Army of Dorkness

Closed the school tour Sunday and put all the gear away. Then took Monday off.

Put up another chapter in my ongoing Tomb Raider/Stargate fanfic. I'm not real happy with it. Doing a little research on the next one today. So far I've figured out what airport they fly into and from where (Airbus A320 out of Heathrow for the last leg, on British Airways, into Prague Ruzyně International Airport. Which got renamed about six years after the dates I've set the story in. They also took the pink tank away. Well -- it was only pink for a short time in the early 90's).

And figured out what they are wearing on the plane. Looking at a lot of outfits on Polyvore and Pinterest. Most which weren't elegant enough for my Jolie-style Lara Croft. Trouble is, what eyes can I use to show them? I'm writing in third-person limited and for various reasons Lara can't be that person for this chapter. And neither Daniel Jackson nor Jack O'Neill are the type to notice clothes. So I stopped to look at some resources on flight attendant lingo and seniority ranking and scheduling and so forth to see if I could do a walk-on character to be my camera for just that one scene...

Seems like a lot of work for a fanfic. But I've more or less given up on ever selling the novel (or writing the next one) and this is what I have to feed the writing bug.

Light and Form

I had a quick lighting design this week. Quick not because it wasn't an important design, or because it was simple, but quick because we almost lost the venue and only got it confirmed a little over a week before we opened. We had to load in the set and light it in two days, skip tech and go directly into final dress, then previews that same week.

I'm not happy with the lights. But I'm not sure, if I had leisure to plan it all over again, what I would try differently. The director appeared to be asking for a bedroom in an upscale southern home at mid-day, and believed it didn't make sense for anyone to turn on the electric lights. So all the light was motivated as coming through a window -- a window that, alas, is on the fourth wall and not particularly obvious as part of the picture. And many scenes were blocked in the far corners of the room, far away from this putative light source. So I opened up the fronts, increased the levels, reduced the contrast -- so now you can barely tell the light is supposed to be coming from a window, and the scenes elsewhere in the bedroom are still dimly lit (because there is only so far you can push without having to re-hang the plot from scratch).



When I got home, there was a message from Shapeways. My V150 model was apparently breaking (probably off the sprues) often enough that Shapeways finally downgraded it to non-printable. Would have been nice if they told me before selling it to someone. So I spent 10-14 hours -- many frustrating ones wrestling with file conversions and problems in the Shapeways website -- patching and altering the model once again. I've probably put in close to 200 hours on that damned model now. And model sales have netted me maybe forty bucks.

Among the changes I was forced to make this time was to attach the suspension permanently, and as well fix the gun in the turret (no more posing of that part). Apparently sprues are bad, now; Shapeways not only advises against them, they throw up all sorts of clever little road blocks against their users. Their alternative is to print a mesh bag around the model....increasing the price of the print 150% in the process.



Meanwhile the school tour I've been mixing closes this Sunday. Today I'll be finishing up repairs on some of their wireless microphone elements. Then switch over to work on my wireless microphones, because those get rented out next week. And then perhaps work on repairs for the company that hired me for the season then "forgot" to tell me they'd found someone cheaper. Or maybe not. I don't feel I exactly owe them any extra work!



Now that I'm paying monthly for TechShop, I hate the feeling when there's nothing to go into the shop for. But it is all in the brainwork phase now. Mostly software -- finish the Inkscape files for the new holocrons, finish the CAD for the raygun -- but also raw design work.

And if I'm slow at wrestling with 3d models, you should see how long it takes me to problem-solve mechanical arrangements. Or dream up better ways to light a play.



After posting the above, paused in soldering up microphones to try out the Lithium Polymer battery that just arrived on my Cree driver board. The LED lights up nice and bright -- the 3.7 to 4.2 volts of the Lipo is plenty -- but the chip is still resetting. I need to put it on a breadboard and try out a regulated power supply. But it is enough to tell me that battery will work for the raygun.

Laralex, Polygons, and Post-Post-Processualism

I was quite under the weather for a few days there. Each time I'd sort of recover, I'd do another early-morning show and between the missed hours of sleep and the tension of the show I'd slip back again.

The CAD is coming along slowly. This is the hard part now. This week is also load-in of my next lighting design. And Maker Faire is not all that far down the road.

