Stanford Torus (Space Colony)

This craft is a representation of study by Stanford University and NASA in 1975. In the design the colony is meant to house 10,000 people. This was one of the studies in the 1970’s about colonizing space. There is a good Wikipedia page that has more information on real design work.

[No XML data was hacked in the making of this colony.]
This is craft it is over 2000m across and with a tether around 6000m. There is a solar furnace with a docking port at the end of the tether. The torus itself over 80m across and contains simulated natural habitats and farming. The torus can be opened up with hotkey ‘8’. There are at least 10 docking ports in and around the hub of the colony.
There is a primary mirror housed in the base of the colony. Stage 2 will undock it allowing it to navigate on its own. It has its own control and plenty of RCS to maneuver. There is a central node where the control is located.

Launching:
Launch from Luna. Start the launch at 100% and rise vertically until you reach 10 km. Then point forward to 15 degrees from horizon and speed time to 10x. The colony should snap to the direction you pointed quickly and then go back to normal time. Continue thrusting to when the colony is at 50 km apogee. Then flatten out the orientation to 0 degrees and continue to 50 km orbit.
On to phase 2, trigger stage 2, to release the mirror. Transfer control to the mirror and change to translation mode. Back out of the base hanger slowly (Nothing should break). When the mirror is far enough away stop its motion and pitch the mirror for optimal sunlight.

Loading:
When you first load the colony to the editor you get a blank screen. Zoom in a little to see a vertical line (that is the tether), then right-click to pan downward. After a few pans you should see the main structure. This is a big craft and editor can’t render all of it. For what I can tell is the editor works in a with draw distance 1.5 Km. Parts pass this distance are not shown, yet still there (and clickable). The editor strained to keep all of track of all of the parts. (The Undo feature took 5-10 seconds to complete an undo.)

Design notes:
I did not add the radiator panel to the colony as I was worried about part count and I did not care for the esthetics a large panel sticking out. I would have liked to add more parts to the habitat sections of the torus, but the editor was chugging and I did not want to crash it.

Have fun with launching a colony!!