Took some better-quality (tripod) photos of the Star Destroyer model. Actually mostly in focus now, with different exposure levels. Should have a black background, but whatryagonnado.
May 132018
May 132018
Some weeks back I posted photos of a preliminary experiment using “black light” paint to illuminate starship models. Included was a small Bandai Star Destroyer model, which had windows on the left side of the ship and the engines painted and lit up with UV to demonstrate that it could make a convincing lighting system. After taking the photos I tried to put the model back on its shelf, fumbled, and broke one of the “shield generators” off of the bridge. Whoops. But that presented an opportunity to try something new… modeling the ship as being under attack and exploding.
The photos kinda stink, largely due to being shot under dismal lighting conditions (what do you want… it’s 4 AM) and the camera being handheld. So everything is blurry. Even so, I think it turned out pretty well. This would certainly be a hell of a chore to light up using LEDs.
May 102018
The Convair VL-3A was a 1966 concept for a space station logistics spacecraft. It was a sleek, flat-bottomed lifting body featuring a twin tail and flip-out wings that would deploy shortly before landing to reduce the landing speed. It would be fitted with flip-out turbofan engines for range extension, self-ferry and control during landing. General Dynamics released sizable “educational” cards with information and photos of models of the spaceplane showing how the wings would deploy from within the lower fuselage.
I have uploaded righ-rez scans of both sides of this poster-sized card to the 2018-05 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for APR Patrons at the $4 level and up.
I also wrote about and illustrated the VL-3A in US Spacecraft Projects #2, showing the general arrangement of the design along with the disposable propulsion stage and the launch configuration atop the Titan III.
USSP #02 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $6:
If you are interested in thes VL-3A model images and a great many other “extras” and monthly aerospace history rewards, please sign up for the APR Patreon. What else are you going to spend $4 a month on?
Apr 252018
A question has popped up from time to time about that Orville model I’m working on for Fantastic Plastic: can it be lit internally? It’s a fair question since the Orville is a brightly lit ship. But with those relatively thin and long loops, making a resin kit hollow seemed like a nightmare, especially since it would have to be cast in very difficult transparent resin. But as the photos show, an alternate approach is possible. This is the result of a few minutes tinkering, a half-assed effort with a spare 3D printed engine loop and one of those really nice but really small Bandai Star Destroyer models.
Precisely zero points for guessing the system used, because, c’mon, it’s pretty obvious. But if you’re thinking “Photoshop,” no, that’s not it… this is the real lighting, simple flash-less camera phone photos, no trickery.
Apr 102018
I’ve never gotten into the Gerry Anderson puppet shows (probably just weren’t shown in my area when I was a kid), but I do know that a lot of people are quite fond of them. And I do *kinda* get it… in the era before computer graphics made filling the screen with spaceships of wildly varying designs easy and cheap, Andersons shows were the only ones that featured a whole bunch of different designs. Other shows like Star trek you had pretty much just the one ship, and that was mostly stock footage used over and over. And it seems to me that the most popular of the Anderson ships would be either the Eagle from “Space: 1999” or the Thunderbird 2 from “Thunderbirds Are Go.” And if you want a bignormous T2, well, crack open your bank account, here it comes.
Thunderbird 2 | 1:144 Scale
This is a model kit, but it’s not one you get all at once.Instead it’s a subscription kit, paid for and shipped a bit at a time. There are two options available, 12 month and 24 month; it’s a little unclear, but I *assume* that with the 12 month option each month you get twice as much stuff as you’d get per month in the 24 month option. And in the end, you get this:
The thing is freakin’ GIGANTIC:
And it’s spendy as heck. For the 12-month option, it’s £79.99 per month, or £959.88 total. .. about $1,400 at current exchange rates.
Umm.
Seems like a slightly more affordable option would be this 1/350 scale conventional model kit, a steal at forty bucks:
But hey. If’n ya want a gigantic Thunderbird 2, let it never be said I didn’t point one out to you.
Apr 092018
This hasn’t been my top priority of late, but it’s cruising along. Final product will include landing gear and will be 1/144 scale.
Apr 082018
I estimate I’m about halfway through the process of cleaning up the 3D printed parts. Still visible here and there are the stepped layers that result from the printing process, steps that are being laboriously cleaned away. The parts are just taped together here. It’s shown next to a Diamond Select TOS Enterprise. They aren’t the same scale, but they are pretty close to the same size.
Apr 052018
The 3D printed parts for the 1/1400 scale Mid Range Cruiser arrived yesterday. If you’ve ever dealt with 3D printed stuff you know that before they are prepped they kinda look… blurry. That was the case here. But today I went after the forward hull top and bottom shells with sandpaper and mineral spirits and… SHAZAM! This is looking like it’ll be a damn fine model. The fine details that I threw into the model Just Because, knowing that they wouldn’t get reproduced… they’re there. Each individual window is recessed and visible. Neato.