But I was sick and my concentration shot so I basically slumped on the couch with lots of hot tea watching Cynthia Rothrock movies and reading Tomb Raider fan fiction.




Oh, yeah. Discovered another odd relic from the late 90's. Apparently when the King Tut exhibit was on tour, the Times (yes, the Times of London) wanted to remind everyone that they had helped bankroll Howard Carter. So they contacted Eidos/Core Design and had them re-use the engine and assets from TR4 (Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation) to make a short game homaging the Times' involvement in the opening of the Boy King's tomb.

In the game, Lara is hired by the Times (as if!) to explore a newly discovered annex to KV62. Complete with rampaging mummies and all the usual Tomb Raider action, of course. The game is a full stand-alone and a free download and as a Win98 game runs near flawlessly on Wine. It is also the original "tank controls" Lara, who really does handle (as The Escapist puts it), like a cow in a trolly. But it was worth it just to experience 200-polygon Lara first-hand.




It's been a long strange journey. I was never attracted by the character or the games until one bored evening I stumbled on Tomb Raider: Underworld on a $1.99 sale at Steam. And that game was a lot more fun than I expected. My only real interest in the older games, though -- even the Crystal Dynamics remakes of them -- was from that same sort of completisim that drives one to read all the books in a series even when the first one wasn't that great.

Actually, this is more of a problem when you started with one of the later editions. I didn't want to play "Legends" so much as I wanted to find out what was the deal with Amanda and Natla and all the hints about Lara's previous history with them.

Anyhow, the fanfic.

Fanfic in bulk follows trends. The stories people were writing after AOD (Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness) were largely about continuing adventures of Lara and Kurtis and more appearances by the Monstrum (or whatever...I never played that game, although perhaps I should, given the Prague setting of part of the action).

Following the 2013 game, the main meat for most fanfic is what might have been called in the old days of Star Trek fanfic "slash" stories -- Kirk/Spock then, Lara/Sam now. Like several recent writers in popular markets, Rhianna Pratchett included a subtext (in this case, in the relationship between Lara and her best friend Samantha "Sam" Nishimura) that is so barely under the radar it practically counts as canonical.

But another major trend to fanfic based on the 2013 reboot is, basically, fix fics. Specifically, versions in which Alex doesn't die. Which is kind of odd. The shape and flavor of the game is pretty much a grimdark in which Lara loses most of her friends and is pushed slightly beyond the bounds of sanity, coming back someone who will willingly put a flaming arrow through a stranger's neck in order to survive.

Alex is one of the disposable NPCs. More specifically, he is a nerdy guy over his head, led by Lara's example to an unwise attempt at heroism himself. His entire reason to exist in the narrative is as a combination object lesson and one additional sorrow for Lara. Maybe it is the way that he is so utterly eclipsed by Lara that draws so many fanfic writers to him, and towards his attempts to win (and grow enough to earn) an actual relationship with her. And it isn't nerdy young boys who are vicariously living this dream, either, but young women.

There's some fun stuff out in the fanfiction world. I've been reading one story that sends her to the Plain of Jars. I wish I'd thought of that one -- mysterious neolithic cultures and thousands of tons of unexploded wartime munitions makes a perfect playground for the Tomb Raider. Another I'm subscribed to is a hurt/comfort fic (Lara/Sam, of course) that beats the poor kid up worse than the 2013 game. But does some cool stuff both with Greek mythology and with pulling in some of the characters and situations from the previous games.




My own fanfic is basically Crystal Dynamics canon, but taken before the events of Underworld (mostly because Underworld concerns Thor's Hammer and the Stargate SG-1 side of my plot involves, among other things, the Asgard).

I did scribble one quick Tomb Raider 2013 sketch, though. Which was entirely a take-that at one of many bits of ludonarrative dissonance in the game. Might be a little hard to explain. You see, the game makes it possible to go back through all the previous levels after defeating Mathias and freeing Himiko (aka, after winning the game). And this makes no sense within the presented narrative (any more than the reluctant hero of the narrative meshes with game mechanics that encourage you to do especially brutal kills in order to earn more points).

Come to think, my previous one-shot was also a take-that -- this time at the railroad nature of the plot. Which is why I had Lara set fire to Himiko's body the first time she saw it. Not like she doesn't spend half the game setting fire to everything in sight (mummified bodies included) anyway!

