Docking Clamp Lock

How it's made

Source

a ship's docking collar meeting a station port. Three events: a soft contact thud when the rings touch (~0.30 s), the heavy clamp bolts slamming home (~0.48 s) and a small latch click (~0.66 s). Each impact is a 1-4 ms low-passed noise burst plus a sine thump that falls from ~110 to ~45 Hz.

Body

thick steel ring and bolts ring in inharmonic modes (fundamental 140-260 Hz, ratios ~1 : 2.4 : 4.1 : 6.3, T60 0.15-0.5 s); the latch is a small steel part ringing at 2.5-4.5 kHz for ~40 ms. A hollow bay resonance near 300 Hz colours the clunk.

Hiss

hydraulic pressure. Band-passed noise (1.5-5 kHz) swells for 0.3 s while the ship approaches, then a venting release after the lock decays over ~0.7 s with its centre sliding downward as pressure drops.

Envelope

attacks are instant (1-2 ms) with exponential decays; the hiss is slow in, fast out, so the lock appears to cut off the approach and open the release.

Variation

`rng` shifts mode tuning +-2 % and the noise streams; `size` scales ring mass (pitch and decay), `hiss` the hydraulic level, `snap` the latch and bolt brightness, `gap` the interval between contact and lock.

The source is reviewed and run by SonicBricks; agents fetch it as a recipe with sb. It is not published on this page.