This is a mobile space station I made while playing the "Age of Engineering" modpack. This was possible thanks to Advanced Rocketry, and it was something I've thought to build one day ever since the first space-based mod came out for Minecraft. This post will contain some first impressions, more screenshots with details will come in further posts. I'll also add commentary.
Screenshots are hidden in spoiler tags for those with slow connections.
A first impression: the station consists of seven connected spheres, of which five are arranged in a wheel-like pattern. There is a large sphere containing an artificial ecology (which might need some more work) and another medium-sized sphere below I had to add because I needed more space. There is also an additional smaller sphere for my personal quarters.
Since this station is mobile and has a warp drive (research Advanced Rocketry for details), I thought it might need a shield to protect it against meteorites while travelling. That's what the large green shield is for.
The view from below:
and from above so one can see the structure:
And an aft-front view:
The station has many solar panels of different kinds (=mods) to supply it with basic power (there's also a fusion reactor for high-performance tasks like duplicating items with the Atomic Multiplier from the Calculator mod, which you'll see later):
This part contains the quarters (sorry for the texture bug, the Invictus Universal Modded resource pack has had this bug for months) and the ET nanobot beacon which makes it possible for me to fly without any equipment and continually regeneration health. It also makes it so I don't have to eat.
The view from the shield. Since redstone logic looks out of place here, I just connected the power here, and added a switch to a power cell further back the chain:
This part has two of the mining machiness which play a big part in making the station independent from planetary resources. The void resource miners makes many different non-ore blocks, and the void ore miner in the second shot makes ore blocks. The orbital laser drill from Advanced Rocketry (the thing with the transceivers, I clad it in steel sheetmetal to make the surrouning logistics look less odd) is not independent from planets, but it mines what is there from up here, so that I don't need to leave the station.
Also in this shot: the rocket I must use should I want to visit a planet or moon I haven't visited before (repeated visits go by teleport), and an observatory, both from Advanced Rocketry. I thought a space-based observatory would be good idea, but the mod maker didn't take that possibility into account: since it is never night out here, the observatory never opens.
This is what I call the EcoSphere. I put some plants and animals around an artificial lake in here and attempted to make it look somewhat natural, in reminiscence of the old SF classic "Silent Running" from 1972. Unfortunately, the ocelots (I have a spawner for them, just like for almost everything else) keep dying on me.
The thermal evaporation towers might look a little out of place, but I need them to make fusion fuel.
This spartan-looking room is the "bridge", if you can call it that. You're seeing the warp core and the warp controller as well as an RFTools screen that controls the shield. It also provides a good view of the station since it's located in a separate dome on top of the central sphere.
A space station needs a name. I thought this sounded nice. The motto is adapted from a commentary by Johannes Kepler on Galilei's "Nuncius Sidereus", in which he envisioned space travel as early as 1610. The translation is "I do not fear the vast emptiness", as Kepler envisioned there would be people of that kind as soon as ships existed "suitable for the winds of the heavens".
Some commentary on how this was built:
99% of this station were built without using the creative powers you acquire at the end of the "Age of Engineering" pack, and with one exception (the IC2 molecular transformer is powered by three quantum generators) its continued operation does not depend on such powers. My goal was to build a station that's as independent from planetary resources as it's possible to be with the rules of the pack without using those creative powers, too, and I think I have succeeded rather well. The only thing I can think of I can't acquire more of without leaving the station is Forestry bees of pristine stock.
For full disclosure, I'll mention a few cheats and some changes I made to the pack:
(1) I cheated with bees. I have little patience with RNG troubles and thus bee breeding by vanilla Forestry rules is so utterly non-enjoyable for me that I cheated, first by cheating some mutating frames in and later by adding Gendustry. Also, while it *may* be possible to run bees from different biomes on my station in alvearies (no idea if the climate changer blocks give you enough variety), it would've taken up more space than I was prepared to spend just for bees.
(2) The spheres the station is made of were built by the RFTools builder, but the shield couldn't have been since at least in RFTools 5.93, which is in the pack, the builder can't make domes flipped by 90 degrees into the vertical, and the attempt to upgrade RFTools resulted in crashes on world loading. So at some point, I added OpenBlocks for its building guide, made the flipped dome of shield blocks, and removed OpenBlocks again.
(3) In its config, I set Advanced Rocketry's method of calculating vacuum containment to 3 (="volumetric/experimental multithreaded") and increased the radius to 64. There have been no adverse effects from that. The experimental method appears to be working well.
(4) After technically finishing the pack (by acquiring the required creative power, liquid, gas and item elements), I enabled Joule/RF conversion. I wanted to include a Mekanism fusion reactor, and there would be no point in building it if it couldn't output as RF since that large amounts of Joules are never needed.
