Obmunjalae pilot’s deck and ‘flippers’

There’s not really much that one could call weather on the Voidplane, but the pilot’s deck of the Obmunjalae did not feel complete without a roof over it, so I created one.

This is the dock door at the center of the big window on either side of the hangar. There is now a control station (on the right) that includes the lever to open the door, an intercom for communicating with the pilot’s deck or machine room, and a four-color dial that can be used to communicate a basic status to those same central stations. Typically the pilot’s deck is the center of command for the vessel, but a fully redundant control and communication system is located in the machine room for emergencies or maintenance.

The contraption to the left of the door is a “flipper”. The voidplane presents a unique challenge when movement from either side of the plane is required. As an object passes through the plane, the part that has crossed effectively experiences reversed gravity. How does one conveniently and safely transfer themselves? The flipper is one such device that facilities moving from the obverse side to the reverse and vice versa. It is a rectangular four-walled box with two moving floor panels. The video below shows how the transfer process works.

The right side of the video shows the reverse side of the same flipper.

The box is sized for a person and has a button on the inside of the box that triggers the transfer. The user lies on their back and presses the button. The floor panel they are lying on moves away from them, lowering them into the plane and leaving them to float in it as the panel rotates out of the way. The second floor panel swings in and moves towards the user, pushing them through the plane. Once the machine halts, the user can then transition to their hands and knees, then to their feet. They then can exit the flipper, now technically upside down from when they entered it.

2 thoughts on “Obmunjalae pilot’s deck and ‘flippers’

    • Well, apparently there’s now a “VR Scene Inspection” add-on in Blender that lets you wander around a scene in VR, but it does nothing fancy like letting the user interact with things or collision detection.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *