As background, I envisioned a large vehicle, about 500 meters in length. I imagine the engine to be an intertial confinement fusion drive system, similar to the one conceptualized decades ago for Project Daedalus. The propulsion system consists of various tanks (who knows what’s in them), followed by a shield, presumably to protect vital parts from accidental radiation and disruption that might occur for the instruments in the middle of the ship. The middle is composed of microgravity modules, perhaps storage and labs and so forth, with a small lab on an arm that rotates about the axis for gravity-related studies. Finally, we get to the habitation ring and the characteristic dome shield, itself containing machinery necessary to produce a magnetic shield emanating from the forward-most piece. All told, the thing would be a kilometer long and the habitation ring wud have a diameter of 400 meters. I assume the mass of the vehicle would be somewhere around a million metric tons.
I didn’t really plan this out in advance; I designed and built as I went and this inevitably produced challenges, especially because electrical wiring is involved. The tiles on the dome were not planned, for instance - but I wanted some texture and this seemed the best option, though a tedious one.
I’m an artist, not an engineer. Still, my aim was to produce a scale model of a large vehicle that could cover vast distances relatively quickly (years) within Saturn’s orbit around the Sun (a navigational sphere about 1 billion km in radius). For humans to live in an artificial world for that long, a good deal of comforts will be required, hence the scale of the vehicle. I named it after Chesley Bonestell, an artist of some renown among architects, astronomers, and industrial designers with an eye for the future.
Lighting: Evan Designs: https://evandesigns.com
Plastic hemisphere (commissioned): Bruce Kennedy at Bell Platsics
Kits scavenged: Meng "The Navigational Platform" (from Chinese The Wandering Earth film), parts from some sort of gundam kit I picked up years ago, parts from a kit of the rover from the film "Moon," 1/350 Tamiya Enterprise CVN-65, 1/72 Dragon Saturn 5 parts
Scratch parts: Evergreen plastic, ping pong balls, mouthwash bottle cap, aspirin bottle, other bits
I has the feel of a massive ship, and I love the effects, including the tiles. Well worth all the work.
