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It's finished! Here we have another MCRN freighter made, like the first one, from bits of old camera lenses and assorted other garbage I found whilst rummaging in my neighbour's bins. The WIP can be found here, feel free to take a look at all the gory details. cheers Monty

Hi All This is my first group build - thanks to all for putting it together :). When I came up with this idea I got nervous that perhaps it might not qualify because it wasn't a spaceship/rocket etc, then I RTFM and calmed down a bit. Anyway, this is going to be a Martian Marine Corps APC, inspired by The Expanse tv show (again, as per the Freighter build). I don't actually remember seeing an MMC APC or anything similar on the show, and I watched every single episode because I am an anorak. If there was such a thing, feel free to let me know. I wanted to do it mainly because the MMC logo is very, very cool and I wanted to put it on something, also I had an urge to build something with wheels. Not having anything to copy I was forced to improvise a good deal, all the while trying to think how such a vehicle might look, bearing in mind the relatively low gravity and thin atmosphere on Mars. This is my sketch: I did a more detailed sketch which you can see in the pics, I also put the whole thing into LibreOffice Draw which turned out to be a smart move as I changed the design quite a lot: It has six wheels rather than tracks because I have 6 wheels in my stash which my brother had knocked up for me ages ago on his 3d printer. That project never happened, but I knew I would find a use for the wheels some day. I don't know whether to add a gun turret or not. That decision can wait for a while until more of it is built and I can see if it would work or not. This build will have lights, so I bought this: I'm not sure what's going on here. Something to do with maybe Lego and a VW Camper. I don't understand why anyone would want to combine those things. Anyway, it was fairly cheap and it does what I want. This is where I've got to. I've used square section drainpipe as the starting point for the hull. Onto that I glued some layers of 5mm plastic sheet to give me the rough outline which I will fill and sand into the correct shape. I'm using more 5mm sheet to make the cabin and engine compartment which go on top, they will also need a lot of filler and a lot of sanding, which I have started as you can see. Martin Bower said that the key to scratch building is being able to carve. Personally I think the key is the ability to put up with the dreary monotony of endless sanding. Hopefully this will all come together and end up looking like something that really could bounce over the rocks of Mars (and those Martian ruins in the Cydonia region which no one wants to talk about). cheers for now Monty

Hi All Here we have the finished MCRN freighter 'Clarke' - the build can be seen here I mocked up a few money shots of the Clarke in Mars orbit (of course) and also leaving Earth orbit, and doing a fly-by of an asteroid as she heads towards Ceres base. All of the planet shots are actually NASA pics of Earth, while the asteroid is a random rock shot I found on the net, then heavily edited. Enjoy! Please feel free to comment. cheers Monty

Greetings fellow modellers Time for another ship build, this time it's a freighter, very roughly in the style (and markings) of the MCRN ships from the Expanse. This build began a while ago, it went onto the Shelf of Shame, came off again thanks to a sudden burst of mojo, and right now it's mostly done. I took a lot of pics but never got around to doing a WIP as I didn't know if anything would come of it, so perhaps now the simplest thing is to put all the pics into perhaps three posts to spread the load a little and to make it easier to digest. It began with two basic components: 1. An old and very large camera zoom lens inherited from Dad, so vintage 1970s with blurred optics and a mount that fitted nothing currently available on this planet thanks to the collapse of the Soviet Union (Dad went through a stage of buying camera gear from East Germany because it was cheap). 2. A baked bean tin because I thought it had an interesting shape. I had no idea what to do with the lens but then I thought perhaps it could be incorporated into a build of some sort. I had a vague idea that it might work as a spaceship hull, so I dismantled it, binned the glass and superglued some of the components together to create a 'hull'. The bean tin (without beans) was glued onto the front. I also raided my spares box and found a hosepipe nozzle to go on the back as an engine exhaust, and a plastic plumbing joint to go on the front.That gave me this: At this point i lost interest and the project got shelved. Not difficult to see why, Recently I wondered if I could salvage something from the whole sorry mess and after a lot of thought and googling "expanse ships" I came up with this sketch of a freighter, covered in cargo containers: And here is the very first attempt at creating the freighter. You can see that the length is just over 30cm: The grey thing on the front went in the bin and I replaced it with the lens hood and various other bits of plastic to create a sort of docking hatch. The boxes are the shipping containers and are made of 5mm plastic sheet. I don't know what sort of plastic this is. It's certainly not styrene. Superglue seems to work on it, so that's fine. Anyway, it's fairly sturdy and yet still soft enough to cut with a craft knife. I got it off Amazon and I believe that it's the stuff that architects use to create model buildings. Whatever, it's useful stuff and fairly cheap. The three bits of styrene that look like wings are going around the engine as baffles, to direct the exhaust away from the hull. Or something like that anyway. I thought that the rear needed something to make it a bit more interesting. Well, another update soon, I'm still sorting out the pics, in the meantime happy modelling all! cheers Monty

I've had a small scale Rocinante for a while, and after stumbling across printedplanes website from a thread on the forum, I found that they also do quite a few Sci-Fi models, amongst which is the Canterbury, that unlucky ship that kicked off the Expanse series by getting nuked. There were 2 options of sizes, one at 100mm the other at 150mm, and on the basis of go big or go home, I selected the larger of the two. The lead time was quite substantial after order, but with 3D printing that's fairly likely, as anything 3D printed takes an age to get done. This process is the stereoscopic laser in a bit vat of resin goop, the name for which I really can't remember right now, but it seems to give a pretty good result. When it arrived it was in 3 pieces, main ice storage area, fuel tanks, and engine pods. It was also goppin'! What do I mean? It was slimy and sticky, with white goop oozing out of it in places. I was bit concerned until I read their FAQ and found that this is pretty normal, as the models are hollow printed, and some of the resin gets trapped inside the voids. There are some vent holes in the model, but it's difficult to get it all out, so I left the parts tipped up to allow the stuff to pool in the bottom, then blew as much of it out as I could using canned air (butane). Then I cleaned all the parts in a bath of IPA in my ultrasonic cleaner, which got things nice & clean, although the occasional little blob of goo would still find its way out. I ended up leaving them to drain naturally by propping them up again, with the occasional squirt of air evacuating the accumulated goop from time to time. A couple of weeks later and the parts are nice & clean, and the resin has hardened up too, being much more rigid, as I found out when I dropped the engine pods by mistake. I glued the broken pod and its supports back on and have now finally gotten round to priming it along with the Roci. I wish the ice storage area had been printed in top & bottom halves really, as painting inside that area is going to be difficult, and I still haven't ruled out making a few cuts somewhere to facilitate this, but I'm pondering it long and hard before I make any final decision. The surface is well detailed, and there's very little evidence of the layers to be seen, but there are some attachment points for the support structure that need sanding back flush. This is what the first primer layer is all about really, to check for imperfections. The most obvious layer pattern is visible on the outsides of the baffles on the engines, but as these are flat surfaces, they shouldn't be too hard to clean up. I'll be working on getting things ship-shape in short sessions, and once I've got it suitable for painting, I'll give it a coat of grey and then start trying to replicate the surface colouring to match the few pics of the Cant that I can find online. I'm trying to resist the urge to get the printedplanes Roci in 300mm, as the wee one I have from Shapeways is a bit small, although it looks like it scales out somewhere near the same scale as the Cant, although they're never seen together on screen. Can't wait for season 4 next year