Celestia Screencaps

[WRStone]

Ok, now it should be noted that I have little artistic ability, nor the patience and dedication to do what those on this forum routinely do. You will not see me coming up with an extraordinary mesh.

What I can do is take pictures.

Enter Celestia. The program's Web site says it best:

Celestia is a free, interactive (real-time), 3D astronomy program. It doesn't just show you the sky as it can be seen from earth as most planetarium software does, but allows you to move to and view the universe from any point between the planets and the stars.

The Celestia Motherlode hosts over 10 GB of Celestia addons by various creators, which extend or change the way Celestia renders the universe.

And brother, they aren't kidding about add-ons. Among many, many others are a rather massive archive of Star Trek add-ons.

Once installed, I can buzz all over the Trek universe taking screencaps.

I can't make meshes or do designs -- but I can shoot pictures.

This is my public gallery of Celestia screencaps.

There are plenty of Star Trek screencaps, but these are probably indicative:









You'll no doubt notice that these are not high poly-count meshes and that they suffer if you get too close to them. However, there are solar systems and starships spread out over Federation space. If you frame the pictures right, you can get some pretty amazing shots.

Remember again that I made none of these meshes. I just position my virtual camera and squeeze the shutter.

Dakota Smith

 

[Cary L. Brown]

I love Celestia, too. A few items you have there are ones I've never seen. I'm out of date!

I've only MADE one thing for Celestia... a script to use TOS-style warp drive speeds (wf^3 * c)

 

[WRStone]

I've only MADE one thing for Celestia... a script to use TOS-style warp drive speeds (wf^3 * c)

Kewl -- I've kicked around a couple of scripts, but what I may contribute is creating an Ubuntu PPA for the add-ons. I've got a fonts PPA I'm working on that will provide a boatload of genre fonts. My collection is very thorough on Trek, and I've got tons of other SF TV and movie fonts.

If you're not familiar with them, PPAs are Personal Package Archives for Ubuntu Linux. Users can subscribe to the PPA, and then whatever programs or packages that PPA offers are visible to the user's installer.

So in short, one day Ubuntu users will type

sudo apt-get install ttf-startrek

and every font used by Star Trek will be installed to their system.

Celestia has always been available to Ubuntu as a standard package by default. There's also an ancillary package with some copyright-restricted material.

The add-ons, however, must be downloaded manually, then installed into a user directory by hand. The main Celestia configuration file has to be edited to make this even work. That's too much effort for the average user.

sudo apt-get install celestia-addons-startrek-vulcan

would obviously be better.

Anyway, once I get the fonts setup figured out, I may work on Celestia add-ons. Unfortunately, the process of building packages and then using them with the PPA is non-intuitive -- and I say that as a 30-year sysadmin. I've built RPM packages for RedHat -- Debian packages are very different and much more complex.

Anyway, it's something I'm working on. Not as neato whiz-bang as scripts or meshes, but mostly something to make my life as an Ubuntu (actually Lubuntu) user easier.

(And yes, I'll plug Lubuntu. Unity simply sucks. the GNOME3 programmers have completely gone off the deep end. They have collectively embraced user interfaces with which the user cannot interface.

(Ubuntu 11.10 is the first version to officially suck -- because of Unity.

(So it's Lubuntu for me, thank you. No spinning cube desktops or wobbly windows, no trying to figure out how to get two windows open at the same time, and a friggin' Start Menu.

(And yes, Windows 8 is going to suck for the exact same reason. Where's the friggin' Start Menu?! Have all user interface designers everywhere taken leave of their senses?! A desktop is not a frakking smartphone!!)

Ok, so to at least maintain some semblance of topicality, here's one I took last night that I thought worked out well:



That one's from the Enterprise in Drydock mesh provided by the Star Trek At Home add-on, by the way, maintained by one Tim Wilson.

