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Pegasus 1/350 Von Braun Moon Lander


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This is the Pegasus Hobbies 1/350 Moon Lander as conceived by Wernher von Braun in the early '50s. It's a companion of sorts to my adaptation of Lindberg's old Moon Ship kit, to bring it closer to Von Braun's "round the moon" design from the same period. You can see that kit here:

The lander was a monstrous object, 49 metres high, weighing 4000 tonnes, with a crew capacity of 25. The spherical crew compartment was at the top of the structure, so the crew needed a crane to lower them to the surface. Astronautix has the full specifications here: http://www.astronautix.com/v/vonbraunlunarlander.html

 

The box art shows the kit configuration, which is unrealistic in terms of the original mission design. The large spherical external tanks were used for departure from earth orbit and then discarded. During trans-lunar injection the landing gear was designed to be stowed out of the blast from the 30 rocket engines - folded upwards in the case of the four outer legs, or telescoped in the case of the centre leg. The "real" landing configuration was portrayed in Bonestell's cover art for Collier's in 1952.

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I elected to portray the spacecraft shortly after landing, so needed to remove the kit's external tanks and apply a bit of scratch building to tidy up the "stumps" of the support structure. I also used some of ParaGrafix's photoetch details, a few of Tamiya's 1/350 crew figures modified to look like astronauts, and some decals saved from various old projects. I deviated from the kit's painting instructions, which render the fuel and oxidizer tanks in various shades of blue, red and yellow - this scheme seems to have been copied from Bonestell's paintings for Collier's, which in turn seems to originate from a set of colour-coded diagrams in the same article. So I opted from some plain white tanks instead.

 

Quite a complicated kit to assemble, as you can see, but the parts fit together well.

 

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The kit's outer engines can be vectored in one plane, as in the original spacecraft design:

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I see I haven't quite got the crane cable for the crew lift to hang straight yet. Sigh.

Edited by Hamiltonian
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11 hours ago, Hamiltonian said:

I see I haven't quite got the crane cable for the crew lift to hang straight yet. Sigh.

1/6th gravity may account for that.

A lovely build of what would (I imagine) have been a monster to 'fly' and land.

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

smashing work and great to see this kit assembled (a first for me) - I do love the Pagasus space / sci-fi range - they produce some brilliant subjects as cleverly thought out kits - very nice work there, I love the figures which help add scale

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21 hours ago, Gimme Shelter said:

smashing work and great to see this kit assembled (a first for me) - I do love the Pagasus space / sci-fi range - they produce some brilliant subjects as cleverly thought out kits - very nice work there, I love the figures which help add scale

Thanks. It's a nice kit to assemble, but fairly easy to put the wrong rod in the wrong place if you don't stay alert and look at the instruction sheet with a magnifying glass! I was lucky that 1/350 seems to be a common scale for model ships, so I was able to find a little packet of 1/350 crew figures to modify.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Really nice build and color scheme. Ive wanted to do one of these in a natural metal finish for a while, but think your 'nasa' scheme works really well.

After seeing the size comparisons you threw up, i took a quick look to see if i could find any Apollo Lunar Landers at 1/350 scale.........unfortunatley not as far as i can tell (although you can get the whole Saturn V stack at this scale)

However, i did stumble across this - Shapeways 1/350 Von Braun Round The Moon Ship , which could be quite a nice companion to your lander, and under £30 is pretty good value for a 3d printed model! (although quite a bit smaller than the lander i think)

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4 hours ago, Kushan_Farsight said:

Really nice build and color scheme. Ive wanted to do one of these in a natural metal finish for a while, but think your 'nasa' scheme works really well.

After seeing the size comparisons you threw up, i took a quick look to see if i could find any Apollo Lunar Landers at 1/350 scale.........unfortunatley not as far as i can tell (although you can get the whole Saturn V stack at this scale)

However, i did stumble across this - Shapeways 1/350 Von Braun Round The Moon Ship , which could be quite a nice companion to your lander, and under £30 is pretty good value for a 3d printed model! (although quite a bit smaller than the lander i think)

Thanks for finding that. I'm not sure how easy it would be to paint!

(The link also revealed the existence of the Spaceship Handbook to me, which looks extremely attractive but nose-bleedingly expensive.)

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41 minutes ago, Hamiltonian said:

(The link also revealed the existence of the Spaceship Handbook to me, which looks extremely attractive but nose-bleedingly expensive.)

Well now you've gone and done it - i know also know of the existence of it but that is a little too pricey for me!! Cheapest i could find was £85, shipped from USA, so will have to go on the 'keep a look out for' list for the time being! ~

Love these kind of books, i have a Frontiers Of Space book by Phillip Bono, and its full of lovely color illustrations of near and future space craft of the 60's, definitely some inspiration for a kit-bash or 2! - (and much more price friendly, i think used copies are less than £2 on Amazon) 

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remembering your build, I saw this kit on the shelves at last weekend Nationals in Telford and was tempted to buy one - and then I found the Pegasus WoTW Tripod kit and opted for that instead - I've still had to come back for a second viewing of your though and love it just as much 2nd time around

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9 hours ago, Gimme Shelter said:

remembering your build, I saw this kit on the shelves at last weekend Nationals in Telford and was tempted to buy one - and then I found the Pegasus WoTW Tripod kit and opted for that instead - I've still had to come back for a second viewing of your though and love it just as much 2nd time around

Thanks again for the kind words!

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  • 3 weeks later...

I always liked the look of this ship.

 

I built the Glencoe and Lindberg issues of the original back when, but the Pegasus kit looks quite a bit better IMO.

Your build looks to have done it justice I think. :thumbsup:

 

 

(The Spaceship Handbook is an excellent source of dimensions and details for this kind of thing.

I picked up a copy when it first came out and it has been very inspiring.)

 

 

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