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Moebius 1/144 Discovery spacecraft from 2001


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Excellent work!  The pod bay test bench is very well done.  I struggled so much with the Paragrafix part - it was not an easy thing, so very small and delicate.  You have done wonders with these parts.  Looking forward to more.......

Bill

Edited by Jeddahbill
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On 11/11/2022 at 4:04 AM, Jeddahbill said:

Excellent work!  The pod bay test bench is very well done.  I struggled so much with the Paragrafix part - it was not an easy thing, so very small and delicate.  You have done wonders with these parts.  Looking forward to more.......

Bill

Thanks. Talking of fiddly bits ... I've been making progress with the little hollow Falconware pod I'm planning on lighting. It's printed in translucent plastic, so I brush-painted the interior with about four coats of Tamiya white primer, followed by a couple of coats of flat black, followed by a couple of coats of white, and seem to have got a decent level of light-proofing. There are channels that will take 0.75mm fibreoptics for the headlights, and I drilled an additional hole for a 0.25mm HAL eye. These are difficult to keep clear of paint, but I found that a little interdental brush of the kind I use in cleaning my airbrush was just the right size for the headlight channels, and I twisted my fine drill bit through the HAL channel intermittently to keep it clear.

The arms have their own mounting channels, confusingly also 0.75mm wide and extending into the interior! There's a definite potential for having the arms and headlights misplaced.

 

I've now marked up the exterior, with a mixture of hand-painting and tiny custom decals I printed to reproduce some of the more obvious markings. I also did a tiny bit of weathering with LifeColor Smoke, to bring out some of the excellent detail on the Falconware pod. Here's the finished article, poised on a UK penny for scale.

 

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It looks a bit scrappy at this level of enlargement, but I think works OK at a normal viewing distance.

 

I'll get an LED inside it next, and then start sliding in the fibreoptics. The arms are very fine and look potentially fragile, so they'll go on very late in the build.

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  • 2 weeks later...

More progress with the pod bay and my pod lights.

podbayoverview1.jpg

 

I got lights behind the computer screens and the red door light of the lab bay. Still to be done is to add the downlight above the ladder, which I'll do along with the main ceiling lights.

lab1.jpg

Looks a wee bit grubby in this photograph--I rather overdid my efforts to bring out the seams in the padding around the window and door, but I've since toned it down slightly.

 

The rear wall was just a matter of decalling and painting, using reference stills.

podbayref3.jpg

 

More problematic is the port-side wall, which contains the iconic illuminated tunnel you can see to the right of Bowman, above. The Green Strawberry kit provides this as a couple of solid hunks of resin, and some nice photoetch and decals to produce the interior appearance---but no way of producing the lighting effect.

tunnel1.jpg

 

I decided to replace the octagonal tunnel parts with thin folded styrene sheet, so I could rig a light box around the tunnel.

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With all the photoetch in place, and the tunnel folded into its final configuration, I discovered I had light coming through between some of the photoetch strips, which hadn't perfectly closed up edge to edge. So I stuck a light temporarily inside the tunnel, so I could see where light was coming through inappropriately, and painted those spots black on the outside. Like this:

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You can see I used a cuff of the original resin tunnel, both as a former for the styrene and to block light for the last few millimetres, beyond the end of the photoetch strips.

I used warm white LEDs, to reproduce the contrast in white point between the pod bay lighting and the tunnel visible in my reference still, above. Here's the result:

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There's supposed to be a little blue light in the control panel on the wall. I drilled this out and slipped in a bit of fibreoptic to borrow light from my tunnel, but the result wasn't bright enough. I was going to leave it alone, but a bit later I had to carve a corner off the tunnel light box to get it to fit snugly inside the hull, and I took the opportunity to add a small light box with a bright white LED inside my warm white light box!

 

Back at the pod: once I had a small LED inside, I started melting 0.75mm fibreoptic to form the headlights.

podlights1.jpg

I held the end of the fibreoptic strand close to a heated soldering iron, and watched the end blob out, trying to catch four examples all at the same size. Here they are in place on the pod, which is now glued to its pad with the wires run through:

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There's also a red "HAL eye" in the centre, which has blown to pink in this photo, unfortunately.

At this point I confess that this is my second attempt to light a pod. During my first attempt I managed to get a large amount of Tamiya transparent red inside the pod while trying to colour the HAL eye, which then ran out through the other fibreoptic ports and wrecked the outside paint and decal work. So since my previous post I've stripped this thing back to the primer, repainted and redecalled. I've edited my previous post to show the current version of the pod.

 

Next I wanted to check that my extended pod pad could actually line up nicely and convincingly with the kit pod bay door and the Green Strawberry interior. First I had to do a bit of surgery on the central pod bay door, to get the size of the opening correct. Annoyingly, Moebius have moulded the outer ring of the door frame as if it were part of the door---so after some scribing, drilling, chiselling and sanding, I managed to separate the ring from the door

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I got that glued in place and then slid the Green Strawberry interior into the lower half of the hull.

podbayoverview2.jpg

It takes up a lot of space! After my first trial fit decided I needed to trim a millimetre or so off the tunnel light box, because the thing was sitting a little proud at that side.

