Rotating Space Station...

[Boothby]

OK...now I'm interested.

http://endersgameblog.tumblr.com/post/2 ... ders-world" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Mich]

That... is a number of curious ways to say many things.

[elfprince13]

I'm going to have to reimagine the interior of the battle school now. Eek.

[Boothby]

Smooth walls were always a possibility in Hollywood. I still would have preferred a more rough-hewn look, like the interiors of WWII battleships. Bulkheads out to the walls, visible plumbing and electric, scuttling mechanisms built in on some of the doors, odd-looking emergency electrical pass-throughs at many of the doors in case a door has to be permanently dogged shut. Real-world, down and dirty, imperfect, desperate engineering designs.

[elfprince13]

Smooth walls were always a possibility in Hollywood. I still would have preferred a more rough-hewn look, like the interiors of WWII battleships. Bulkheads out to the walls, visible plumbing and electric, scuttling mechanisms built in on some of the doors, odd-looking emergency electrical pass-throughs at many of the doors in case a door has to be permanently dogged shut. Real-world, down and dirty, imperfect, desperate engineering designs.

It isn't so much the smoothness as the not-quite smoothness. It looks more like the underside of my Macbook Pro than like a space station.

[Boothby]

Those circular items to the left and right are actually modeled after captured hardware:

http://www.southco.com/resources/documents/47-4c.en.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Which makes the panel about 6" across, from parting line to parting line....

Or, they're just doing the usual: take a cute item, scale it up out of proportion, and make it look like something else.

[Myself Overwhelmed]

Yeah, I didn't like this teaser picture. My first thought was it was supposed to be one of the lockers in the bunkers.

The lighting, semi-smooth surface, no ground for perspective, the "screw" looking things, large bland font, and the brown wall; all made this image look miniature compared to what should be a big door.

I also couldn't determine how that thing is meant to open...

In fact, I disliked this picture so much that I made an account to comment on it, hello fellow Ender fans! (I've been stalking these forums for about a month)

Edit: Wait a minute... what the heck gave me the idea that that was supposed to be the entrance? Must've been the blog talking about the halls... I certainly hope that that is a picture of the lockers

[mr_thebrain]

I don't think its a door dude. It's a placard saying what hall they're in. Maybe at the bottom of a ladder and the screws will hold the ladder in place.

[Boothby]

I'm not expecting to see much in the way of Chutes and Ladders (tm) on the Battle School.

[Cassandra]

Removed.

[elfprince13]

It's, ummmm, not very 3-ringy?

[Boothby]

So, what do we know about it? First off: it looks like a giant, single battle room in the middle of it.

The left hand side is the habitation ring (obviously too tight a radius to be effective--you'd get seasick immediately).

The stuff on the right is clearly "something that goes 'bing!'," but has no real use.

http://youtu.be/lusXJIfB4ys" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Any other observations?

Besides "It's not very 'nine-roomey'"?

[Boothby]

I posted my first long commentary on the Battle School, on E/A (also a similar set of comments on E/N)

[Boothby]

Well, as expected, it's gone, now.

However, the shadow of it still lurks around teh Interwebs, asking for cheezburgers.

[Gravity Defier]

Your post is gone? Why, did they not have permission to post images of the movie space station?

[Boothby]

Bingo!

But my posts are accessible (since, apparently, in some circles I DO know all the right people), so I can recover my wonderful, flowing, evanescent, technically astute prose, and post it somewhere where the only images of the "Official" (as opposed to merely "Authorized") Battle School are ones made by a wholly independent netizen.

[Taalcon]

Here's the comments, from Darian and Steve:
====================================

Darian: I have created a 3D model based on the storyboards of what I think the “Movie” Battle School looks like. I have a more in depth discussion about how I interpreted the design from the pictures at my blog http://artofdarian.blogspot.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Steve Sywak: From the “shorthand” used in the story-board, it would appear that only the small cylindrical section to the far left of the Battle Room is rotating for centripetally-created artificial gravity.

It’s not clear to me, yet, what that “pick-up” gag (that looks almost like some complicated CD-player pick-up head) is between the rotating habitation rings and the (apparently) non-rotating tripod of hallways leading to the heavy, stationary, equatorial (and also non-rotating) band surrounding the Battle Room. You would think that if the large equatorial band were rotating, there would be arrows on it indicating such, as with the cylindrical group to the far left.

As I mentioned previously, with only a single battle room (as indicated), it’s hard for me, right now, to determine the overall scale of things. My gut sense, though, is that the radius to the habitation areas is too small to be comfortable. Decades of research on the human vestibular (inner ear) response to both gravity gradients and heightened Coriolis effects of small-radius centripetal habitation rings can lead to discomfort and nausea (and NOT the type that you “eventually get used to,” such as zero-G, itself).

