Centum Nonaginta Novem

 I just spotted that my next post will break the 200-in-a-year barrier. Wow! Blender is important to me, and that's evidence if it were needed.

Should I be coming up with some New Year's resolutions? Bah, they don't work except that it's always good to be reflective on where you have been, what you have accomplished, or not, and where you are going. People should not limit this kind of thinking to the first few days of a new year.

1. Sell more on Superhivemarket. Target: end of Feb 2026. I'll be paying for my website then, which will be a lot more than the money I made from the store last year. 

2. Improve things that go beyond Blender. Better attention to detail, more patience. Do more sketching. Those sorts of things.

3. More technical knowledge: Geo-nodes, rigging, master UVs (mwahha hahha hahah -- crazy laugh) 

Now I'm getting silly.

Do more training material. I've got the HardOps course to do. I stopped it because the first lesson was causing system crashes. Very off-putting, that is.

Shamrayev Project

Sails!

Nice! Daedalus-effect propulsion. [waves hands]

I liked how the sails were rebuilt. If there was one negative comment, it's that they now look heavy and carry more visual weight than I had planned. That said, this works, given that they are a kind of thruster system; they are not catching the sun's magnetic field, like actual sails, so we'll live with it.

Engineering

The next significant effort is to finish the engineering section.

First thing to do: ditch the ball tanks. This space vehicle is looking phallic enough without being equipped with balls. Instead, we'll go with a series of plug-in capsules. Tanks of volatiles

Engineering!

Thoughts on what's needed

Time to think about that shield disk. It's designed to shield the front of the ship from radiation produced by the primary propulsion system and is supposed to be a high-tech, lightweight substitute for a giant block of lead. It may have bags of water/ice inside. The fabric elements always look interesting, but they're costly in terms of rendering resources.

The plug-in tanks are kept simple, with only tiny surface elements and machinery in their end-cap recesses.

Those struts that extend from the disk to support the rear sail struts need to be engineered as an element. Let's see what cross-bracing struts do.

The cable mast should come out of this section instead of the shield disk. I'll make it bigger and more structurally complex.

Stability is still a problem with TrueSKY 3 and Blender 5.x. That said, yesterday I was able to reproduce a CUDA error with the Shamrayev model, though it didn't repeat after a restart.

I did a test of Blender 4.5 and True SKY2. Scatters are not a problem! As soon as I move back to Blender 5 and True SKY 3, its CUDA errors all the way.


I will test moving back to pure CUDA instead of Nvidia's OPTIX drivers.