Featured Engineering Video: Building Megaobjects in Minecraft

Minecraft is a software game about placing blocks to build anything you can imagine.

[video=youtube;kn2-d5a3r94]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn2-d5a3r94[/video]

The video was uploaded by Youtuve ID halnicholas

Here's what he has to say about his work:

I've always wanted to make a 1:1 scale model of the Enterprise-D. Even when I was a kid, I thought how cool it would be to build the ship and live in it. One project I embarked on about a year ago was to build a 1:1 scale model of the enterprise in Sketchup. I got pretty far too.

Sadly, my hard drive blew and I lost six months of work. The only thing I had was my original framework and It was just too painful to start over. One of the things that was not lost was the deck plans and a nice computer-friendly vector format, converted from the Whitefire plans (Not the Okuda ones). The plans are pretty rough, but workable. One day I need to go through and clean them up.

The Minecraft world uses 1m^3 blocks, ans so, I simply converted my already scaled plans into a format that minecraft could take and imported each deck in batch, leaving 4 spaces in between for walls

The original Enterprise is 642.5 Meters x 467.0 Meters x 137.5 Meters. This is about 3m per deck. Sadly, with the 1m deck you have to walk on, that only leaves 2m left over for hallway space. As your character is only 1.7m tall, you will be bumping your head around a lot. I decided to make the ship 22% bigger, so I could have 4 m per deck. That puts the final size @ 785m x 570m x 168m. I made my "pit" 800x600x180 to fit all 42 decks and almost made a critical error. Even though there are 42 decks on the enterprise, the 2nd deck is split into two half-decks, making actually 43. I made the pit bigger than she ship so I could have a little wiggle room and just missed making it too shallow. In my testing, the halls can get a little cramped. The current decks are just a guideline and framework. They don't call it "Creative Mode" for nothing.

The halls are going to be sand-obsidian-sand (To give that light brown look with the black touch panel in the center) I'd show a demo, but Minecraft is down. I would like to mod my server so that sand doesn't fall. That would bee cool. I also don't know how to fly yet, will be making it much easier to work on the ship.

This is on a creative server. I would love to put it on Alpha, but Notch limits the game depth to 128m now, which is 40m too shallow. I'll lose 10 decks. Maybe I can convince him to up the limit to 256m with the project

There are still some things to work out.

1) I need to turn flying on. 2) I need to model and import the warp nacelles, just so I have the framework there. 3) I need to make a dirt floor so people can start building scaffolding from the bottom. (You can't plant blocks on Adminium) 4) I would live to get rid of the Admininum walls. 5) I should put this online so people can help. I need to come up with a pretty solid anti-griefing policy and need many like-minded people so I don't wind up with cocks in the shuttlebays.

Your comments about the video are welcome.