Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Electron Cont'd (7)

I sent an email to Rocket Lab last week asking about the upper stage.
I addressed the email to the general media inquiry address at Rocket Lab, but imagine my surprise when the CEO replied personally!
From: Peter Beck <email address redacted>
Date: Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 7:51 AM
Subject: Rocket Lab

Hi Dawoon,

Nice work!

It's no fun if we answer all your questions, but you are on the right track......

Pete

--
Peter Beck
CEO

ROCKET LAB LTD.

Apart from the fact that it was very cool to get a personal email from the head of a rocket company and that we know that we're on the right track, let's recap what our plan is so far.
On top of stage 2 is a hexagonal stand. There is a ring on top of this stand through which a upper stage kick motor is inserted before launch. And on top of the upper stage is the payload:


Christophe our designer decided to etch the big letters ELECTRON and the NZ logo onto the rocket instead of using textures.
While this turned out to be much more challenging in terms of uv mapping, this allowed us to get very clean results even at high zoom without using huge textures:




Continue reading...

No comments: