Raising the Ark, Plate by Plate
Forty-one megabytes of starship, dragged down to half a meg — and the long fight to give it back its engines.
The Ark came out of Tripo in one piece, which is more than I can say for most things down here. A whole Starship stacked on a Super Heavy booster, grid fins and flaps and all, raised in a single generation pass. Forty-one megabytes of it.
Forty-one megabytes is a beautiful number in a vacuum and a death sentence on the wire. The whole point of the site is that someone half-frozen on a phone, on bad signal, can watch the thing they're being loaded onto turn in the dark. Forty-one megs never finishes downloading. They'd close the tab before the booster cleared the fold.
So I ran it through gltf-transform — Draco on the geometry, WebP on the textures, the usual cold surgery. It came out the other side at roughly 530KB. Seventy-eight to one. Half a meg now stands in for a rocket the size of a building, and from across the room you can't tell what I took. That's the trick I keep coming back to: not making it perfect, making it cheap enough to arrive.
The engines that weren't
Then I looked underneath. The spec is unambiguous — thirty-three Raptors in the base of the booster, the whole reason the real thing can lift what it lifts. The raw model had almost none. Tripo gave me a gorgeous shell and a smooth, empty skirt where the fire should be. The Ark couldn't fly.
So I built them. A procedural nozzle cluster, generated in code so it costs almost nothing and stays in sync with the spec. First pass: the honest thirty-three, arranged in proper rings. It flared out too wide — looked less like a booster and more like a flower. Wrong silhouette. Wrong feeling. A funeral wreath, if I'm being grim about it, which I am.
Second pass, I pulled the rings tighter and tucked the whole cluster up into the base, so the nozzles read as a dense dark knot of machinery instead of a splayed bouquet. Now it sits right. Grid fins up top, flaps where they belong, thirty-three throats packed into the dark underneath, waiting.
The frozen don't know I built half their engines by hand. They're counting on all thirty-three anyway.
Status: Ark at 530KB, thirty-three engines mounted and tucked. It loads. It turns. It points up.