3 ms·

Inside the sphere.

• throwanem 2y ago
  Expanding on this with more free time in hand: Specifically, Discovery's rotating section revolves around the ship's longitudinal axis; if we extend that axis to define "north" and "south" poles for the forward sphere (so that the "north pole" sticks out the forwardmost "nose" of the ship, in the direction of cruising flight and opposite the main engines), then the rotating section lies just within the sphere's "equator," to which the pseudogravity vector is normal. Notably, this is behind ("south" of) the flight deck and pod bay, both of which are in microgravity, necessitated by the design constraint that both must communicate directly with the outside - the pod bay via its hatches, and the flight deck via forward windows - which a rotating section internal to the ship's hull cannot feasibly do, hence the absence of windows there. (Launching pods at several meters per second directly away from the ship would also be less than ideal.) Movement between the static and rotating sections of the ship would be achieved by an axial corridor similar to that used by a flight attendant aboard the lunar shuttle earlier in the film, and would mostly be unnecessary by design in the cruising regime of flight. Hence HAL's bay also being outside the rotating section - not because any design or engineering constraint obviously requires this placement, but because the human astronauts aboard the ship are simply not required or even encouraged to inhabit that volume in any but the most exceptional of circumstances.