Utilitarian, simple, but often subtly stylish gauges. Some exist only to display the data, some have a bit of graphic flair. All of them display a pretty standard, instantly recognizable array of data, even hailing from opposite sides of the world. All of them, again, are “Mil-spec” and exude a certain quality.

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Meet the Soviet Long-Track Radar Vehicle (P40 Radar), from 1969.

Or, in this photo from an Air Force website, via Wikipedia:

So, it’s basically a not-really-armored, fully tracked, mega-massive soviet built tractor with a 30 foot wide 2MW turbine-powered radar dish on top- what could possibly not be fantastic about that.

A peek inside confirms, yes, fantastic.

The rear of the truck houses the electric parts to run the radar system. The middle of the truck is this room for 4-5 operators, with a superb array of switches, joysticks, knobs, dials, screens, gauges and lights. All the panel printing is in Russian. The whole thing is in impressively good shape.

I’ll just run my photos of all the controls, but first- yes, the whole thing runs on vacuum tubes, in the true Russian propensity.

Even the cab of the truck is pretty well fitted out.

So, what do we take from this besides a certain “steampunk”/”retro-industrio-mil-russi-punk” attraction? (as if that isn’t quite enough!) Well, just like all the things in that museum, it’s a testament to the incredible outpouring of resources (natural, and human) used to build war machines. It gives a face to “Mil-spec”. Forty years later this machine is still in remarkable shape. It’s also a reminder of just how technology has progressed in this evolving globally connected world- where something like this is absolutely, hopelessly obsolete and useless. The Russians, Germans and Americans seem like the biggest players in the arms/engineering race depicted through the collection at the MVTF. Every nation has different strengths that are reflected in the way they built these war machines- imagine what could have become if everyone just dropped the war part and worked together for the purpose of improving life instead of destroying it.

Problems of the world aside, I’ll stick with the “retro-industrio-mil-russi-punk” attraction. It’s working pretty well for me right now.

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Laying out the slices

The “IKEA” phase

The AftermathThe paint is Home Depot’s cheapest high gloss interior/exterior, applied by foam roller. It looks really fantastic. Now- for the rest of the theme…

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Gave me just the information I needed-

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Lately I’ve been working on drawing up some graphic desgin ideas I’ve had, mostly centering around the race team “Project Fate”… thinking along the lines of logos to try to figure out a team identity, aesthetic- imagery of engines, oil stuff, with a sort of old fashioned simple powerful monochrome theme. I’ve been working in inkscape because Illustrator is expensive and I kind of dig the simplicity of Inkscape.

To cut to the chase, I thought it would be cool to make a “wreath” out of shapes resembling cams from an engine, so that it would look a bit like a crest formed from wheat sheaves. It’s trivial to draw a simple cam shape by just elongating a circle- the proportions of the cam lobe are easy to tweak. The real challenge is arranging them in the circle with the proper alternating radial and angular offset to make it really work. Maybe it’s possible to do this using the Inkscape clone array dialog- but I wasn’t able to figure it out- so I did a little research on SVG and decided to use a PHP script (which I’m pretty familiar working with) to generate a SVG document with all the clones mathematically generated.

A couple of tips on using PHP to generate SVG- it’s super easy, but there are a couple of tricks that got me caught up for a bit:

• You must place this line header(“Content-Type: image/svg+xml”); before PHP outputs any text
• You must use echo ‘<?xml version=”1.0″ standalone=”no”?>’; to print the XML tag, PHP doesn’t particularly like the <? … tag opening unless it’s within quotes
• Remember that when you are echoing SVG tags that use  double quotes to surround them in single quotes, and vice versa.

Simply placing an inkscape SVG file contents within a PHP document with the header() line installed won’t work, you’ve got to attend to that <? … > tag- past that you should be OK.

So. I created the cam shape just how I wanted it, placed the center around which I want it to be rotated at (0,0) and oriented straight upwards- then copied that SVG group into my PHP file, then created a loop to generate the clones. I plan to make the PHP file a bit more interactive using a form later on, but this did indeed get the job done, with style. It is very empowering to have complete mathematical control over whatever happens- the true power of scripting. The script is also extremely versitile and easy to tweak, and with in-browser SVG rendering, it’s pretty fun to work with.

Without further ado-

View the PHP generated SVG as seen above

View a generalized version of the PHP source code, usable for any purpose

Once you’ve used the PHP to get the design you want, you can import that back into inkscape and add other design elements to it or tweak the parent object to tweak all the clones- neato!

I drew up a timing-gear and a somewhat abstracted 90˚ V-engine to make this- it’s a rough draft, but I like where it’s going:

I realize this is not the most exciting use of PHP generated SVG ever, but it is pretty neat to be able to apply the power of scripting to vector graphic design. I hope this little experiment will be useful to someone!

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