SMC M#04 - AlfonzoAqui

[alfonzoaqui]

Solar Power Drill.

Combining equal parts deep sea drilling rig, the Icarus drilling rig from "Die Another Day", and the Solar Two helio-stat power plant in California.

30 minutes so far in Blender 2.49b.

[alfonzoaqui]

The rig is designed to be split into separate elements and towed on massive skates to a drilling location, then reassembled.

Polygons so far: 225k. Lots of cylinders.

1:30 spent so far.

[TNTxGRAVE]

Have any idea of how this thing will be moved once the hole is drilled. Because it looks very fixed in place and stationary right now.
I can see this drill folding up like a flower and going into the pocket of an even bigger machine...lol.

looks amazing. keep on trucking

[alfonzoaqui]

The unit assembled is about 32 meters high and 95 meters in diameter.

It has to be disassembled and reassembled on site for drilling each multi-kilometer hole.
The skates on the bottom of each sled rotate independently, allowing the sled to be towed out of position once done. It would require large tractors and cranes to assemble this drill platform, with the collector and support arms loaded on another sled.

How the bore hole vents the steam from drilling I have not yet figured out.

[alfonzoaqui]

After some consideration, I've add some tracks instead of rear skates, to allow the individual sleds to position themselves.

I also add some storage doors to the sleds, as well as the beam itself.

Poly count is starting to skyrocket: 1,158,759

Time so far: 2:30

[alfonzoaqui]

Details of the tracks themselves. Mirroring, arrays, and curve modifiers to build the actual tracks.

[ClassicGamer-3DT]

You must have a pretty good machine to handle all that, or is it struggling in the viewport I know mine would

Detailing looks great so far, really original style.

[alfonzoaqui]

It's a Amd Dual Core 64 (4400) with 2 gigs ram, running Blender 2.49b on Fedora Core 10 (x86_64).

Yeah, it does struggle a bit, particularly with the tracks (116K polygons X 8 objects). I've got the meshes split out into the mirrors, sleds, tracks, and posts, with 7 duplicates of each mesh. It's more for easy scene management than animation or posing. For that I would have to split the elements, but that is really easy to do with Blender. I kept the original object in layer 1 and put the duplicates in layer 3, and just combine the two for rendering.

Current time to render with AO & raytracing is about 36 seconds with 2 threads.

[alfonzoaqui]

A quick and dirty wire frame without raytrace or AO of the major elements.

[bakuryu06]

Interesting concept. Why do the solar panels flip up?

[alfonzoaqui]

They're not solar panels per se. They are actually large parabolic mirrors that focus sunlight onto the center collector, where the separate beams are then focused into a single beam. It's called a solar concentrator set-up.

Depending on the size of the array, the temperatures can get quite high. The Solar 2 concentrator in California can hit 1700 degrees (927 degrees Celsius), which is hot enough to boil Sodium crystals. Heck, Aluminium melts at 1350, which is hot enough to char flesh instantly.

Since this setup only has to melt ice, the temperature beam delivers doesn't have to be high, it just has to be powerful enough to pierce the steam that will come boiling out of the hole. But if you drill at a slight angle, the steam will rise to the top of the bore hole as it rushes to escape, leaving the beam unaffected. Or so the theory says.

[Tox]

I guess this are mirrors and not solar panels. The tower in the middle focus the sun light to burn through the ice, if i understood that right.

Edit: to slow lol

[alfonzoaqui]

The comments by TNT got me thinking about how this thing will assemble, and I realized, with a little work, that it could self assemble. So I added an extending boom crane with a hook to the front of the sled, and switched out the front blade for another tractor unit. This way the sleds can approach the concentrator, latch on, and lift it up together as one unit.

Polygons: 1,634,993
Render time: 1 min
Time so far: 3:15 <- almost done

[happymat27]

I love the concept and very nicely realised

[Tiberiy]

for more efficient use of solar panels to direct them to one side) and the concept of a large and ambitious! want to see the final render