Engineer Zero

Today’s Sketchup practice session was to make a Classics Illustrated Martian tripod. It’s not quite right, especially the tentacles, which are as yet a skill too far. But I exported this image, then loaded it into Paint to crop, and then I realized that it was cool as it was. Certainly there was inspiration in the original! As mentioned in the Amazon review, “The artwork by Lou Cameron is simply superb.”

I did a search in the Google 3D Warehouse and couldn’t find a War of the Worlds tripod quite like this. Perhaps, with a little touching up, I should upload this. Well, when and if I ever figure out how to do the tentacles.

An architectural student in Beijing has built a ‘mini-house’ in the shape of an egg. The link is here.

I wanted to compare it to a shipping container, so I did the following:

Shipping containers, by the way, sell for around $1250. So in terms of floor area I think they’re the better deal.

Well, he gets credit for being creative and it is fun to look at and maybe live in. But if it rains a lot, I think the shipping container would be less muddy.

Seattle will get a light rail system in 2020, except of course there will be political and financial delays, so we’re looking at 2030. For a light rail. Meanwhile, China is building 300 mph maglevs today. Or should I say, 500 kph, because mph is so Medieval.

(BTW, in case you don’t know, the first image is cgi. The second is, of course, e0gi.)

I was out walking in the park and saw a circular hole in the clouds, so I took this picture with my phone camera. I’ve got Mary Hopkin’s cover (no pun intended) of Clouds on my MP3, but I didn’t think to play it.

Anyhow, this reminds me that I’ll need to design a cyanobacteria-killing robotic minisub. Another time.

This is cool, but sixty dollars is a bit out of my budget.

I made this sketchup model of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft in twenty minutes. With another hour I suppose I could try details and maybe even photo-wrapping. Also, I now notice that the solar panels appear to emerge from holes within the main cylinder rather than being bracketed externally to it. So don’t go building your own satellite based on this.

Anyhow, the stats on the real spacecraft are to be found here.

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