TITLE: SPS
NAME: John
EMAIL: jhu@sdf.lonestar.org
TOPIC: Epic Proportions
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.5
TOOLS USED: brain, vi, gimp (create bump map and jpeg file)
RENDER TIME: ~14 hours
HARDWARE USED: Celeron 800
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
The first thing that popped into my mind when I read the topic was "particle accelerators!" Hey, those things can be huge! Of course, the problem is that making an image showing the exterior of such a device would be rather boring. It'd probably be a forest image with wild and happy animals who have no idea that many meters below lies a particle accelerator many kilometers in diameter. Of course, then we get to the point where I'd get comments concerning how grossly off-topic the image really is. 

But I digress. This is an image of the 400GeV Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN. This accelerator had been on the drawing boards for several years before final construction approval in 1971. It was originally used to accelerate protons (hence the name, I think), but has since also been used as a proton/anti-proton collider, heavy-ion collider, and an electron/positron feeder for the Large Electron Positron Collider. And to keep with the topic, this device is 6 kilometers in diameter and buried underground. 

The image depicts just one particular section of the SPS. Please bear in mind that I have no idea what parts of the particle accelerator do, but they probably have really powerful magnets in them. 
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
This image was rather "simple" to create. By simple, I mean that the most complex object in the image is a torus. Of course, the devil is in the details, isn't it?

The tunnel itself is just a white cylinder with some standard materials imposed on it (reflection, normal, etc). There four pipes along the left wall, which are just cylinders. 

The fluorescent lights above actually consist of 3 point lights each, which could explain the long render times. They were originally 1 point light each, but the reflections and shadows just didn't look right. 

On the left side again, there's a dark gray rack with yellow and green wires on top. Those are just some boxes and cylinders. 

Now on to the main device:

Red thing: boxes and more boxes with slight protruding boxes on the side, with a box suhtracted out on the top and with a black box to fill the gap. 

Half-cell: that's the gray thing in the middle with the orange rings at the ends. Just a hodge-podge of cylinders, toruses (for the wires), 3 superellipsoids, and many many boxes all put together to give the illusion of a half-cell.

The blue thing is also a component of the half-cell (I think). Again, it's just a bunch of boxes strewen together. There's actually a phone hanging off the right-rear leg of this object's stand (you can see it if you turn up the brightness). That is just two spheres and a torus. 

Ground: It's a box with a concrete texture I found somewhere. I used the same texture as a bump-map for the ground.