Orbital Manufacturing Hub | mysimulator.uk

Orbital Factory

Production speed 1.0×

Station spin rate 0.05 rpm

Units produced

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Crystal quality

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Solar power

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Residual gravity

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How it works

On Earth, hot and cold pockets of fluid rise and sink under buoyancy, stirring the melt around a growing crystal and dragging impurity-rich fluid past its surface. In orbit the station is in continuous free-fall, so the effective gravity felt inside it is a residual of only 10⁻⁴–10⁻⁶ g from spin, thruster firings and drag — buoyant convection almost vanishes and the melt is left to mix by diffusion alone, which is slow and uniform. That is why ZBLAN fiber and other exotic crystals grown on an orbital platform come out with far fewer flaws than the same melt grown under Earth's 1 g.

Gr = g·β·ΔT·L³ / ν²   (Grashof number — buoyant vs viscous force)
g_eff ≈ ω²·r           (residual "gravity" from station spin)

Production speed — how fast the print head extrudes new material; faster growth locks in more lattice defects, so quality trades off against throughput.
Product type — switches the print head between a translucent ZBLAN fiber crystal, a metal lattice truss beam and a stacked ceramic tile, each built with a different geometry and growth pattern.
Station spin rate — spinning the station raises the residual acceleration felt at the build site (g_eff ≈ ω²·r), which reintroduces convective mixing and lowers crystal quality — the whole reason to manufacture in free-fall in the first place.
Sun tracking — toggles whether the solar arrays rotate to face the light source; power output follows the cosine of the angle between the panel normal and the sun direction.

Real-world relevance: this is the working rationale behind commercial microgravity manufacturing platforms already flying ZBLAN and protein-crystal payloads — the value isn't "made in space" novelty, it's a physical environment Earth cannot offer at any price.

Station core Solar arrays Print head Product

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