HCMS (Highly Configurable Mars Station) by Pr09het

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

This is the Highly Configurable Mars Station (HCMS).
The station is designed to be very configurable, customisable and highly connected. This allows the astronauts to build up an environment best suited for them once at Mars, without having to wait months or years for new or replacement parts to be sent. A part can take a few hours to a day to manufacture.
Parts
Each part is designed to be 4D printed, on a custom built cylindrical 2m diameter, 3.8m tall selective laser sintering 4D printer called the Very Large 4D Printer (VL4DP) that has multiple robotic arms that build and place PCB's as the plastic is layered up.
The parts, based on hexagons, join together to form sections.
Virtually every part (bottom, top, sides etc.) acts as a type of communications router and power distributor, this allows for redundancy and ensures that the fastest communication occurs.
The major parts (such as bottom, top, side and door etc.) include static radiation shielding.
The solar panels use a small proportion of the energy being produced, to power an active radiation shield within each unit, being above the sections means this blocks a large percentage of harmful radiation reaching even the top part.
The bottom and top sections include ventilation systems, pressure equalisation equipment, very low energy lighting and a small light weight capacitor bank that can keep the vital equipment and lighting running for 24 hours.
All the fittings, resource and docking ports use the pressure difference between inside and out to strengthen the seals.
The sides, bottom and top sections include damage sensors and, like most other data streams, records the data to the main server rack and backup server rack simultaneously.
Sections
The backup server rack is located below the living section, in an underground room, that's also used as an emergency room with separate power and oxygen storage, which can run self-sufficiently for 7 days.
As well as the living section and emergency section, there are 5 more sections; a double height room for the VL4DP, research section, data and communication section, an eco section and a resource section.
The resource section is connected to the Carbon Dioxide scrubber and the thermoelectric generator. It also stores the bulk of the electrical energy, oxygen gas and raw carbon for use in the VL4DP as well as resources for the astronauts such as food.
Each section has an air lock. When stepping in and closing the air lock, it blasts a short burst of air around the astronaunt before purging again, this is to remove dust and particles from the space suits before entering any section.If I had some more time, I'd join each of the sections up, so this would be less of an issue! (Being highly configurable, the astronaunts could build this over time...!)
Connectivity
Sections are connected to each other in a couple of ways, through the resource ports and Wi-Fi. Bluetooth 4.0 LE is also used, as a backup to Wi-Fi, to connect to the astronauts smart devices.
The resource ports are mainly used for gas/liquid exchange, distributing power and data lines. The gas/liquid exchange can be set to one way as well as 2 way transfer, both are flashback protected.
Thank you for this great competition,I thoroughly enjoyed making my first entry into a thingiverse competition!
Also, I'm a great believer that I'll see a manned mission to Mars in my lifetime :)
Last note, apologies for it being a little inaccurate, it's a little rushed!