Autonomous Orbital Gantry

We've seen Ships, we've seen Platforms, but what Overdrive needs is something to fill the table. You can't just put a hill in space [citation needed], so I figured some human-made structures would do.

Even better, when terrain doubles down as resource rich salvage, things are even better.

Containers

I love shipping containers. I have sculpted a whole set of them, with a gantry, for Full Spectrum Dominance, five years ago... and still now, they're one of the most versatile and readable elements to add in any terrain piece.

A recent rework of the containers of the Opulence made me like the potential of them for my fleet even more... and even more I felt like they needed a central place on the table.

Doodling

I could never overstate how valuable is doodling. Admittedly, in the recent years I've become more and more reliant on artists (amazing ones, too) for concepts and ideas to work from. It's only natural, the more I squeezed out of my own imagination the more I felt like exchanging ideas was the best way to go. Often I even did concept art commissions for others, while commissioning art myself.

Now I find myself struggling to find the time (and the space!) to properly draw, but I still keep a pen and some paper next to my pc - you never know.

In the few minutes that preceded a call, I drafted these. It might now seem like much, but it's already quite enough to get a few interesting concepts out of.

Floating Gantries

The idea I wanted to explore was a structure meant to tend to containers, which is however not connected to them at all - and to anything else.

For printability, of course, the arms rotating on the two outer rings would be in contact with the surface of the shipping containers, but the actual three-rings-structure is floating around.

The rest followed fairly naturally. Build the structure, make sure there's no gaps between the containers, add enough supports (the arms) to make sure everything is fixed in place.

I intentionally did not leave a hole for the beam every single one will end up with a different angle, as it should be for floating cargo.

And... that's about it. It's the first version only, and I might do more in the future. If anything, a second one with the gantry moved towards one of the two ends would complement this well.

More to Come (?)

And what about some longer ones? or a very wide one, where all the containers are in a single slab, with a much wider ring? And...

Well, there's plenty of ideas, and really very little stopping me from doing a bunch of them. For now I tried working on the antenna, one of the two front pieces in the doodle, and... well, after ending up with a space-banana, and adding enough details around, I got this.

Which is pretty cool - and very WIP.

Stay tuned!
Jack