space Station V - Massive orbiting station above earth with new texture
Orion space plane - the PanAm space plane seen in the movie - orbiting Earth
Moonbus - skims across surface of the Moon
Discovery - the giant spacechip that housed the astronauts and HAL. Adrift outside Jupiter space
Pod 1 - one of the pods used outside of Discovery. Adrift outside of the ship
Monolith - Black monolith orbiting Jupiter

The models turned out very well, thanks to DarkMiss and a bunch of folks on the Celestia forum and web who designed them and/or helped me get them working. For a view of them go to my gallery at
http://ennui.shatters.net/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=album06

For the zip file, go tomy website at http://66.93.244.45/celestia/

Enjoy. Frank

Looking nice Frank
I love that space station

What space shuttle is that, Frank ?
is it from the forum or a new one ?

Darkmiss wrote:What space shuttle is that, Frank ?
is it from the forum or a new one ?

Yes i think look here.

Jens

Paul, it's from the forum.

Frank

Great models - these have turned out very well, so thanks to all concerned.

Just out of curiosity, and not trying to be picky (honest!), where does the name "Space Station V" come from? It's called "Space Station One" in the book; I don't recall if it was named at all in the movie.

Grant

Dear Grant:

I got the mesh on a website called 2001, A Space Odyssey Modeling Archive. That is what the model was named at that site. Go figure ....

Frank

fsgregs wrote:That is what the model was named at that site. Go figure ....

Ah well. Whatever it's called, it's a thing of beauty.

Here's another definition some folk might like to try:

It shows the Orion shuttle on final approach to the space station, having synched its rotation for docking.
For fun, I've gleaned some information from the book version of 2001: the orbital altitude of the station is 200 miles, it rotates in a minute, and the centripetal acceleration at the rim is equivalent to lunar gravity - which lets us calculate a radius of 150m. This radius looks appropriate when seen alongside the Orion, and fits with the appearance in the movie that the rim is around three storeys high (two rows of lighted windows and another layer above that).
Running through the movie to get a feel for this, I spotted a continuity hiccup I've never seen mentioned before - in the first couple of shots in which we see the station, it's rotating clockwise as seen from the side Orion docks; the rest of the time it's turning counterclockwise! It's also apparently rotating clockwise when we watch from inside the station's hub as Orion approaches - the stars are turning clockwise in that shot.

BTW, it's fun to observe the view from inside the station's hub in the above set-up. Select Goto Object, and choose "Space Station One", -90 latitude, 0 longitude, and distance -0.12km. Then centre "Orion III".

Grant

Don'tya just love this forum, and all the folks in it.....

Grant ... How the $%*& do you do it??? Your command of orbital mechanics is damned amazing. I wish I had 1/10th your knowledge of this subject.

The ssc for the station and Orion are great. Thanks. I am leaving the original StationV model up in orbit also, so that I can practice being my own Orion space plane and trying to dock with it. It's kind of really wonderful to do, particularly when trying it to the Blue Danube (natch)!. I only wish Celestia had a command that would let me rotate my viewscreen in sync with the rotation of the station. It gets a bit difficult to keep hitting the roll key over and over again to keep up with the turning station. Anyway, maybe someday.

Well, Celestia has several advantages over the real world - everything is independently variable, and things stay where you put them. So I can get away with weird non-physical tricks like assigning a trillion-hour orbital period to the Orion .

Grant

Or a period of 0.0 for infinity

Rassilon wrote:Or a period of 0.0 for infinity ;)

That'd be nice, but it seems to place the Orion at the centre of the Sun and render it invisible!

Grant

Very nice... It makes me eager to see the celestia game...
http://mostlyharmless.sourceforge.net/index.htm

Grant, I just caught something in your post on Station 1 that I'm not clear on. You recommend that we Goto the station and actually set up our position in latitude, longitude and distance, and then observe the Orion. Is there something I don't know about in Celestia that lets you actually type in a coordinate and distance, and it takes you there? I thought movement like that had to be via spaceship controls, or through a cel script? Is a script what you meant? If so, could you please post the script if its not too lengthy? I'm still learning about scripts and am not sure what to write. Conversely, if you can position yourself directly from within Celestia by some keystroke commands that I'm not aware of, please ... what are they??

Frank

fsgregs wrote:Is there something I don't know about in Celestia that lets you actually type in a coordinate and distance, and it takes you there?

From the Navigation menu choose Goto Object.... Type in the name of the object you want to go to, and the latitude, longitude and altitude above the surface.

Grant