Flare Sci-Fi Forums: Neo-Volumetrics

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Posted by Guardian 2000 (Member # 743) on :

Crap, forgot to post about this here.

There's a plugin for Google SketchUp that allows for volume calculation, and since SketchUp is for 3-D modeling naturally geeks have made starships with it (though strangely, almost nobody's made them to scale). As a result, it no longer requires LightWave and its AreaVol plugin to do volume estimation.

This has prompted me to revamp my old Volumetrics page. You can find the details on using SketchUp and the plugin there.

The first 20 ships of the chart are Star Wars vessels. The last 50+ are Trek ships.

Enjoy!

Posted by Bernd (Member # 6) on :

Great work!

I always refer the people to that page in case of the "mass is proportional to length" fallacy (as trivial as it is, it is surprising how many just don't get it).

Posted by Guardian 2000 (Member # 743) on :

Actually, I thought of you lately, as it finally dawned on me that I could do something fun.

I've gathered together a lovely DS9, a great runabout, a fairly good Fact Files Defiant, and an OMGWTF pseudo-Galaxy. Though it is masochistic in the extreme, I have put them all together to see what scale seemed to work best in reference to some of the more standard shots we would see.

I posted about what happened when I put a two-meter dude near the upper pylon (as in the DS9 credits) . . . I had to shrink the station to around 330 meters to get him to look even halfway right. Someone on my blog commented that 334 meters works out to around 1097 feet. The station's original design was 1097 meters.

Might be old news to you, but I thought it was an ingenious explanation. Wish I knew who the anonymous poster was!

Posted by Guardian 2000 (Member # 743) on :

Incidentally, I'll share that DS9 modeling thing as soon as I finish it up. I have to replace the Defiants with a better version I found, and finish making the different-DS9-size versions of each set.

(I might be done already, but I got distracted modeling the Rise torpedo scaling after seeing another denier with no sense of 3-d perspective. Amazing how widespread that seems to be, especially among my loyal opposition. [Wink]

)

Posted by Masao (Member # 232) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Bernd:
Great work!

I always refer the people to that page in case of the "mass is proportional to length" fallacy (as trivial as it is, it is surprising how many just don't get it).

I remember first being disabused of this fallacy by an article in Boy's Life magazine (a magazine for Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts) in the mid-1960s. It explained why arachnids and lizards filmed in close-up couldn't work as giant monsters in science fiction movies and introduced me to the concept of mass increasing as the cube of length.

Thanks for the tip, G2K. I'm going to have to learn this Sketch-Up thingy.

Posted by Guardian 2000 (Member # 743) on :

Masao! Thought of you, too . . . some of the Starfleet Museum ships are on there!

I've got links posted on the Volumetrics page to every SketchUp model I use, but if you want pre-scaled ones I can figure out some way to get you the ones I've modified and saved.

It'll even export little movies, but they're nowhere near as crisp or controlled as the "Scenes" and scene transitions within the program. But that's what '3-Ding' from the cheap seats gets us, I suppose.

Posted by Guardian 2000 (Member # 743) on :

Couldn't help myself:

The Torsk, at about 148m, comes out to 105,524m^3 at 5% accuracy. The Krechet, despite being 30m shorter, is a much fatter bird and comes in at 147,845. And the carrier could almost eat six Torsks.

But I don't wanna take all your fun of playing with your own ships, so I'll stop there for now.

(At TOS densities, by the way, they'd come out to 457,000 and 640,000 tonnes, respectively. At VOY densities, they'd be more like 118,000 and 165,000.

So you called it very well with the Krechet being 40% heavier than the Torsk, even considering the low densities of the Romulan War era ships.)

Posted by Masao (Member # 232) on :

Since my Romulan War-era ships were constructed from simple solids, calculating their volumes required only junior high school geometry. Nothing to it!

Posted by Guardian 2000 (Member # 743) on :

Yeah, most aren't too bad insofar as being able to get pretty good estimates with sufficient effort and guesstimation, but then technically many of the ships could also have their volumes worked up fairly well in just that way. The fact that nobody seems to have ever done it, though, is testament to how much easier LightWave and SketchUP make it. [Smile]

Posted by Guardian 2000 (Member # 743) on :

From my blog:

"Axeman" at Flare and TrekBBS has been working on a model of the Type-7 shuttlecraft that I really wanted access to . . . the Type-7 remains one of my all-time favorites, and I wanted to be able to check the volume and just size it up against other vessels. After all, the poor things were largely forgotten, and really . . . comparing a Type-7 to any of the ugly Eaves-designed monstrosities (like any of the Enterprise-E shuttles) makes it clear that Probert's little babies are the best, right?

Holy cow, what have I done?

Axeman's Type-7 was a LightWave ship, and though I'd seen that there was no direct import function in SketchUp, and while I saw that there were costly solutions for converting the file, I decided to look once again for anything free that might do it. Turns out my Google-Fu failed me last time, because this time I finally found Blender. It's apparently a kickass freeware raytracing and mesh-making cross-platform and free program, and it will import and export to the two major formats of interest. And, I saw reference to a volume calculation script.

. . . Or so I thought. Holy sweet crap what a funky UI that thing has. SketchUp was sufficiently simple that I was able to get up and running pretty quick. But Blender looks like a Linux programmer just saw Windows 3.11 and decided to try his hand at a UI. I finally got the Type-7 to import to where I could see it, but then the funky Python script-running in Blender did nothing at all when the script finished.

But no matter, I simply exported that puppy to a .3ds and imported it within SketchUp.

(3D Studio Max has a stupid proprietary file format, by the way, a .max that nothing else can read. The older and more open 3D Studio format is .3ds, and is preferred. However, there is the suggestion of a free version of Deep Exploration from years ago that might help with .max files here.)

When I rescaled the Type-7 (which was the size of the default dude's big toe), I got her up to 8.5 meters or so, which EAS has as the correct length. I ran the volume ... and the program seemed to lock. So I killed it, restarted, and tried again at 10% accuracy.

The result? 59.436 cubic meters.

But that blew my mind, because the Type-6 is somewhere in the 26 range. (Here's a SketchUp model that reads 22, but I think that might be a tad low.) Turns out, though, the figure is probably correct. I had no idea, but the Type-7 is really quite huge compared to the now-puny-seeming Type-6. I noticed the 8.5 meter EAS length for the Type-7 compared to 6m for the Type-6 (is that right?), but didn't think much of it . . . but in concert with how wide that big girl is, she really overwhelms the Type-6.

I have to say, now, after pondering the use (from an in-universe sense) of the Type-6 and derivative Voyager shuttles . . . what the hell? Unless they're little mass-produced sports cars by comparison to the curvilicious but large Type-7, it doesn't make sense to me why they'd always want to fly those wee things.

But then again, these are the same people who often took Type-15 shuttlepods, which you could almost park in the rear of a Type-6 were it not for the wee impulse nacelles, so nevermind:

(And yes, I found a .3ds Type-15 that I was able to snag off of a web archive version of the old Star Trek: Australia site, may it rest in peace. But the volume function in SketchUp doesn't act correctly on it.)

Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :

How much bananna pudding would fill Picard's ready room as an April fool's day joke?

Posted by Guardian 2000 (Member # 743) on :

I go by the rule of thumb that you can never have too much banana pudding.