making a science and technology museum full of hands on demos that teach concepts like how you can use loop antennas for radio direction finding :)
what is Nebulium, you ask? look at this photo of the Cat's Eye Nebula. you see that green on the top and bottom fringes? for over 60 years, no one had even the faintest clue how it was produced
added a distance scale model to room 2, and gosh the inner solar system is crowded huh? also, my placeholder image for these info displays sure is plentiful right now lol
added light up planets+orbits, as well as audio of the text also started working on the second room of this series of 3 rooms, which shows the planets to scale, as well as info about the moons and, as of yet unmade, distances in the sol system to scale
on the opposite wall, a display showing the context of earth in the Sol System and beyond
making an actual in-game museum now, not just a museum in the gym-zoo-museum sense this is a science museum, specifically a museum of space, which is intended to act as a kind of teaching/training environment so im starting with planets, and boy do the gas giants have moons
there's also varying roughness and metallicness, which only comes out when you view at angles wrt the light sources
been playing around with making some art shaders, because these places need wall art, and came up with this one that produces some interesting looks -- overlapping concentric circles with slightly randomized soft split complementary colors with terrazzo texturing
some more things in a more complete context. rooms like this in the actual setting are going to be lit more brightly, at least when the lights are at full brightness, but the moodiness of the dark like this is so intense
its also fully modeled, and im quite surprised at how utterly insignificant the impact is on my laptop. i can zoom around at like 10 meters a second and theres no impact but the full modelling means you can get right up in the frame
i made a space frame and some fog to put the museum in, and it's such an evocative environment x.x
building a little museum to get a sense of what various architectural elements look like in a context lighting is so fun :(
in particular, I think it's useful to think about the different cursor types that exist in terminals, especially in older settings what i mean is the difference between vertical line cursors and underline/box cursors
a very similar but NOT identical panel is used in babylon 5, on the left here the B5 one uses only circles, has no small grid of circles, just the central circle and border, and it's not holes, it's solid but its the same motif!
heres another fun one: this weird backlit panel in the background, consisting of a grid of hexagonal holes, with a big circle hole in the middle, and a border of larger hexagonal holes
these things ALSO show up in Babylon 5! in both cases, there's a bright line down the central core of it, visible through the fins, which suggests its some kind of lamp, but its not on EAS's lamps/lights pages
here's another thing that keeps showing up in scifi tho: this weird fuckin helix thing a tall single helix statue of some sort, but its made out of flat sheets cut in wavy patterns, rotated and off set so that the waves form a helix
i don't actually know what those are, they might be a different kind of Sonex panel from the 80s/90s or they might be something different entirely, maybe custom made here's a clearer view of their details, behind Garibaldi
many different kinds of such echo dampening were used in Star Trek, and were used all over the place but it's not just Star Trek that uses the motif! here we see a similar motif adorning Commander Sinclair's kitchen, on the top left and bottom left cabinetry
but wait! there's more! more sound isolation, that is did you think Sonex Contour's was the only sound isolation panels used? no! there's also more traditional echo dampening panels! here's Sonex's Junior panels used as the walls of a transporter pad in Star Trek VI
"Oh but Beka that's just one place where they're used, and it's just one kind!" oh ho ho! look at this! its a Sonex Contour Vision in another place in medlab, on the back wall of the isolation chamber!
here you can see teal Sonex Contour Spectrum's behind Dr Franklin in MedLab 1, on the wall of the exam area of the medlab
Sonex Contour wall panels come in a variety of designs. that one with the half-diagonal grooves is the Spectrum. there's also the Panorama, with two groups of diagonal grooves, and the Vision, with two overlapped/crossed groups of two
here's another thing that turns your room into an instantly cool science fiction set: the fuckin Sonex Contour wall panel
here's the crucial image from the video, btw using ethernet cable jacket tube of the given colors, these are the resistances read off the flex sensor at different angles white had a high variation in range (up to 7 kOhm), vs orange's (max 200 Ohm variation)