O'Neill Colony

I created this project in Blender, mostly using my own assets, although there is still a fair bit of kitbash in there, to speed up the process. No point spending a week creating an asset that I can find ready made for free or little cost.

This artwork depicts a type of large-scale space colony called an O'Neill Cylinder, made popular by American Physicist Gerard K. O'Neill in his book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space (1976). The interpretation in this view differs from O'Neill's original idea, in which the inner surface had transparent strips running its length, and mirrors outside those sections to bounce sunlight inside. Instead, here the surface is fully landscaped, with a light source provided by a central, axial light strip powered by nuclear fusion (or other future technology). The cylinder here measures 9.2km (5.6 miles) in diameter and 36km (20 miles) long. Rotation about the long axis. at a rate of 300 m/s at the surface, provides artificial 1g of artificial gravity by means of centripetal force.