Station scale-model convergence

Recovered development history; test values are not all current specifications.

The design became tractable when unlike quantities were forced into one physical picture.

Discussion of the Station repeatedly crossed astronomical distance, ordinary landscape scale and human visual experience. A simple scaled construction was used to make those relationships inspectable together rather than reasoning from isolated numbers. In the remembered working test, a roughly 6 m model stellar radius represented about 60,000 km, while a roughly 150 m model inner radius represented about 1.5 million km and a roughly 6 m atmospheric depth represented about 60 km.

These are development-scale correspondences. They record how the geometry was reasoned about; they do not independently override the current values in the 600-series model.

The model exposed which parts of the Station could remain visually planetary.

The scale exercise helped reconcile a small central star with a very large inhabited ring. It supported the current working picture in which the star can still present a conspicuously broad disc while the inner surface remains far enough away to carry continent-scale terrain and an atmosphere whose vertical depth is tiny relative to the ring radius. That separation of scales became important to later arguments about mountains, atmospheric exposure, horizon behaviour and the thinness of the actively inhabited layer relative to the wider Station.

Blender tests shifted the question from colour to illumination.

Later visual experiments in Blender Cycles tested strongly coloured emitters and deliberately low or unusual light levels. Blue/green emitter trials and values remembered in the sequence around 20%, 300 and 1000 were exploratory controls rather than physical specifications. Their useful result was negative as much as positive: simply tinting ordinary terrestrial illumination did not reproduce the intended environment convincingly.

The design consequently converged toward treating the central object as a genuinely cool emitter, with a working temperature around 2,075 K, much of its output in infrared, broad weak-edged shadows from its large apparent disc, and a copper-red visible environment. A provisional visible illumination target around 15 klux subsequently entered the current model.

The experiments established relationships, not a finished radiometric solution.

The remembered model ratios, 2,075 K temperature, approximately nine-degree apparent stellar disc and approximately 15 klux visible target became useful shared constraints, but the full stellar radius/luminosity solution, spectral weighting, atmospheric scattering, surface albedo and biologically useful photon budget remain open. Likewise, the scale model did not solve atmospheric circulation or prove a particular mountain height.

Several visual shortcuts should remain historical rather than silently surviving as physics.

Early lighting tests that treated the scene primarily as an emitter-colour problem are superseded by the cooler-star/spectral interpretation. Percentage-style Blender settings and arbitrary lamp strengths are therefore production experiments, not Station units. The same boundary applies to any scale-model dimension that was chosen for convenience: the ratios are evidence of design reasoning, while current engineering conclusions live in the corresponding 600-series records.

This record preserves process rather than duplicating the model.

The current Station geometry, rotation and environmental conclusions remain in 600. Any astrophysical, atmospheric or photometric sources used to test those conclusions belong in 700. Fictional visual comparisons belong in 750. A Tribunal-era scale model, lighting specification or engineering drawing represented as an object inside the setting would belong in 100.