How to Make a Pressurized Habitat

Caddy says, "If you're going to live on the surface of the moon, you need a pressurized habitat to live in. Pressure shells like to be round, but The Sims only has flat walls. Making a good-looking pressure shell that your sims can actually go inside presents a challenge, but here is an idea for how to make it possible.

"Suppose we make the pressure shell in pieces. Let's define ground level to be the floor of the pressurized habitat. This is realistic because on the surface of Luna people will pile up moon dust around a habitat for shielding and insulation.

"The easiest part to make is the part that would be buried below grade -- you can't see it so we don't need it. :)

"The user could define the basic box for the house by building transparent walls and then roofing over the walls with a transparent floor. That tells the game what is inside and what is outside, and provides a second floor for the top of the pressure shell.

"The top of the pressure shell is made like gable roofs. It is a collection of objects that sit on the second floor.

"On the first floor, our pressure shell is made up of objects. The back of each object, is a curved section of the shell, so that when they are all collected together we have a complete habitat.

"In the illustration I am showing a cylinder 9 squares wide, which would be about 27 feet in diameter. That's a reasonable size for a habitat built on Luna, but too big for a habitat launched from Earth and deliver to the moon.

"If you want to design things for a shell that could be lifted from Earth using launchers that existed in the year 2001, you would show it about 5 squares wide, 15 feet in diamter. That is the size of the Space Shuttle's payload bay, and pretty much the same size as all the expendable launcher's largest payload shrounds. (The Saturn V rocket used in the Apollo program could put a payload 33 feet in diameter into orbit, but that was a different era.)"

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