All the Way Round the Ring, and Up a Pylon
The habitat ring now goes all the way round with 90 rooms to walk into, two docking pylons have interiors you can ride up to, and the docking ring's dead ends have started to open.
Yesterday I opened the first two slices of the full habitat ring. Today it goes all the way round.
The whole habitat ring
The ring is now 68 segments of corridor and 90 rooms, laid out by a generator that places the pieces around the circle. The crew quarters come in small, medium and large, and the rooms get different colour schemes (ochre, slate and mauve) so that walking past door after door doesn’t feel like a hall of mirrors. The large ones, like the one in the picture, have a stained-glass replicator, a chest of drawers and a painting on the wall.
Remember the ribbed bulkheads I put at the ends of the habitat corridor a few days ago? They now open, west and east, onto the ring. So you can walk out of the filmed corridor, past Dax’s and Bashir’s doors, and keep going all the way round. If that sounds like a long walk, it is. There are two new turbolift stops, Habitat Ring 120 and Habitat Ring 240, at the far sides of the ring, and the lift menu now groups its stops under headings so the list stays readable.
Up the pylons
The pylons are the six big curved arms that reach up and down from the docking ring. The episodes never show their insides, so these rooms are my own invention, built to fit the station’s style. Today the upper and lower pylons nearest the main docking ring stop both open, with three decks each and six new lift stops between them. Each pylon has a hub deck, an arm corridor, a lounge with furniture and a docking port behind a cog hatch.
From outside, every one of the six pylons now has bands of windows along its sides, so they read as places people live and work, not solid sculpture.
The ride from the docking ring to the top of a pylon is about 760 metres. It’s quite a trip.
The docking ring opens up
The two viewport corridors at the ends of the docking ring were dead ends. They now open into the next stretch of ring, with windows on the outer wall where you can watch the Defiant at her berth. The kit pieces for the rest of the ring, including a section with a cog-door airlock, are built. They’re not placed around the whole ring yet, so for now each end stops at a locked door.
The window that wasn’t broken
My favourite moment today was a non-bug. In one of the new ring quarters, the oval window showed almost nothing but a big dark shape. I went looking for what had gone wrong with the window and found that nothing had. That set of quarters looks straight out at one of the upper pylons, and the dark shape filling the window is the pylon’s own face. Location, location, location.
Doors that don’t push you around
One small fix you’ll feel. If you walked up to a closed sliding door and kept pushing against it slightly off-centre, the seam between the two door leaves could steer you sideways along the door. At Bashir’s door you’d slide about 18 centimetres. Now you just stop, as you would at a real door.
The roadmap shows what’s next for the docking ring and the pylons, and the home page shows what I’m working on right now.
See you tomorrow.