Moonwards World-building Project - Aims

• Present the probable architectures that will one day be used to build an industrial space economy. They must:

  • Makes economic sense - returning real value to the Earth for the investment made

  • Be entirely technically realistic - starting with sensible extrapolations, the world portrayed is a reliable, productive, efficient industrial design

  • Be a usable model - the main steps for all major processes are laid out

• Engage users by conveying:

  • How space works and how to engineer for it

  • The vastness and potential of the solar system

  • The transformative nature of space development and advanced technology

• Present the full range of realistic options for space transport in a developed space economy, specializing in fixed infrastructure approaches

• Provide means to explore and expand on this world

Ladder of Products:

Website - First step and core reference

• Relies on interactives, calculators, diagrams, and animations

  • In js and svg

  • Plain text external to js / svg content is minimized. Instead, uses pop-ups in context through Nutshell, see below

• Lays out how the envisioned industry and transport works

• One pager with lazy-load sections

  • May be split into a few pages if it becomes too heavy

• 3d models of infrastructure and equipment is included in viewers

  • Which would work here? modelviewer.dev?

• 3d models also can be downloaded

• All content has a permissive license

Nutshell - from https://ncase.me/nutshell/

• Incorporate within js and svg content where feasible

• Provides access to technical detail while keeping page clean, clear, and accessible

• Should not exceed two levels

• Try to enable this in annotations within 3d viewer

• Adaptation for the 3D viewer happens in a fork, https://github.com/moonwards1/nutshell (upstream is CC0, so this is unrestricted); the fork's built file then gets vendored into Website/Shared/ (see Website/README.md, "Nutshell")

3D models - Next step

• Models of major infrastructure and equipment built in Blender

• Designs are low-poly

• In .usdz

• Communicate the engineering and operations

• 3D models developed outside repository

Virtual environment - Final destination to enable storytelling

• May be chiefly used to film explanatory videos for the website

• If there is sufficient interest, may be fleshed out over time as fully modelled locations in Blender and Unreal

Repository and local use

The whole project folder is a git repository, published on GitHub. Website/ is the deployed site: GitHub Pages serves it exactly as committed, with no build step (workflow in .github/workflows/deploy-pages.yml). Notes/ is private working material and stays untracked (see .gitignore).

To view the site locally after cloning or downloading, double-click serve.bat (Windows), or run one of:

python -m http.server 8000 --directory Website
npx serve Website

then open http://localhost:8000/. A local server is required because the site is moving to ES modules, which browsers refuse to load from file:// links.