What attracts me most in fanfics is alternate histories. Especially stories in which one thing is changed, and the changes propagate until the entire original narrative unravels. And, yeah, in my opinion Tomb Raider 2013 could really do with some of these. Pity that none of the Laralex fics I've seen so far do much but re-tell the exact same game only with Alex following along like a strangely-shaped shadow.

But all these Heroic Alex fics made me tempted to send Jonah down to the beach to look for survivors instead. Which would mean Lara would never go through the opening sequence with the mummy bag. And might even end up with Stephanie being rescued. And between Jonah's sturdy, unflappable nature ("I'm not going to die with an empty stomach") and Stephanie's irrepressible good spirits, the story would evolve in very much not the grimdark way it does in the game.

Instead of course I'm doing an SG1 cross-over. Which started as a one-note joke; a desire to observe the clash between Daniel Jackson and Lara Croft, despite both practicing essentially the same Indiana Jones school of archaeology. But what has become the alternate universe aspect, really, is my attempts to rationalize both the Forbidden Archaeology of the Tomb Raider world, and the Ancient Astronauts of the SG1 world, with something resembling the real world we live in -- one in which archaeologists carry soft-bristle brushes, not whips.

One of these conflicts is going to become important in my next few chapters and I'm still trying to figure out how to approach it. Tomb Raider, like much fictionalized depictions of archaeology, is artifact-centric. Which is not incorrect for an earlier era, the time of cabinets of curiosities, of Carter, of Schliemann (who, it is quoted, did to Troy what the Greek army could not). But really, this depiction comes straight out of much older story-telling traditions; fables and fairy-tales, stories of magic swords and geese that lay golden eggs.

Far from being artifact-centered, one could argue that a modern dig is site-centered. A site is explored horizon by horizon (essentially, layers of time) instead of the bulk being hurriedly tossed away (as it was by Schliemann) in the search for museum-ready pieces. And all the detritus of the site goes under the microscope, analyzed by every method from botanical to statistical to build up a picture of the culture under consideration.

And even this conceit -- the idea of archaeology as a neutral observer which could use tools of economic analysis and time-motion studies to reconstruct a society's needs and goals, started to be questioned as far back as the first cultural anthropologist to openly admit that they were incapable of painting a picture of life in a remote village -- they were instead painting a picture of life in a remote village that had an anthropologist visiting it.

Almost every lovely economic theory eventually founders on the harsh reality that people do not make rational purchasing decisions. So, too, did processualism falter on the conceit that a stone age tribe put their physical and emotional needs in the same boxes as a college graduate in the western world of the 20th century. But then, too, did post-processualism fail in throwing these tools (of using our own constructs to analyze the workings of a very different peoples) completely away.

And, of course, amid all these heady and competing theories, and in a world where site access is fought over and observing the legalities is everything to an archaeologist's career, the reality of a Daniel Jackson or Lara Croft is still going to be going after those rare magic swords that, in their version of the world, are still out there.

Look-Ahead Sound Mixing

I was mixing microphones for a school tour yesterday, and I realized I was, once again, not just mixing for that moment of that song, but mixing in context; of the whole song, of the total performance.

I'm reminded of a couple of classics of science fiction when I think about this. In Robert Heinlein's "Blowups Happen" the staff at a power reactor are going insane from the tension of the job. This was written before the operations of the first pile became publicly known, and Heinlein had extrapolated a fission reaction in positive feedback; balanced on the cusp between dying out or going into runaway (what the industry now calls a "power excursion."

His people, experienced nuclear physicists all, were forced to monitor the processes inside the massive power reactor second by second, using calculus to project the widely varying curves to decide when to moderate -- knowing if they slipped a decimal, a massive explosion would take out half a continent.

The stakes are similar in SF Pioneer E.E. "Doc" Smith's The Vortex Blasters. In this case, the (seemingly) natural phenomenon of a loose atomic vortex behaves chaotically. At any given moment, you can take the past few minutes of activity and attempt a best-fit curve. And if you could do this well enough, you could time a large explosive charge to arrive at the core of the vortex at the exact moment that the yield matched the energetic output of the vortex, thus snuffing it out like an oil rig fire.

Enter "Storm" Cloud, physicist and lightning calculator, who did this personally using his ability to perform complex calculations in his head (eventually he is replaced by a specialized computer...but the real solution to the loose atomic vortices and the source of the problem is more interesting than that. The story stands up well -- still worth a read today).

