Minecraft: Hyperion Construction 2
I neglected to mention in my last post the approximate scale I'm using here. I had to guesstimate from the images I was using as reference about what size the Hyperion was. I figured that a single deck (approximately one line of windows on the reference image) was roughly the equivalent of 2 blocks tall in Minecraft terms-- 3 if you include the flooring. In hindsight, that probably wasn't large enough for the true size of the Hyperion-- it would probably be more like at least 3 blocks of space, if not a bit more. At any rate, even with my wrong scaling, it was going to be too tall.
Calling my original figure of 3 blocks (with floor) per deck 1:1 scale, and figuring about 12 decks from the reference image, just the nose itself was going to be about 45 blocks tall. That factored in some additional flooring here and there I could see on the reference images that wasn't necessarily part of a deck. And that didn't even include the bottom of the nose that sticks out quite a bit lower.
That just wasn't going to work and would make the nose itself extremely wide-- about 162 blocks by my calculations. Add to that the fact that I had figured from the reference images that the aft-section, the engine block, stuck up above the nose another half-nose-height, there was no way I'd be able to fit it without a very deep, very wide hole.
So I had to scale it down. I decided to go with 2/3 scale for the overall project. Unfortunately I couldn't shrink the deck size because I had already figured a deck was about the minimum space for a Minecraft person to walk around in. So I had to get rid of decks where possible and make some other allowances to allow for other decks to have flooring. So instead of the 6 decks for the main sides of the nose that I wanted, I ended up with 4.
Here's the progress after another few days. I was stopping work periodically to work on our server subway, so there were some times I wasn't able to get much done.
I worked with the above two schematics for a while until I started getting to the point where I needed to build the main body pylon-- the part that connects the nose to the engine and wings. At that point I need to figure out exactly what height the thing was going to be at relative to the nose.
After some more time I finished the upper section on both port and starboard sides of the nose and got tired of working on it, so I decided to extend the pylon for something more interesting to do for a while.
In this picture you can see some of my on-site smelting stuff. I had about 12 smelters smelting cobblestone into stone almost non-stop for a long time.
Right about at this time it really started to sink in just how massive this project was.
Calling my original figure of 3 blocks (with floor) per deck 1:1 scale, and figuring about 12 decks from the reference image, just the nose itself was going to be about 45 blocks tall. That factored in some additional flooring here and there I could see on the reference images that wasn't necessarily part of a deck. And that didn't even include the bottom of the nose that sticks out quite a bit lower.
That just wasn't going to work and would make the nose itself extremely wide-- about 162 blocks by my calculations. Add to that the fact that I had figured from the reference images that the aft-section, the engine block, stuck up above the nose another half-nose-height, there was no way I'd be able to fit it without a very deep, very wide hole.
So I had to scale it down. I decided to go with 2/3 scale for the overall project. Unfortunately I couldn't shrink the deck size because I had already figured a deck was about the minimum space for a Minecraft person to walk around in. So I had to get rid of decks where possible and make some other allowances to allow for other decks to have flooring. So instead of the 6 decks for the main sides of the nose that I wanted, I ended up with 4.
Here's the progress after another few days. I was stopping work periodically to work on our server subway, so there were some times I wasn't able to get much done.
I worked with the above two schematics for a while until I started getting to the point where I needed to build the main body pylon-- the part that connects the nose to the engine and wings. At that point I need to figure out exactly what height the thing was going to be at relative to the nose.
After some more time I finished the upper section on both port and starboard sides of the nose and got tired of working on it, so I decided to extend the pylon for something more interesting to do for a while.
In this picture you can see some of my on-site smelting stuff. I had about 12 smelters smelting cobblestone into stone almost non-stop for a long time.
Right about at this time it really started to sink in just how massive this project was.