Mercury-to-Saturn Orrery
Posted: Sun Sep 08, 2019 7:17 pm
Finally got around to mostly finishing my orrery a little while ago (um, "decision paralysis" is the bane of my existence). Since Gearotic was key in helping me select completely insane Modules for these gears (to maintain a single center distance for all gear pairs) I figured I'd make a quick post...
...see attached file...
...I haven't finished off the central planet gear stack (trying to decide if I just pop a white disk on, or try to do something fancy) so that's why you can still see a bit of brass at the center of the planet arms. Laser cut acrylic; the Saturn drive gear is approaching the minimum resolution of the material (smaller than this and you just get a fused lump) while the Saturn planet gear is approaching the maximum size of my laser bed, so I skipped everything past Saturn.
I claim this is defensible since Uranus and Neptune would barely move, even if I had included them. There's some barely visible fiddly bits down on the base (approximate flight directions of Voyager 1 & 2, plus the Pioneer probes, and some things like line of galactic rotation, some of the Zodiac buried under the main planet gear stack, and so on).
EDIT: alright, got a sane file size...
...see attached file...
...I haven't finished off the central planet gear stack (trying to decide if I just pop a white disk on, or try to do something fancy) so that's why you can still see a bit of brass at the center of the planet arms. Laser cut acrylic; the Saturn drive gear is approaching the minimum resolution of the material (smaller than this and you just get a fused lump) while the Saturn planet gear is approaching the maximum size of my laser bed, so I skipped everything past Saturn.
I claim this is defensible since Uranus and Neptune would barely move, even if I had included them. There's some barely visible fiddly bits down on the base (approximate flight directions of Voyager 1 & 2, plus the Pioneer probes, and some things like line of galactic rotation, some of the Zodiac buried under the main planet gear stack, and so on).
EDIT: alright, got a sane file size...