Fortunately mixing a show is much smaller stakes. But that doesn't change the problem. Given an ideal audio space, ideal sources, perfect equipment, and no psychoacoustic or physiological auditory limits, you could set up a perfect mix for every moment.

In the real world, you have issues you have to map around. One big one is hearing fatigue. If you want to have the ability to push a powerful musical moment into the peak power you are legally and ethically allowed to deliver to the audience, you need to hold back until that moment. Otherwise the audience will already by fatigued and will be unable to appreciate it. Every show, every act, every song has an internal dynamic arc, and you don't start every song with screaming levels; because that leaves you nowhere to go.

I also look ahead knowing a flute is going to enter and I need to carve sonic space for it now, instead of having its entrance masked by competing material. I mix knowing I have one singer who isn't on microphone and the mix that will work during her solo is not the same as the optimum mix a few bars before that.

And I also have to mix into history. Say I guessed wrong on the EQ for a trumpet and gave them a specific and distinctive flavor. That means I have to make a lightning-fast decision about where to go into total artistic mix. If I change it now, the audience's attention will be attracted to the change instead of to the solo, leading to a poorer experience. On the other hand, when the trumpet entered it was new, and the audience is not burdened by the same preconceptions I (or the musicians) might have about how it is "supposed" to sound. Within that first few seconds, they may accept this as musically valid, and the song will work.

The window to make this choice is only a second or two. And it is a multi-variant problem; the sound might be "slightly" off, but it might be so in a way that will stand out later in the song, but the song itself may permit adjusting before that other moment occurs...

And in the middle of this same window a vocalist may have decided to shift her position on a mic and need to be fixed now. Which means even less time, and even less brain power to spare on figuring out where the potential fixes may fall within the total context of the moment, the song, the act, the night. And, yes, I do slip. I have someone suddenly sound utterly wrong, and as I'm fixing that, I blow an entrance.

Raygun XII

Basic shape is in CAD now:

I used a picture of the rough model as reference, adjusted a few details in the direction of a sketch I showed the client...then after building most of it, went back and tweaked again.

I'd made the body a little fatter than the mock-up (as well as leaning the "bulge" forward towards the barrel more) but after I'd placed everything else it was just too much. So I re-scaled. Rather; deleted one half, scaled the remainder, re-aligned it along the drawing planes, and mirrored it. If you are careful, there's a lot of elements in the "stack" of operations in Fusion 360 that remain parametric quite late into the modeling process.

I'd like to try making the rings a little bigger, also the "sight" a little smaller. On the latter, though, it is just barely large enough to contain a 5mm LED.




In any case, the current task is figuring out how it will all assemble. I'm half-tempted to smooth the fins and grip into the body with nice gussets, but that would mean one massive machining pass for each side, and a larger billet. So it seems most sensible to break it into body, fin, handle, trigger guard, reflector dish, nozzle rings, front nozzle escutcheon.

In fact, I am thinking the escutcheon may be lathed out manually. And also possibly do the same for the "sight"; that would make a cleaner shape, and more importantly, save a lot of time in CNC machining. Plus, then, the fin might be made in a single piece instead of fitting two pieces together.

So this takes me deep into what they call "Design for Manufacture" (which includes as a subset "Design for Assembly.") Fortunately, again, I have a couple decades of theatrical scenery and props behind me in figuring out what order things have to happen in order to be able to reach the bolts for one part that will be later hidden by another part.

It doesn't make it easy, though. Especially in a basically new material and process. I have to keep in mind as I go the likely tolerances of the various processes -- high on the list, how well I'll be able to align the billet for top and bottom machining steps.




Plan that looks best is that most of the parts bolt into the main body; the fin, handle, and trigger guard can all have tabs that slot into the main body then are bolted into holes tapped in the main body. If I was more sure of my fit-up I would just use tabs and close fit, but I'm not and I don't want parts to wobble. The main body then slips together with a locking tab at the back (which will have to be manually milled) then a couple of bolts in front; these get hidden by the donut assembly, and that in turn gets held on by tightening the nozzle escutcheon down on a set of threads.

Already I have two problems with this scheme; getting a tight enough join at the rear, and the fact that the escutcheon doesn't have wrench flats...plus is hard to access due to being inset in the reflector dish.

