took their cues

Horizon Orbital is one of the first - and remains one of the largest - fully self-sufficient orbital installations. Designed before the spread of the standardized station projects, in the early expansion era when each station was an individual project and a massive undertaking, it was laid down in 2157. Seen at the time as both a symbol of mankind's newfound aspirations and - in a much more pragmatic sense - a significant investment in attempts to shorten the supply lines and centralize logistics, the project proved immensely successful, and a lot of later large-scale zero-g construction projectsfrom the Horizon. Built with modularity in mind, the station has seen constant extensions and extensive reworks. The shipyard and manufacturing arms were added in 2225, making the Horizon the biggest and longest serving space station in the history.Personal project I've been busy with for a while. I thought about making a large-scale piece, fairly grounded sci-fi piece like this for a long time. The station was inspired mainly by the old soviet illustrations and the nostalgia for 70s sci-fi and depictions of space exploration era. I wanted to make a tribute to that era - modernized and grounded, but still resembling the old illustrations.At 130 million polygons, the model is at a practical limit of what you can achieve with Sketchup on a generic PC. Any higher, and you'd need a professional workstation. I worked on it in spare time, and it took three months to complete, and it would probably been even slower if I din't end up using my kitbash. Even with it, details were the biggest time sink - since this was a personal project, I could afford to go through the design and detail each part, and I did.