It's an astounding add-on. It contains the Copernicus Ship Yards in orbit of the Moon (where there are Work Bees assembling a Galaxy-class ship; Jupiter Station; and the refit Enterprise in drydock.

There are a couple of space-suited workers. The dock has a shuttlebay, and it has work bees, shuttles, and cargo pods.

The E's interior Rec Dec, Officer's Lounge, and Botanical Garden are modeled.

There is a Ghu-cursed butterfly in the Botanical section.

Finally there's Spacedock ... great Ghu's purple fingers, what's in there boggles the mind.

There's a TNG-era ship that looks a bit Excelsior-ish coming out the space doors. Inside are a Constitution, refit Constitution, Miranda, an Oberth, a couple of classes that escape me, several shuttles, and space-suited dockworkers.

The shuttles orbit inside Spacedock.

If you're a fan of Star Trek and have a computer built in the last five years, you need Celestia. If you download no other add-on, get Star Trek At Home.

Dakota Smith

 

[WRStone]

I'm afraid I also can't let an opportunity slip by to sing the praises of a non-Trek add-on. However, if you're a Trek fan and not a Known Space fan, there's something not quite right in your head ...

However, the mastermind that can bring you this deserves mention:



(Yes, that's Fist-Of-God Mountain -- taken from the top of Olympus Mons on the Map of Mars!)



(Yes, that's the Lying Bastard, with the entire crew modeled inside the transparent #2 General Products hull!)

Runar Thorvaldsen is, quite simply, The Man. His Ringworld add-on for Celestia defies description in its level of detail and accuracy.

Were it in my power to award Runar Thorvaldsen a Special Hugo Award for Extreme Awesomeness, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

Get Celestia and get Ringworld. Your brain will love you for the rest of your life.

 

[Redfern]

Do I actually see Nessus and "Speaker to Animals" along with Louis Woo and Teela Brown seated in there?! Talk about a completist mind set! Color me impressed!

Sincerely,

Bill

 

[WRStone]

Do I actually see Nessus and "Speaker to Animals" along with Louis Woo and Teela Brown seated in there?!

Yep, and that's not all by a long shot. Down on Ringworld' surface, you have (among other things) all of them in flycsycles, in and around Fist-Of-God Mountain:



As I say, Runar Thorvaldsen is The Man.

Dakota Smith

 

[Klaus]

wow... awesome stuff here... I need to get back to my Ringworld model and try Fist-of-God.

 

[Forbin]

Okay, the shadow squares MUST be longer than that to simulate equal parts of night and day.

Otherwise - WOW!

 

[Redfern]

Okay, the shadow squares MUST be longer than that to simulate equal parts of night and day.

Maybe they're configured for their "summer" setting...long, languid days and shorter nights. Yes, I'm being a wise-acre.

Sincerely,

Bill

 

[Klaus]

The problem I ran into in thinking about it was the scale --- as cool as the pic looks, the mountain is WAAAAAY too big... the Ringworld is a million miles wide, making it very difficult to get views showing it and the walls that look both aesthetic and accurate. If the functional atmosphere is 100 miles deep [the walls are supposed to be 1000 miles high] then it is only 1/10,000th the width.
In fact, when I did my recent Trek/Ringworld pics I made it the equivalent of 2 million miles wide for dramatic effect... if I do try F-of-G I'll make it the right scale.

 

[WRStone]

The problem I ran into in thinking about it was the scale --- as cool as the pic looks, the mountain is WAAAAAY too big...

No question, the scale is off -- though to be fair, Fist-Of-God Mountain is only visible because I took pictures fairly close to it. From space, you don't even know it's there.

The Ringworld is simply a structure larger than the human imagination can comprehend. It's like having a $15 trillion public debt: the number is so large that it might as well be imaginary.

The Ringworld is so large that I doubt someone on the interior surface would even see the curvature of the ground. Niven touches on this by having the Ringworld's inhabitants believe they're living under "the Arch."

Still, it makes for neat pictures.

Dakota Smith