The scheme I'm toying with for the "sight" is to lathe that separately, and have a tab from the fin go into a milled slot, where it will be retained by a threaded pin driven from one end of the sight. But this gets a lot more complicated with the LED and the turned acrylic "nose" (the part that gets illuminated) having to somehow be attached. At least for those, glue should be sufficient (and well allow access later if necessary -- an important part of any assembly plan).

Raygun XI

In an effort to make this blog a little less long and rambling (too late!) I'm editing instead of adding a new post.



The parts I want for the Raygun are out of stock right now. And I haven't tested them. But I need to move forward. Fortunately, I was able to find a few models at Thingiverse and GrabCAD that I could import into Fusion 360 (Digikey also links to CAD files on many of the products they carry):

Instead of going through a proper drawing stage, I photographed the rough model (with maximum zoom to flatten it out as much as possible) and used it as a reference to start building up the CAD in Fusion 360.

It took a lot of tries to find out what would create the main body shape. In any other application it might be a quick lathe then boolean, but in Fusion 360 it turned into many, many greyed-out menu items and "you can't do that" pop-ups until I finally stumbled upon a sequence that it liked. Now I face the same problem with the grips; I haven't figured out yet how to cut the wrap-around grooves into them.

Since the housing is closed, I'm experimenting with a surface transducer instead of a speaker. The idea is that the body of the gun itself becomes the sounding board. Maybe. But I have to try it, because there's not enough time left before delivery to delay working up the CAD. The fall-back position is standard speaker and add some sounding holes. Somewhere.

Similarly, although it is attractive to put AAA batteries in the grip, with a clever door to go in and change them out, making firm commits is more important at this stage then more experiments and test measurements. So Lithium Polymer is the plan. At least that, I have one on order I can test out with my LED driver before things get too critical.

The plan is to start with the basic shape and let the needs of construction dictate additional panel lines, bolt holes, and so forth. But I am kind of hoping there won't be a lot of those; the mockup has infected me with a strong preference for its clean, uncluttered lines.




Really, this is an ambitious project. I'm working up an entire mechanical design, in less-than-familiar software, and generating tool paths from that to cut it out of metal. But I am fairly confident; I've done all these steps before, in different projects.

Machining Paradox

There's a couple of these.

One is that the equipment for working metal needs to be remarkably sturdy and stiff. This is why a lot of those "build your own metal lathe with some angle iron and a drill motor" aren't really going to hack it. And why there is such a difference in cost between a desktop CNC with a laser or (printing) hot end, and one that can carve metal. The machines are heavy, built of steel. The tool holders and other parts have massive bolts and multiple set-screws, and when you lock a setting in, it takes brute muscle power to tighten all the bolts and clamps.

And yet; so much about why we approach a project in a certain way, why cuts are made in one direction over another, why the trade-off between speed and tolerance, have to do with the fact that everything flexes anyhow.



Perhaps related to this, the core calculations for machining -- and engineering -- are at the heart pretty basic physics and geometry. And it is an essential skill to be able to work like this, practically from first principles, to figure out the cross-section of a load-bearing member or the weight of a finished casting.

And yet, against just like in engineering, the devil is in the details. All those places where the abstract form just doesn't carry sufficient information, where the first-order effects are edged on to by second and third-order effects. You really do need to model the thing you mean to do...but you also need to know that the model lies.



Probably the least paradoxical, is that machining is done to tolerances of tens -- ten-thousandths of an inch (I'm barely up to accuracy of 0.0005 myself). But we don't work within arbitrary decimal numbers out to those five places...instead the vast majority of work is done to the nearest appropriate "round" number, or one of the stock fractions that come up over and over again. So I could lathe something to 0.25000", and I might even set the dials to that value, but basically I'm lathing to 1/4" in diameter.

This comes from three different directions. One is that hardware, tools, and stocks are available only in certain sizes -- many of them simple reduced fractions. Another is that as tight as the tolerances might be in one place, there is expected slop all over; necessary gaps to allow parts to move, the known tolerance of manufactured hardware or raw stock, etc. So when you hit a gap or other fit-up, you take the chance to jump up to the nearest simple fraction...instead of blindly adding the exact calculated clearance at each step and working outwards in numbers that are increasingly random-sounding. The last is because it is a heck of a lot easier to remember, and to calculate, and to do the in-your-head approximations for measurements you've dealt with many times in the past.