Titan CV Crew Ascent/Descent /Entry Stations This is an on-going series. See Mars terraforming image links below. This image is an addendum to my previous two images Titan Crew Vehicle Flight Control Station and Titan CV Flight Control Entry Profile View. Geirla had commented (on one of my previous images) about designs incorporating “crew compartment’s in a ball-bearing-like sphere. That way, either by weighting it heavier at the "bottom" or by active means such as gears or tracks, you can orient it to match the acceleration direction no matter where it is.” This is the crew acceleration/deceleration station I designed based on the concept Geirla suggested. The Titan resource recovery operation vehicles carry a crew of fifty. Flight consists of two crew (manning the flight control station) and three crew in the Reactor Systems GCNTR Control Station – leaving 45 crew who need be accommodated through entry but who do not require access to a flight or primary-system work/control station). The crew are accommodated in four 10 man acceleration/deceleration stations and one 5 man station (Note: I’ve left the fifth crew-chair out of this image due to the heavy polygon count generated by poser objects imported into Bryce). The compartments are cylindrical and roll on their long axis – and are aligned so the 90 arc of rotation follows the roll of the spacecraft through the 180 degree transition from atmospheric braking to powered descent. The Titan crew landing craft is spherical in design with the entry-heat-shield opposite the landing & take-off thrusters – the vehicle performs (one) 180 degree roll after aerobraking. This means the direction of gravity (in the form of deceleration during atmospheric braking) will shift 180 degrees relative to the direction of gravity induced by the landing/take-off thrust (or indeed relative to the force of gravity on Titan’s surface). I’ve used Davo’s Modular Command Chair as the basic component of the system -- exported as a Wavefront object -- and mounted these in bench fashion along one wall of the compartment. The entire compartment will roll through the 90 degree transition required. I modeled the set complete with a working airlock (considering that pressure doors would seal specific strategic compartments during entry) and a short section of the access corridor beyond – and wanted to show the compartment in each phase of transition – this resulted in three images, two of which are presented here. The upper image shows a senior crew member lending a few words of encouragement to a nervous first time “newbie” after completing a quick visual check of the crew’s safety restraint harness. Here the vehicle is in zero-g descent – but not yet at the atmospheric interface. Note that the wall mounted screens show a green arc along the lower section, a representation of the vehicles trajectory, the white dot representing the spacecraft, the blue segmented path shows the untraveled portion of the trajectory, and the red segmented shows the trajectory after interface penetration, along with a “horizon” indicator, and a representation of Titan – this screen changes to reflect the current phase of descent in each of the three images I’ve created to represent this scene. The lower shows the compartment pressure hatch sealed (Note: the fifth crew chair and crew member omitted due to polygon restrictions). In a few days I will post the final image in this sequence showing the compartment at rotation during aerobraking. This entire set (except for Davo’s Modular Command Chair) was constructed in Bryce 6.5, and rendered in Bryce 7 Pro. Fifth crew member in the upper image was rendered in Poser 8. Figures are DAZ M4 and DAZ V4 exported into Bryce. As always thank you for your interest, thoughtful comments, and encouragement.