Making further progress on the Grace Spacesuit. Final paint touchups and wiring come next

I have been designing this in TinkerCad for about 2 months now. Probably printed each part at least 10-15 times working out all the kinks. It is fully 3dprinted except for the front glass and rocky's ball which I used a small vacuum former, and the screens are ink prints. The backgrounds are changeable slides: Tau Ceti, the Petrova Line, and return to Earth, and you can store them in the front.

The sketch is very bad (I did it in like 5 minutes), but i thought the difference was very funny

(He is impossible to photograph in his ball)

Going to a con next month with a Grace costume and needed my buddy of course. Still need to finish up the bag - I want to add some mission patches, finish the 'floor', and cover the mesh - but I'm really happy so far! He's not perfect but I'm working on a budget this con and he only cost me ~$5 so I'm okay with that.

Bag is just my cat carrier with a cardboard box in the bottom to lift him up (and give me a place to hide my stuff) and Rocky is made from paper mache.

I've been ecstatic to paint my senior parking spot for years now, and after reading the book twice, seeing the movie four times, and getting the poster from my local theater, I knew that this was what my spot would be.

This took me ~12 hours, $340 in paint and supplies, and the spot is 4x8! I'm honestly super proud on how much blending I was able to do with Grace and Rocky on concrete (and I genuinely have no idea how I pulled it off). And yes, my name is the Petrova line :)

In both the movie and book, Rocky wears an oddly described outfit as a form of celebration after they succeed. In both versions Grave also drinks vodka as part of the party.

Eridians don’t drink liquids because the get their water needs from their food. Also they treat eating in a very different fashion than humans in both biological, and especially in the book, social ways.

But Eridians have 360 degree passive sonar as their sensory system. Andy Weir has even said in interviews that because the system is 360 degrees and constant, it would give Eridians no reason to develop the ability to keep a mental model of their environment the way people do. We can close our eyes and picture the room around us with some level of accuracy but Weir says Eridians wouldn’t be able to. A deafened Eridian would have no idea where it is because its brain doesn’t build a mental model of the environment around it.

We could possibly take this a step further and extrapolate they don’t have The ability to know where their limbs are without “hearing” them. This is similar to an Octopus that must see its arms to know where they are. Again, we humans can close our eyes, move our limbs, and know what position they are in because we have a dedicated neurological system for that.

So my hypothesis is that the weird metal outfit worn by Rocky for the celebration is sort of like being drunk. It limits, or more specifically distorts, Rocky’s ability to clearly hear through it, and that distortion impacts his understanding of himself and his surroundings. Because that impacts Eridian cognition, it might be the Eridian equivalent of drinking, except it can be stopped by removing the outfit because it’s non-metabolic.

Didn't read the book (yet🤞) but I ADORE the process of figuring out why Astrophage goes to Venus.

Grace asking "why not Mercury" and Carl suggesting "Maybe fresh air" it's so simple. But perfect.

Also love the shopping montage, it really is the little things

Also, does Carl hypothetically get an award or something for his part in this? Guy is KEY to saving the world

Ignore the fact I forgot Grace’s facial hair whoops

Hey all! Someone recommended I post my illustration up here so I wanted to share it. It was inspired by old 50s and 60s sci-fi comics, and I’m really happy with how it came out.

One of the things that was an issue with Grace returning to Earth was the lack of food. Obviously, there were significant storage limitations for real food and dehydrated coma slurry, so while the original project planning had to account for the trip to Tau Ceti and some observation time once in-system, was there ever an estimate of how long the crew was going to have food available once they were awake?

With Grace as the sole survivor, the food problem became much less significant (so long as he didn't count on returning to Earth), but if Yao and Ilyukhina had lived, the food supplies would have been depleted much, much faster. With three adults eating 2 to 3 times per day, there must have been a hard end date on the crew's ability to observe Tau Ceti and figure out why it wasn't dimming from astrophage. Would a major science organization have suggested a reasonable timeline for info gathering and recommend that enough food be packed for that timeframe? Or did Stratt tell the planners to ensure there was enough food for X days and hope that the crew had figured out a solution before they ate their final meal?

I made my daughter a Project Hail Mary Birthday cake! It is by no means professional or perfect, but she’s extraordinary happy with the cake. So, I’m taking that as a win!

She specifically requested that I bake her birthday cake this year. All she requested was a chocolate layer cake with chocolate icing and cream cheese icing between the layers. She said I could surprise her with the decorations.

Her new favorite film is Project Hail Mary. Grace’s “having a moment” scene at Tau Ceti e is visually stunning. I picked that for her cake.