But, let me see how big things would have to be if I scaled things up to what I think would be appropriate:

My initial analysis of the centripetal rotation of the rings of the Battle School (and I do not have a copy of my book with me right now) was roughly 75m radius at the “Battle gate” (also where the subway cars ran to bring people from the rotating rings to the stationary central core). That dimension was (roughly) optimized to avoid the aforementioned problems. That would make the outside diameter of the rotating rings in Gavin Hood’s design about 150m, minimum.

That would make the habitation rings about 75m wide, total (about 30m-35m wide each, since there appear to be two, in a close, tandem arrangement, with a slight spacing between them).

It would also make the sphere about 175m (575 ft) in diameter.

There’s a video of a guy on YouTube who can jump straight up, without a running start, and achieve a 44″ height . According to my calculations, his peak velocity would be about 4.69 m/s (also: 15.37 ft/sec ) - To jump across a 175m diameter would take you over half a minute (37.4 seconds)

Darian Robbins: Ok, that is quicker than I expected. But what about teenagers and or smaller kids?What do you estimate a good time would be for them? That guy in the video is a trained, grown athlete. Do we halve the speed, make it 3/4?

Steve Sywak: I read somewhere “on the Internet” that some people can jump as high as 50″, but there was not much else in the way of supporting facts or evidence.

Basically, in the absence of anything better, and assuming that our Battle School students ARE going to be “trained athletes” (after all, even the actors were getting into pretty good shape after only a couple of weeks!), I’m going to stick with those values.

Besides, 30 seconds of screen time will be INTERMINABLE!!! Part of the reason I had selected 75m across for a battle room (back when they were CUBES) was that traversing one face to the opposite face was only on the order of 15 or 16 seconds!

The other problem with ONE battle room is logistics: 21 Armies, taken 2 ways = 210 different combinations for each army to battle every other army. Assuming 1 hour per match (allowing for clean-up and prep), 10 hours a day, 7 days a week = 3 weeks (21 days), straight, to make up all those battles. 1.5 weeks if you’re running half-hour time slots (etc.).

With NINE battle rooms, and 1-hour time slots, that time gets reduced to 2-1/3 days.

I am so hoping that the story-board is NOT calling for the shuttle to dock to the rotating perimeter of the habitation rings….



Darian Robbins: Steve as I am looking at the story boards again. I am wondering if those arrows are not showing the “habitation section” rotating but showing the the motion of a shuttle circling around that section.

Look at the top left corner of the first frame there is an object in the foreground that I was thinking was the underside of a shuttle. The arrow begins from that object and tapers toward the habitation section. If I was drawing the storyboard I would draw an arrow in the same way to show the movement of an object from the foreground to a point in the distance.

Also, look at the last frame it shows that “shuttle’s” nose peeking around the edge it just flew a circle around. Docking? Maybe. But it might mean that what we think is rotating, might not be.

Steve Sywak: Well, having drawn up a few storyboards in my day (NYU Film School–not that it makes me an expert), I would say that we’re looking at two separate “directives”. The rotating arrows are definitely indicating that a particular part of the space station is revolving (the left part), and that the other sections are not. The more “linear” arrows indicate the direction that the camera (the shuttle) is moving in to the space station. The central image (Slide 2) is very clear on this.

Darian Robbins: I agree the linear arrows at the bottom of the frame are for camera movement toward the Battle School. I just don’t think it’s from the shuttle POV. It looks removed, in my opinion, *shrugs* well have to wait and see.

Steve: More like a generic “free floating camera in space” POV? Now THAT would be neat–track in on the Battle School, re-align with the rotating habitation ring, and then track in to a window on the rotating ring! Though you couldn’t track in on the outer face of the ring, since that is the FLOOR, and wouldn’t have any windows (one would think…)

Of course, that pretty much mimics the whole "Subway Car" approach I outlined (in great and glorious detail) in "The Authorized Ender Companion," except with MY approach, the whole change in perspective is something that the characters experience, instead of JUST the audience, leading to a stronger incorporation of one of the principal themes of the story....

[Boothby]

Thanks, Dave--I appreciate your effort to bring those back!

[Gravity Defier]

Thanks for posting this; it would have been a shame to lose this.

[Boothby]

What I find VERY interesting is that when Cassandra posted the Battle School images on EndersAnsible, there was a HUGE response in the comments section. After she was told to pull it, the responses there (and, similarly, on EnderNews) slowed to a trickle.

You'd think that the PR people at Summit and the other various production entities would recognize that, and would welcome the added traffic and interest. Or that, at least by now, they'd have started to grab the reins of a public relations campaign to start promoting the movie. I don't see them drumming up any interest in the movie, itself. It's just interest in the interest (interest in the RELEASE DATES, rather than interest in the FILM).

For instance: they need to address NPR's dropping of E/G from their summer reading list. Current action: nill.

[Srobison825]

I gotta say, I'm thinking that the utility deck g has something to do with where bean came out in the air ducts. That was how he knew it was safe to emerge and wouldn't be caught.
Anybody agree? I just read Enders shadow for the 500th time and that's the first thing that came to mind.

[Boothby]

That might be...hopefully, time WILL tell!