It will take a little while to get things photo-worthy. There’s cleanup, some contouring needing finishing, some other bits and pieces. I’ll post some photos in a day or three. The model is not gigantic, but it is of a decent size… it’ll look great on a desk, shelf, mantle or zooming around in your hand while you go “pew pew pew.” I don’t judge. You can reserve a kit HERE.
In lieu of a photos, here’s a set of orthogonal diagrams made from the CAD model. The diagram has been cleaned up substantially since this small image of it was taken. I plan on doing something meaningful with the diagram; seems like a first step would be to include a one-page layout in the kit instructions with tech data and callout, a tech manual sort of thing.
HERE is the post where I described how I determined the scale of the ship. If you disagree… well, it’s a little late now, ain’t it.
Mar 312018
A month and a half ago, Hasbro said “if enough people – 5000 – sign on to our crowdfunding effort, we’ll make a ginormous high-end ‘Jabba’s Sail Barge’ toy for $500 a pop.” It seemed like a bit of a long shot.
They’ve exceeded that number, and have announced that they’re going ahead.
They are currently sitting at 5687 funders out of 5000, each at $499.99 plus tax. It’s not clear that Hasbro will actually manufacture this beyond the requirements of the crowdfunders, so if you want one, you only have a few days left (they stop taking funders on April 3).
With luck this will give rise to a proper Falcon. I shudder to guess what *that* would cost…
Mar 252018
The video below explains why the original starship Enterprise design looks great, using a few bits of art-math.
To my eye, the TOS Enterprise is the pinnacle of sci-fi spectacle. No other spaceship design comes close in terms of just being plain beautiful… sure the XD-1 has sorta-realism going for it, the Millenium Falcon and the Star Destroyer have their charms, the Gunstar and Starfury are utter badassery. But the NCC-1701? Just gorgeous.
What’s sad is that with such a fantastic basis, Star Trek ship design has kinda cratered. The refit Enterprise from the movies? A worthy successor to be sure, and a number of the other movie-era ships are up there: the Grissom is good, the Excelsior and Reliant are awesome. And even though the actual *show* is something I’ve completely lost interest in, the NCC-1701D from TNG has grown on me, as hav a number of other TNG/DS9/Voy ships. But the 1701E from the movies? Meh. The Enterprise was always *elegant,* be it 1701, 1701A or 1701D, it was just a slick design. But the 1701E started the trend of making Trek ships… well, not quite sure what the word I’m looking for is, so I’ll go with “shardy.” The NX-01 from “Enterprise” left me cold, which, actually, was kinda fine since it was supposed to be a technology prototype built by people who didn’t really know what they were doing yet. The Enterprise from the nuTrek movies? Bleah. And the “Discovery” ships took “shardy” to whole new levels of excess. The brief glimpse of the TOS 1701 from the last scene of the season finale of “Discovery” (plastered all over youtube) just looks sucko. It’s a mishmash of TOS and movie era with a whole lot of needless excess CGI’ed onto it.
The “Discovery” take on the 1701:
Bleah. Details and greeblies just for the sake of tacking them on.
The Mirror Universe episode of “Enterprise” included a faithful CGI 1701-type ship. That, along with a number of fan-created CG Enterprises, show that the design *still* works just fine, no need for a bunch of Just Cuz design changes or revisions to jazz the thing up.
With the rapid advance in CGI, there’s no good *technical* reason (though some powerful legal reasons – the rights are all over the place) why a movie or series couldn’t feature not just *a* 1701-type ship, but *the* TOS-era Enterprise, complete with Tarkinized 60’s-era Kirk and Spock & Co. I suppose someone could even write some bloated crossover event flick where the nuTrek Enterprise goes through a spatial anomaly into a parallel reality, runs into the Discovery, they start comparing notes, rejigger the anomaly to send the nuEnterprise home and whoopsie, end up bumping up against the *real* Enterprise. Do it right, and it might even redeem Discovery and nuTrek. If nothing else, it’d be worth the price of admission to see the Karl Urban and Deforrest Kelly McCoys making life hell for the two Spocks, and the Chris Pine Kirk putting the moves on the Grace Lee Whitney Yeoman Rand. Maybe use *that* as the excuse for why she left the show: she left her Enterprise to be with PineKirk. And there’s even a good way to explain why TOS didn’t suddenly get a bump up in technology levels: they wanted to adopt the nuTrek technologies, like interstellar transporters, but the cost would have been prohibitive. The new technologies would have introduced lens flares all over, and no sane civilization wanted to put up with that.