I cleaned up the triakis tetrahedron drawing.

left and right hand, willfully clasped together despite their destined disagreements. a common enemy for the two of them that splits into the other as time passes; time may well be their true enemy, in that case.

Drawing a truncated cube and a cuboctahedron from a cube....

As for understanding truncation: You can imagine having a cheese cube and just cutting of the vertices...

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Truncated cubes and cuboctahedra are Archimedian solids.

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I used isometric dot paper.

Gathering

broken glass

The clock is ticking. Perhaps it's time to choose.

Quietly wishing I was chilling at the polyhedron, watching my pals dying from the sand plague and laughing at them.

I totally get why people wanted to destroy the Polyhedron not because it's a perversion of the natural order of the world or anything but because it's so difficult to draw omg.

think ive finally figured out a building process i dont despise. still got a LONGGG way to go improvement wise (a whole lifetime even) but the process occurs regardless :3

how do I draw the polyhedron? well firstly, you must be in love with her

Hoping that one day I’ll finish this🥲

Two things to show at once:

- I started to draw Catalan Solids, with the Triakis Tetrahedron being the first one.

- A foldable drawing board

One side is for the main content, the other side is for quick notes (as memory aid etc):

(can be folded)

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And here is the Triakis Tetrahedron drawing:

Polyhedron or spacecraft

Dodecahedron and stellated dodecahedron WIP - perspective drawing on isometric dot paper

So I drew this dodecahedron and then the stellated dodecahedron below.

And when I drew that stellated dodecahedron I made some very annoying mistakes (in the last steps!)...

As I could not erase those ink lines, I improved and cut out the parts with mistakes...

Sadly, the cut outs are irritating for the perspective drawing. (I will show you why shading the faces will help make sense of this shape once I have made a second drawing of it.)

Now I cannot shade the stellated dodecehedron as it would look very messy with the cuts.

So I just use the stellated octahedron part as an interesting collage item.

I could even insert neon-colored paper, which would make it look fancy.

But for making a shaded drawing I might draw a second one - but without those mistakes...

pathologic but it's a lost 1920s german expressionist film [id under cut]

[id:

image 1: a digital drawing of a fake poster, using bright colours and rough, painterly brushstrokes. the title, 'pest' (german for 'plague'), is written at the top in spiky black text. in the foreground a man dressed as a tragedian is staring intently at the viewer, his hands raised and splayed as if in horror. in the background, the town is framed against a red sky, with the polyhedron in yellow behind.

images 2 and 3: fake casting sheets for the film, with the names of the actors and the characters they are playing above a black-and-white portrait photograph of them. all the text is in german. in english it reads: 'Pest', a film by Robert Wiene Alfred Abel as Victor Kain Ernst Busch as Grief Lil Dagover as Katerina Saburova Ernst Deutsch as the Bachelor Carl de Vogt as Vlad the Younger Marlene Dietrich as the Inquisitor Willy Fritsch as Mark Immortell Alexander Granach as Andrey and Peter Stamatin Bernhard Goetzke as General Block Dolly Haas as the Changeling Ludwig Hartau as the Haruspex Brigitte Helm as Anna Angel Brigitte Horney as Maria Kaina Emil Jannings as Big Vlad Gerda Maurus as Yulia Lyuricheva Lothar Menhert as Georgiy Kain Asta Nielsen as Lara Ravel Ossi Oswalda as Eva Yan Fritz Rasp as Stanislas Rubin Conrad Veidt as Alexander Saburov and Tragedian Paul Wegener as Oyun Gertrud Welcker as Aspity

image 4: four digital sketches of set designs for various locations. all are strongly influenced by expressionist imagery, using extreme angles, warped perspective, and dramatic shapes. they are labelled 'street 1' (a street lined with houses), 'street 2' (a square with a lamppost and a set of steps), 'polyhedron exterior' (the polyhedron walkway), and 'cathedral interior' (the dais at the far end of the cathedral).

image 5: four digital drawings in a black-and-white watercolour style, showing fake stills from the film. all are similarly distorted and lit by dramatic lighting. the first shows katerina's bedroom, with katerina standing in the centre of the floor. the second shows the interior of an infected house. the third shows daniil staring out of the frame in horror, one hand on his head and the other raised as if to ward something off. the fourth shows an intertitle with jagged white text reading 'the first day' against a dark background.

end id.]

It's cute to say that stealth aircraft got rounder for the same reason that video game characters did: because the computers got more powerful. But it's not the completely story. More accurately, it was specifically Lockheed's stealth aircraft that evolved that way.

Famously, a Lockheed employee noticed a paper describing how to calculate electromagnetic scattering from a polyhedron. They implemented it in software and used it to design the Have Blue demonstrator, which evolved into the F-117.

But at the same time, Northrop developed the Tacit Blue demonstrator, which was not designed using the edge diffraction software, and did not consist of only flat polygons.

Tacit Blue was the first aircraft to use "edge convolution" (a.k.a. "Gaussian stealth"). This smoothes out the edges by convolving them with a gaussian function. In particular, the convolution makes the edge of the wing sharper than if it was just a wedge between two polygons (with an ideal gaussian function it would extend out infinitely, so the acute angle would approach 0 degrees). This means that the edge of the wing will reflect less radar waves if it is illuminated directly from the side (from the horizon), which is the typical case if the plane is flying straight and the enemy radar is far away.

All stealth aircraft now use the gaussian smoothing idea, and you can clearly see the commonalities between Tacit Blue and the Northrop B-2.

Actually, when it came time to design the ATF (which evolved into the F-22), Lockheed also had to abandon their edge diffraction software. The ATF chief engineer commented:

We did not know how to analyze a curved stealthy shape in those days. The software wasn't sophisticated enough, and we didn't have the computational capacity we needed. We had our hands tied by the analytical problems. Lockheed had become convinced that, if we could not analyze a design as a stealthy shape, then it could not be stealthy. We would not break through that barrier until 1984. [...] We simply started drawing curved shapes even though we could not run the designs through our analytical software models. When we went to curved airplanes, we began to get more acceptable supersonic and maneuver performance. Instead of relying on software models, we built curved shapes and tested them on the company's radar range. The curved shapes performed quite well in the radar tests.

So in the end, I think the "smooth stealth planes" (B-2, F-22) were mainly designed heuristically and evaluated by building actual model airplanes; having fast computers to simulate them was not the bottle neck.