Side question: what I'm seeing appears to be a wire frame model with flat shading of a model with very few vertices. I know nothing of the STL format. The only time I've dealt with it in the past was having an ME send me models of parts when doing circuit board design work. To get to the point, why on earth is it so large? 10MB is a lot of data for what I would assume would be some polygon vertex coordinates and some texture instructions(which should be minimal given this is flat shaded).
It's because it's the ASCII version of the STL format. (horror!) A binary STL would be about quarter to half the size. And there are other open formats that would be smaller and perform better than STL.
The reason why I didn't futz around with it too much is that I'm still working out whether HNers and 3D modelers would find it useful to version control 3d printable models.
I could spend a long time optimizing transfer times of models, but it'd be a pity if no one wanted to use it in the first place.
Side question: what I'm seeing appears to be a wire frame model with flat shading of a model with very few vertices. I know nothing of the STL format. The only time I've dealt with it in the past was having an ME send me models of parts when doing circuit board design work. To get to the point, why on earth is it so large? 10MB is a lot of data for what I would assume would be some polygon vertex coordinates and some texture instructions(which should be minimal given this is flat shaded).