Screenshots with more details will be forthcoming. I'm also open to questions and comments.
Screenshots are hidden in spoiler tags for those with slow connections.
A first impression: the station consists of seven connected spheres, of which five are arranged in a wheel-like pattern. There is a large sphere containing an artificial ecology (which might need some more work) and another medium-sized sphere below I had to add because I needed more space. There is also an additional smaller sphere for my personal quarters.
Since this station is mobile and has a warp drive (research Advanced Rocketry for details), I thought it might need a shield to protect it against meteorites while travelling. That's what the large green shield is for.
The view from below:
and from above so one can see the structure:
And an aft-front view:
The station has many solar panels of different kinds (=mods) to supply it with basic power (there's also a fusion reactor for high-performance tasks like duplicating items with the Atomic Multiplier from the Calculator mod, which you'll see later):
This part contains the quarters (sorry for the texture bug, the Invictus Universal Modded resource pack has had this bug for months) and the ET nanobot beacon which makes it possible for me to fly without any equipment and continually regeneration health. It also makes it so I don't have to eat.
The view from the shield. Since redstone logic looks out of place here, I just connected the power here, and added a switch to a power cell further back the chain:
This part has two of the mining machiness which play a big part in making the station independent from planetary resources. The void resource miners makes many different non-ore blocks, and the void ore miner in the second shot makes ore blocks. The orbital laser drill from Advanced Rocketry (the thing with the transceivers, I clad it in steel sheetmetal to make the surrouning logistics look less odd) is not independent from planets, but it mines what is there from up here, so that I don't need to leave the station.
Also in this shot: the rocket I must use should I want to visit a planet or moon I haven't visited before (repeated visits go by teleport), and an observatory, both from Advanced Rocketry. I thought a space-based observatory would be good idea, but the mod maker didn't take that possibility into account: since it is never night out here, the observatory never opens.
This is what I call the EcoSphere. I put some plants and animals around an artificial lake in here and attempted to make it look somewhat natural, in reminiscence of the old SF classic "Silent Running" from 1972. Unfortunately, the ocelots (I have a spawner for them, just like for almost everything else) keep dying on me.
The thermal evaporation towers might look a little out of place, but I need them to make fusion fuel.
This spartan-looking room is the "bridge", if you can call it that. You're seeing the warp core and the warp controller as well as an RFTools screen that controls the shield. It also provides a good view of the station since it's located in a separate dome on top of the central sphere.
A space station needs a name. I thought this sounded nice. The motto is adapted from a commentary by Johannes Kepler on Galilei's "Nuncius Sidereus", in which he envisioned space travel as early as 1610. The translation is "I do not fear the vast emptiness", as Kepler envisioned there would be people of that kind as soon as ships existed "suitable for the winds of the heavens".
Some commentary on how this was built:
99% of this station were built without using the creative powers you acquire at the end of the "Age of Engineering" pack, and with one exception (the IC2 molecular transformer is powered by three quantum generators) its continued operation does not depend on such powers. My goal was to build a station that's as independent from planetary resources as it's possible to be with the rules of the pack without using those creative powers, too, and I think I have succeeded rather well. The only thing I can think of I can't acquire more of without leaving the station is Forestry bees of pristine stock.
For full disclosure, I'll mention a few cheats and some changes I made to the pack:
(1) I cheated with bees. I have little patience with RNG troubles and thus bee breeding by vanilla Forestry rules is so utterly non-enjoyable for me that I cheated, first by cheating some mutating frames in and later by adding Gendustry. Also, while it *may* be possible to run bees from different biomes on my station in alvearies (no idea if the climate changer blocks give you enough variety), it would've taken up more space than I was prepared to spend just for bees.
(2) The spheres the station is made of were built by the RFTools builder, but the shield couldn't have been since at least in RFTools 5.93, which is in the pack, the builder can't make domes flipped by 90 degrees into the vertical, and the attempt to upgrade RFTools resulted in crashes on world loading. So at some point, I added OpenBlocks for its building guide, made the flipped dome of shield blocks, and removed OpenBlocks again.
(3) In its config, I set Advanced Rocketry's method of calculating vacuum containment to 3 (="volumetric/experimental multithreaded") and increased the radius to 64. There have been no adverse effects from that. The experimental method appears to be working well.
(4) After technically finishing the pack (by acquiring the required creative power, liquid, gas and item elements), I enabled Joule/RF conversion. I wanted to include a Mekanism fusion reactor, and there would be no point in building it if it couldn't output as RF since that large amounts of Joules are never needed.
Screenshots with more details will be forthcoming. I'm also open to questions and comments.
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