 

Then I was able to check the run of my pod pad supports, decide on a length, and check the electrical connection.

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I'll follow up with another post later, since there seems to be something flaky with image insertion at present.

 

 

 

 

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So.

There then ensued some high-risk wire-stripping and soldering on the underside of the Green Strawberry pad.

podlights3.jpg

 

And then I could get the extended pod pad into position:

 

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And light it:

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One of my headlights (lower left of image) isn't quite bedded home, I see---I'll give it a shove.

 

The Green Strawberry kit includes some nice little photoetch parts to seal off the underside of the pod pad, but I could see a short circuit waiting to happen there, so I copied the photoetch in styrene.

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The pod arms will go on in due course, but I want to fiddle with the support struts a bit to see if I can make mounting and demounting less of a fiddle, and I know I'll just break the pod arms while my attention is elsewhere, so they're staying in their little plastic pot for now.

 

Next up, I need to install all the ceiling lights. The pod bay roof comes up to the bottom edge of the upper hemisphere of the dome, and there's not much clearance above that before we get to the Paragrafix cockpit and its light boxes.

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More dry fitting and trimming lies ahead.

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Very much enjoyed this update!  Excellent combination of photos with descriptive narrative make it easy to follow your build.  The tunnel lighting is especially well done and looks superb.  Impressive work with the resin pod bay parts, looks great and really captures the complexity of the pod bay.

 

Regards,

Bill

 

 

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On 11/26/2022 at 5:50 PM, Jeddahbill said:

Very much enjoyed this update!  Excellent combination of photos with descriptive narrative make it easy to follow your build.  The tunnel lighting is especially well done and looks superb.  Impressive work with the resin pod bay parts, looks great and really captures the complexity of the pod bay.

Glad you enjoyed it, and thanks for the kind words.

My first experience with Green Strawberry, and I found the various bits fitted together very well, and also fitted into the kit part quite neatly.

The decals were a nightmare, however. I don't know if I just got a bad batch---some of them were excellent, but some barely seemed to be decals at all. The markings for the lab area were particularly bad, and just wouldn't come off the backing, despite prolonged soaking. I eventually lifted the TV screen decal with the back edge of a scalpel blade, grabbed the corner with tweezers, and peeled it forcibly, lifting paper fibres as it came off. It's now essentially glued in position with varnish. Oh. And the decal numbers on the instruction sheet and the decal sheet don't match, in some instances, though that's fairly easily spotted and resolved.

 

There are also some issues with proportions, but that's not Green Strawberry's fault. The three pod bay doors in the movie set seem to have been set in a less curved wall than the three pod bay doors in the Discovery model, so there's no way to resolve the mismatch between exterior and interior.

 

Apart from the surgery on the lighted corridor, I've made one other mod to what came with Green Strawberry. The spacesuit racks are provided as photoetch pieces that locate in shallow dimples in the floor and ceiling. I thought they'd be a bit of a pain to position and make secure, so I've drilled through the floor and ceiling and racked the spacesuits on fine brass rod instead. I'm not entirely sure yet how I'll get them positioned, but once they are positioned, they'll be very easy to make secure.

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I've completed the other two pods and the suit rack. The suit rack contains the blue suit and the yellow helmet, as it looked when Dave Bowman first went outside. (Goodness knows why Poole is up in the cockpit with his suit on but with his helmet racked in the pod bay - I suppose it sets the scene for Bowman forgetting his helmet later.)

fullpodbay.jpg

 

And here are a few images showing off the lighting.

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(The eagle-eyed will note that I've done the decal and paint detail on only one side of each of the stowed pods. I was feeling lazy and it was getting late. Sorry about that.)

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1 hour ago, Jeddahbill said:

Looks great so far!  Do you plan to have just the one pod bay door open?

Yes, once I'd established that I could mount and unmount the extended pod easily and with a secure electrical connection for its lights, I committed to having just the centre door open---closed off the other two on the hull, and placed the two parked pods. So it's going to be set up to look like Bowman's first excursion outside, before things began to go pear-shaped with HAL.

You can see the whole interior through the centre door, with the extended pod unmounted, barring some areas at the sides blocked by the pods. These are pretty uninteresting in general, though I think it'll be impossible to see the solitary blue light I expended time and effort illuminating. The computer screens in the lab area will gleam beyond the arms of the starboard pod, and my "hero corridor" is easily visible.

This also gives me the option to pump a little more light into the pod bay if I need to. I'm finding it difficult to get good illumination through the relatively small overhead panels in the thick resin ceiling. So I'm thinking I can supplement the illumination, if necessary, with a couple of small LEDs tucked out of sight on either side of the centre door frame. I can rig them temporarily and see how it looks---I don't want to wash out all the other lights in there!

