The secondary hull is the cylindrical part of the starship below the saucer section.
I added polar movement to my physics engine because I want to get started on modelling the engine room.
The main feature of the room will be a large radial engine, each cylinder block will be an individual warp core. The engine room is a horizontal cylinder situated inside the cowl area that you can see at the front of the secondary hull.
I want to have walkways that go around the circumference of the engine room. The artificial gravity in the room will have the down direction pointing towards the central axis of the “cylindrical” engine room. This means that down changes as you walk around the walkway.
The yellow highlighted geometry is my collision geometry. In the video below, I start on the top, flat, part of the geometry, at the back. I will be looking forward.
I walk forwards and down the ramp to the circular walkway. I will then walk around the walkway until I am upside down.
I will then turn to face backwards and will walk down the ramp and carry on, backwards, through the shuttlebay and it’s launch tunnel, into the shuttle craft at the rear of the secondary hull.
I then turn to face the front of the starship and walk backwards and rotate so that the starship is upright with respect to my viewpoint.
I hope that you don’t get seasick watching the video. It will take me some time to get used to walking in a polar gravity field. At times the framerate is very low and that makes it hard to judge how much rotation to apply.
Notes:
- This walkthrough would be smoother as an animated flythrough but I want to be able to walk through the model at any time whilst building it. And this video is the first real use of the polar walking code.
- All that exists of the hanger bay is the airlock tunnel. In this era, we don’t have, magic, Star Wars force fields to keep in the air. The hanger bay proper will be in the area before the first airlock door that we walk through.
- I realise that I didn’t spend much time looking at the walkway that takes me around the engine room. I was looking forwards most of the time so you might think that the starship was rotating itself around me. No, that was me walking sideways around the walkway.
- You can see the saucer section through the secondary section’s hull. You can see it rotate to be “beneath” us as we walk around the walkway.