Over on the Star Citizen website I’m experiencing some feedback and not all of it good. Apparently it is quite impossible to do what I want to do without hydraulics, industrial servos or $3k linear actuators… it just cannot be done. Over at x-sim.de, where the people who actually make stuff, they’re saying nothing, but the star citizen ‘space engineers’ with nothing better to do than wait for a game that won’t be out for another two years are hard to please with mere words.
I was contacted by an American engineer last night who had some ‘concerns’ about my design. My heart sank for about 5 seconds as I wondered what he was going to say, but he only pointed out the problems of tapping aluminium and suggesting countersinking bolts that point to the inside of the sphere. A good point. When someone says ‘it will never work because…’ they’ve already made up their mind, only a working model will change it and then they’ll hate you for making them look foolish. When someone say ‘how are you going to overcome…?’ they’re actually helping you to justify your design decisions, and hopefully making you realise you have more problems to solve.
So I will spend the weekend oiling up the rusty maths parts of my brain and figure out how much power it’s going to take to move this crazy idea.
As per my previous thread I guess I’ll see if I can mimic the other platforms rotational speed. I expect to find that the $30 motors I’m hoping to use will not work at all, so TWO $30 motors will also not be enough, three might start to get there, and four would be perfect… so I solve the ‘impossible’ engineering problem by throwing money at the problem. $120 is pocket change when you look at all the simulators on the previous post.
The Motion Simulation TL1 is £41,000 and is doesn’t even move!! 😛
