You might have noticed a slight dropoff on rants & aerospace of late. Why? I’ve been deeply involved in creating this:
It’s been something of a challenge (though not as much as the Hammerhead… not yet, at any rate), but it appears to be coming along magnificently. A few more major structures to add (cockpits, underside bumps, landing gear). and then a whole lot of details (guns, turrets, weapons pods, vents, grills, surface details, etc).
Am I getting paid enough for this? Oh, hell no.
UPDATE:
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UPDATE:
Todays version doesn;t look greatly different from yesterdays… but it’s loaded with lots of minor-seeming yet important refinements.
Cockpits:
Note that the cockpits are being modeled so that they *could* be cast in clear resin or vac-formed. No cockpit details are planned at this time, but the option is left open for the dedicated scratchbuilder.
Cockpit in relation to the main body. Holes were punched into the main body to accomodate the cockpits. Again no internal details are planned, but it’s left open for the future.
The parts breakdown for the main fuselage.
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UPDATE: took the weekend off from this; my eyes were starting to cross. Here’s the latest iteration… note the “wingtip” weapons turrets/mounts/whatever.
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UPDATE: Now with all the parts. Of course, some of the parts are represented solely by little gray blocks, but it gives an impression of how complexicated this model will be.
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UPDATE: Pecking away at the last bits…
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UPDATE: Here, essentially, are all the parts.
17 Responses to “What I’ve Been Up To”
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What is that thing? Is it the Dragon from that POS movie Avatar?
yes that is it
and this is made with Autocad
hardwork ? yes it is
Take Holger Logemann
he work with Autocad several year on Spaceships
from German SF serie Perry Rhodan (small 60 meter ø not 2500 meter ø)
http://www.korvettenprojekt.de/index.html
sorry in german, but just look the Reactorsblok
http://www.korvettenprojekt.de/WIP200907/20090707001hl.png
http://www.korvettenprojekt.de/WIP200907/20090707002hl.png
Personally, I thought Avatar was a good movie. I forgot,were these the
bomber aircraft?
Well, the special effects were impressive. But you could tell Avatar was written by a teenage boy. Unfortunately it was the same person who also directed.
The movie shop-vac’d, but the vehicles were intriguing. My beef was that, with complete air superiority, the US forces spent lots and lots of time HOVERING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AIR rather than employing any kind of useful tactics that played to our strengths vs. the Viet– er sorry, blue people. Plus which, why not just tunnel under the goddam tree and mine from beneath if the freaking stuff was worth $20M/kilo?
The first thing I thought of when I saw this was that it reminded me of the ‘Orca Transport” unit from the second Command & Conquer game.
…
In regards to Avatar:
Avatar 2: Nuke It From Orbit, It’s The Only Way To Be Sure.
I predict it will be a fifteen minute short film.
> the US forces spent lots and lots of time HOVERING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AIR
The thing I didn’t get:
1) The decision is made to blow the crap out of the Magic USB-Port Network Tree (fine, whatever)
2) The spaceplane seems to be the only vehicle with the paylaod capacity to carry & drop the big-ass IED (fine whatever)
3) So they take a vehicle capable of hypersonic flight and *hover* the damned thing over the target (!)
3) at an altitude of a few hundred feet (!!)
4) with a boatload of *ground* *forces* (what, to take out the blue monkey’s anit-aircraft guns?)
Now, I’ve seen films & vids of C-130’s dropping Daisy Cutters. They might not be flying hypersonically, but they are flying as fast as their little turboprops can drag ’em.
Apart from the dragon things, the blue monkeys have *no* defence against aircraft more than a few dozen feet off the ground (I don’t care if you’re nine feet tall, your longbow ain’t gonna puncture windscreens designed to withstand 20mm cannonfire). The flying critters would not be able to put up a meaningful defense against an aircraft flying at 15,000 feet and 500 knots. And yeah, okay, fine, the humans might not have ready-made precision guidance for a bomb that big. But the humans are supposed to have on-site rapid assemblers capable of building anything in the databanks. Surely *somebody* could cobble together a simple bomb shape with a laser seeker of a GPS guidance system> How friggen hard could it be? Hell, take one of their *loyal* Avatars and have him Slim Pickens his ass right on down to the target.
> and this is made with Autocad
Actually, no, it’s being made with “Rhino.” AutoCAD would just sit there and give me a stupid glaze-eyed stare if I tried to make it produce the sort of compound organic curves this thing is loaded with.
no autocad ? upps
dude,that was really,really good.
Why does it seem to have both lift jets and lift fans? I can see one or the other, but not both.
I thought the whole sticking their ponytail into other thing’s ponytails was downright bizarre.
I kept waiting for two of the Na’vi to stick their ponytails together, as I figured that’s probably how they screwed or something.
You aren’t going to believe this, from the Wikipedia article on the Na’vi:
‘According to Cameron, the appearance of the Na’vi character Neytiri had some specific inspirations and requirements: she was inspired by Raquel Welch’s character in Fantastic Voyage and by Vampirella, noting in the latter’s case, “the fact [Vampirella] didn’t exist didn’t bother me because we have these quintessential female images in our mind, and in the case of the male mind, they’re grossly distorted. When you see something that reflects your id, it works for you…. Right from the beginning I said, ‘She’s got to have tits,’ even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na’vi, aren’t placental mammals. ‘
Yes, kbob42 is right; this movie was indeed written by a teenage boy. 😀
Having seen Fantastic Voyage in the theater when I was 9, I can assure you all that the Blue Chick has nothing whatsofuckingever to do with Raquel Welch. And that ain’t no shit.
Oh and back on topic, while the CGI money all went to the Blue People, I have to say that the battle scenes with the Two-Legged Stupid Fighting Machine were about one step above Ray Harryhausen IMO.
Well, yeah. It is Raquel Welch!
Ah yes, the fighting machine with the non-spear-proof front window on it. 🙂
I think it was supposed to move around in a jerky manner so you would know it’s mechanical; they did that with the Cylon toasters in the new Galactica also, even though they were done via people in motion capture suits for the CGI input. They said that if you didn’t make them look a bit jerky, they didn’t look mechanical.
The Na’vi girl didn’t remind me of Raquel Welch at all, but rather something Will Riker would try to screw within hours of meeting it – in a nifty inversion of all those male aliens trying to screw Earth women in the 1950’s.
Raquel Welch still looks like a million bucks BTW:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGeRFvMLjvQ
Not bad for a 69-year-old, huh?
… and she’s currently separated from her fourth husband.
COUGAR ALERT! COUGAR ALERT! 😉
I’ve been trying to make sense of the lift fans/vertical jets.
At least the front ones look like some sort of turboprops where the gearing drives the fan and the exhaust from the engine can either flow down the duct atop the ship to push it forward, or be shot out the bottom to add to the vertical lift; this makes sense, as it’s pretty close to the concept of the Convair Pogo’s system where the turbine’s exhaust went out the tail to add to the thrust of the nose contra-props.
But what about the back fans? They also have associated vertical exhaust nozzles, but where are the air intakes for their turbine engines?
> But what about the back fans?
Because shut up, that’s why.
Now that I look at it closer, the front engines seem to have two sets of intakes associated with them; a bigger outside one and a smaller one inside of it – maybe one is for forward propulsion and the other for the lift fan drive engine?