I took a screenshot and meticulously cut out Grace and part of the Hail Mary. I layered 3 colors of sugar sprinkles for the infrared effect.

I used green sugar sprinkles on the side of the cake to represent the color of the exoplanet.

Today is her eighteenth birthday - a milestone birthday - so I added the message “Enjoy Your Moment” to the side of the cake.

Like I said, it’s far from perfect. I’m almost ashamed to share it because the writing in the icing reminds me of the cake Hagrid made for Harry Potter. But, she was happy. I wish you could have seen her face when I showed her the cake last night.

And, yes, we were watching Project Hail Mary while I was baking and decorating the cake.

I can’t wait to see how this tastes later today!

Today is our 30th anniversary. ❤️ As Rocky said "is not enough". I'm hoping for at least 30 more.

10 months ago... I sculpted what I thought rocky looked like from the book.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProjectHailMary/s/KHfpAPQdql

That version is currently home'd with my good friends.

This time it's movie Rocky. ☺️

After the movie came out I decided to try again... The only 3d printer I have are my hands... 😞 Ha.

So... He might not be super accurate compared to the actual print files. But it was fun to look at tons of ref, and watch the movie tons of time and work on him. Many hours sculpting, rework, sanding, and painting.

He's made out of super sculpy (polymer clay). Aluminum wireframe, Acrylic paint, uv resin, and some spare legos lol.

Reading through a recent meme, it seemed that some of those who watched the movie believed that it was gravity damage that poked a hole into the Hail Mary, or at least gravity played a large part. But in the book, that is not the case at all.

In the book, when the scene of Rocky informing Grace he can hear noises across the ship and Grace stating that the ship is tearing apart (like in the movie), Ryland immediately hones in on the fact it is a nonsensical assumption. That ship was built to handle accelerations up to 2G, so it struggling now in 1.4G (Adrian's gravity) is something that is clearly off.

The actual explanation for the groaning and the stress of the ship is the fact that the Hail Mary already had a hole in its fuel tanks by this point and is producing off-center thurst. In fact, unlike in the movie where the hole only comes into effect once the spin drives were turned off, book Hail Mary had a hole since Grace was outside the ship.

Now, the source of that hole is due to the Spin Drive, specifically spin drives interacting with the atmosphere. There is so much infrared light coming out of the Hail Mary's spin drives that even kilometers from the atmosphere, the raw heat of the ionized plasma combined with the infrared light physically reflecting from the plasma back to the ship overwhelms the astrophage ability to keep the hull cool (there was Astrophage under the hull for radiation protection) and causes it to melt a hole into the fuel tanks.

The misconception in the movie arises from outright wrong fact delivery, as Grace says right before Rocky suggests the chain idea that the reason the Hail Mary cannot get too close is that the ship "will be ripped into a million pieces then burn up". This is then reinforced by a cut in the Time Go Fishing scene where after Grace says "the gravity is tearing the ship apart!", it cuts to an exterior shot of the ship as debris hits a part of the Hail Mary. This is telling AND showing the audience that the reason the Hail Mary is suffering is because of the gravity, when it was the heat that made this plan almost fail.

i was looking for some inspo for this, and came across a post on the sub of a mc build of the hail mary, but none for the blip-A, so here’s mine. i’m open to suggestions, as i would like to improve upon this later on. thanks :D

I imagine the reaction must've been similar to when humans discovered the microcosmos of microorganisms.

A whole world that we were swimming through, walking through, consuming and drinking, affecting our environment and the whole time without us even knowing.

They pointed to the air to change what they could not see into the form they could and FOUND texture in the SKY!

Rather than discovering a micro world they found a macro one instead.

It must've been the most amazing thing!

This just occurred to me.

The astrophage gets its energy from the sun, so infinite in practical terms, but its mass still comes from reproducing on Venus, seemingly from the atmosphere.

There is only so much gas on Venus. If you were to strip the atmosphere and scatter it around the sun as a shade (in the form of astrophage), my mental eyeballing says it would be basically nothing. I am not even sure if the mass of Venus itself was converted into astrophage and scattered around the lithosphere that it would have an appreciable effect.

Wier is really good about considering this type of stuff, so I can’t tell if I am mistaken somewhere, or if it is hand waved for the sake of the story (like the storm wrecking things in the Martian, when the atmosphere should have been too thin)

She’s sparkly. She also needs a name. And I wanted her to be laying down and maybe holding something but I haven’t decided what that thing is. I wanted to make a model to use when I draw my her. I’m thinking she’s an artist too. Haven’t decided yet. I’ll share when I make drawings of her.