Space Ark "Mankind"
Seneca Class Ark
This work is still in progress, and will be for some time to come, as I am intending to make it highly complex. The ship will have a sophisticated and fully detailed outside, and also several modeled areas inside. I use the POV-Ray raytracer, as it works with a scene description language that exceeds other renderers with its functionality and special functions.
No WYSIWYG editor was used, all numeric coordinates are hand-typed out of my mind.
I did not yet start the huge side hangars and ship construction facilities. The middle hull and the central hull are 70% complete at this moment.
Any hint about free render farms is welcome, as I also want to create a number of animations with this ship once it is finish.
About the SENECA class of space arks
Those ships are fully automated and computer-controlled industrial platforms with living freight. The flight is fully automated, and on arrival in the target system, the ship's intelligence scans the system directly and through a large number of high-speed drones, deploys a fleet of mining craft and construction vehicles, and builds infrastructure before the first settlers are woken up from their artificial deep sleep.
The ship's intelligence can react on almost any situation, can command the automated construction of standard ships or specialized ships, and serves as large-scale space-based factory. It has its own ports for the delivery of asteroid and planetary ore.
While the huge side hangars (not yet visible) accommodate large-scale craft and building facilities, the midship hull contains altogether twenty small-craft launch bays and four hangars for mid-scale space craft.
the skin of the entire ship hull is artificially organic, it can regrow and seal after damage, has integrated sensors of all types, has color pigments that can produce different paint patterns or images or even moving images better than an octopus, and can even emit light if so required. This all serves identification and communication. Also, the skin can process sun light and produces oxygen that is pumped into the ship. In fact, each ship wall inside produces light and oxygen from carbon dioxide and other side products of life as most materials of the ship interior are organic or half-organic, too.
The SENECA class of space arks were built just before invention of the tachyon and wormhole drives. Thus their large size, as they were meant to fly for long times. Sent out already, the ship computers received the construction details for these two newly developed drives during flight, and consequently their intelligent ship computers made the decision to stop at a nearby system, harvesting all materials needed to construct these drives, and mounted them before continuing their voyage. Now they reached their targets within weeks instead of decades. All later colonizing ships wee much smaller. These were the last really big ships built by humans.
Tachyon and wormhole drives are mounted to the front of a ship, and are combined inside a large round construction.
Posts
The new version is much more complex and detailed.
Re: Free render farms? I've never heard of a free render farm, as equipment of that nature can be quite pricey. I'd imagine budget is an issue for you, but you can build your own render farm with a few off the shelf computers, an Ethernet switch or old router configured to work as one, some lengths of cat5 cable and some custom configuration. Instructions on setting it up can be found with a simple web search. Though, if you don't have everything, the computers alone will cost you a few hundred dollars, depending on which ones and how many you buy. Anything with a decent processor and RAM will do, as graphics processors aren't that big a deal for rendering only machines. It's still a lot cheaper than buying an actual render farm.
Another option is finding somewhere that will render your scenes for a fee. There are companies that do this.
This sorta thing?
http://rendernow.clickforward.com/?_vsrefdom=p.15013
Render farms: will have to check out more.
Looking at: imagine a middle hull in the shape of a vertical cylinder (disc). And left and right from it (not yet visible) are two long, cylindrical hangars connected to the hull in the middle by a hull piece that goes from left to right (visible already). To get a better idea, simply look at the blueish illuminated ship of my 2nd posting right below my first posting - it shows you the ship (previous version) in full, just cut off by the edge of the image dimension. There you see the ship from a position in front of it.
Yeah, this must be a totally unknown design for all of you - I never copy designs of others, I develop my own designs. Makes things much, much more interesting to look at! :-)
Hm, I didn't even know those existed.
I added the four mid-size hangars to the central hull. Two of them are larger (90x200 meters), and the other two are smaller (70x150 meters).
By the way, each of the twenty catapult launch tubes has a width of 36 meters and a height of 19 meters, and a catapult length of 200 meters. Behind it is the storage area, and behind that area is, towards the back of the central hull, the fly-in deck. The catapult launchers are made to launch small and very small craft: probes, drones, reconnaissance craft, repair craft, and such. You might be surprised to hear, that in civilized space, no weapons are anymore required. But maybe I am adding, just for the (stupid) effect, some asteroid defense guns to the ship.
I am not sure yet about the upcoming designs for the various large, medium, and small crafts this ship can launch. If you think you got some interesting design proposals, post them here. If it is a mesh type that POV-Ray (my renderer) can understand, then you might see your craft coming out from one of these launchers, or standing inside one of the medium-sized hangars! :-)