Painting our doors

This week I've been working on a new novel, Renaissance.  The action is set on a large recycling ship, and I had to ask myself: What does a recycling ship do?  And how does it carry out those operations?  

My starting point for answering those questions was remembering snatches of video I'd seen on the news about recycling plants here on Earth.  Basically, stuff comes in, travels along a big belt to get sorted, and drops into different bins.  So how would this work on a ship out in the hostile void of space?  Well, you wouldn't get a fleet of lorries turning up and dumping their loads in your reception area.  I needed a different way to recycle space junk.  So here's what I came up with.

The ship sidles up to the piece of junk and then takes it apart using grapples and drones.  Those tear off chunks of the the structure.  They then pass through airlocks and down chutes to the Belt Room.  When they come on to the belt, scanners identify what the junk is made of and sort it into the right chutes.  But there are bound to be some bits the scanners can't identify fast enough.  So those unidentifieds get dumped onto sorting tables where the Belt Rats identify them and sort them.  A multi-species crew sorts junk on Renaissance.

That led me to describing the room's machinery, and also the language of hand signals the Rats use in the noisy room to signal to each other that they're lobbing pieces of materials their way.  The Belt Rats work long, hard shifts for weeks on end in a noisy environment.

That led me to wondering where they lived.  I decided their small accommodations would be off a long hallway on the same deck as the Belt Room.  I also decided that, as Renaissance and their quarters were their permanent home, they'd want to personalise their spaces.  Which brought me to the idea of painted doors.  The Rats had started by producing nameplates in their own languages.  That had then grown into decorating the whole of their quarters' doors.

I decided the sunrises and sunsets they painted would have different coloured stars, and vegetation.  Some of the doors bore mandalas, and one - Yestirr, the Belt Chief's - has a painting of her people, the equine Aubriann.

I'm far from done on detailing Renaissance, but the ship is the novel's major setting, so I expect a host of other details will emerge as I write.