The SSS Jabberwocky

Sorry about the radio silence yesterday, my Hordeling. The wife and I got involved in a tense game of Scrabble and I lost track of the time. On the upside, though, I won the Scrabble game. Yeah me!

So, what is the SSS Jaberwocky, you ask? I’m glad you asked. Let me back up a bit.

In my earlier years, I read a lot. This lead me to discovering my all-time favorite author, Ray Bradbury. He had a short story about a father that wanted to do something special for his kids. So he built a ‘spaceship’ in the backyard and ‘took’ them to Mars. The spaceship didn’t actually work, but once inside, the kids couldn’t tell. He had made it so the spaceship would shake when they ‘lifted off’ and the controls would do things. Ever since I read that story I’ve wanted to build my own ‘starship’ that I could sit in and ‘fly around the Universe’.

That was part of the reason why I got a degree in Electronic Technology with a Computer Hardware specialization. That’s why I am a big fan of makerspaces. That’s why I tinker with things. All of it is to help me build my Starship Simulator. Of course it was my love of reading that lead me to the name for my ship. Jabberwocky is of course a reference to the beast of the same name in Through The Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll. Putting it all together you get SSS Jabberwocky.

I’ve had the idea sitting in the back of my mind for several decades now. Like many of the projects sitting in my brain, I work on them as I get the time. When I’m not working on them, my brain is cogitating on them.

What rekindled my desire to build my simulator comes from a friend of mine. He’s been working on a Klingon command chair, like you would find on the bridge of a Klingon battlecruiser. I’ve been following his progress as he’s built the frame and put in the cushions. He’s built the armrests and put in the control panel and display screen. Recently he’s been working on the wiring to get the electronics to work. He complained about trying to get the Arduino board programmed so the screen will show random images and the buttons will make sound effects. It’s been a lot of work but I think the end product will be awesome. I’ll try to get a picture of it when he is done to display here.

The SSS Jabberwocky would be a similar project, but on a bigger scale. I envision using one of those pre-made sheds you put in the backyard to store your lawn mower ad garden tools. I would have to put in several ‘panels’ with various blinky lights and controls. I’d have to put in a large screen TV to server as my main viewscreen for my ‘bridge’. I’d have to build a command chair, but I could probably get away with not having to wire it up with electronics. I could tie my ‘viewscreen’ to the computer and the Internet (useful should I want to ‘communicate’ with the folks back on Earth). The interior design would have to look appropriately futuristic. Maybe even retro-futuristic, like a ship they might have designed in a 1950’s sci-fi movie, all chrome polish and curved surfaces.

The other part of the project would involve programming. I’d want to write a program that would generate a ‘sector’ of space, locating star systems in a three dimensional array. If I have a three axis grid with 36 units on each side that gives me over forty-six thousand (46,000) points to place a system. If I randomly select one-third (1/3) of the points in the array to have a system, that gives me over fifteen thousand (15,000) systems to navigate among. I’m sure that would keep me going for a number of years.

To populate those star systems, I could adapt any number of planet generators from various sci-fi role-playing games and non-fiction books. I would randomly generate the existence of a star system at a point on my grid. ne I have one I would generate he solar system – he type of star, the number of planets in orbit, any moon around the planets, asteroid belts, etc. Then if a planet is in the habitable zone, I would generate things like the geography, the populace of the planet, tech level, economies and other details. I could work out shipping lanes and trade routes.

I could pick some interval of real time to use as the measure of time that my spaceship would ‘travel’. Say I pick an hour of real time to travel the distance of a light-year in my simulation. I could relax and read a book as my ship sails along towards the next destination. Or I could say that one hour per light-year is the baseline and come up with a scale of faster speeds.

This is a big project and will take some time to complete. And it isn’t like I need yet another creative project to add to my to-do list. But it is one of those things I’ve contemplated for so long it seems a shame to not complete it. I don’t know. We’ll see what happens.

Do you have any grand dream projects like this, my Hordeling? Leave a comment and let me know.

If you’d like to support my efforts, why not buy me a chocolate chip cookie through my Ko-Fi page? https://ko-fi.com/jhusum