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30 minutes ago, Carts said:

Incredibly impressive skills on display here 👍

Thanks. You're kind. I'll soon be out of my comfort zone, though---I'm slightly dreading getting to the end of all this detailed fiddling, when I'm going to have to apply a uniform blending coat to the whole exterior. I have a record of failure with that sort of thing, and it would be a shame to mess this one up at the very last hurdle.

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I've just finished balancing out the lighting in the pod bay.

The resin ceiling of the pod bay is thick, so the overhead lights are problematic. I suppose I could have spent a lot of time creating neatly fitting boxes that placed the diffusers of the eight overhead lights level with the ceiling, but I thought I'd probably end up with some noticeable seams and irregularities, so I placed my lightboxes on the resin "roof", instead. Because the openings are quite small, this means that the amount of light I can get through the ceiling is relatively small, and the deep recess converts what does get through into a downlight. So I'd anticipated that the overhead lights wouldn't, on their own, produce a pod bay that was brightly enough lit.

And so it proved to be:

podbaylit1.jpg

Kind of gloomy in there, particularly towards the back wall.

 

My solution was to position a couple of LEDs in concealed locations around the open pod bay door, to push some light back into the pod bay:

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I suspected these would be completely overwhelming without being toned down a bit, and so it proved to be:

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It all looked a bit thermonuclear, with bright patches on the ceiling and on the flanking pods, and the various little interior lights almost completely overwhelmed.

 

A bit of trial and error ensued, adding baffles and diffusers, and eventually I got the result I want:

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The test bench and other lights are not overwhelmed, and the pods are visibly reflecting the overheads rather than my extra lights. There are a couple of extraneous shadows, notably behind the suit rack poles, which give away the fact that there are additional lights, but I don't think they're intrusive given the multiple visible light sources on display.

 

So I'll have a quick check for random debris and paint damage inside the bay, and then close down the ceiling and finish off soldering the wiring, after which I can put away the soldering iron and plug in the airbrush compressor again.

 

Then I'll have to say au revoir to the pod bay for a while --- I have a disc of styrene cut to size with which I'm going to mask off the open door, temporarily securing it in place with a good dose of Krystal Klear glue all around the edges.

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Finally time to mate the upper and lower halves of the command sphere, trying not to nip any of the wiring.

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And all stowed away neatly:

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Several layers of black primer in the interior, you'll see. There are some residual light leaks from awkward spots around the pod bay, but nothing manages to seep through the sphere. My main concern was the seam between upper and lower halves, so I spent a fair bit of time sealing the curved front edge of the resin pod-bay ceiling against the rim of the lower sphere half, where light would otherwise have leaked from the pod bay immediately next to the seam.

 

Then before I masked off the pod bay, I did a test of the whole wiring run from the batteries in the engine compartment, through the steel spine, to a connector block glued inside the rear of the command sphere, to the sphere itself and on to the extended pod.

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It's a bit bonkers, but it seems to work.

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19 hours ago, Jeddahbill said:

The pod bay lighting looks fantastic.  Clearly a great deal of work into this part of the build - your efforts show well.   Curious to see what you take on next with this wonderful build.

Thanks. I'll now tidy up the command sphere and give it a base coat of Tamiya German Grey, then start masking panels for progressively lighter coats.

Also a bit of drudgery involved in assembling all those cargo pods for the spine of the spacecraft.

I'll report back after that.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Lots of Aztek Dummy panel masks and successive layers of paint, and I have the panelling preshaded on the command sphere:

commandpreshade1.jpg

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By my reckoning 358 parts had to be built into 71 subassemblies for the cargo pods:

cargomodules1.jpg

(No, we didn't eat six boxes of Ferrero Rocher chocolates over Christmas---but they are handy little containers for this sort of thing.)

 

Each module has a different array of pods, so I partially assembled them (leaving some pods unattached made painting and preshading easier) and kept them in numbered pots:

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Then some Aztek Dummy masks to produce a bit of surface mottling, and a dark wash for the panelling, and final assembly:

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Here they are with their labels on, next to my annotated instruction sheet.

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Not sure if I'll put the blending coat on individually, or mount them on the steel spine and do them all in a oner. When I stuck the labels on I was leaning towards the latter, but it might be easier to fit them in the spray booth if I do them individually.

 

Now I need to experiment a bit with mixing up my off-white blending coat in a reproducible way, and do a bit of practice on some scrap styrene sheet before I commit to the model itself.

 

Oh, and I discovered I was missing a part---the base of the dish assembly was simply absent from its sprue, which I hadn't noticed until now. Moebius are sending me a replacement (at the usual ridiculous postage cost from the USA), but at least I can get on with painting and assembling everything else in the meantime.

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I don't normally stop in on the sci-fi section of the forum but glad I did today, I think what your doing here is very impressive and inspiring, also means I'm berating my lack of courage to try lighting one of my current projects, 

 

Look forward to seeing the rest of this coke into fruition 

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12 hours ago, S-boat 55 said:

I don't normally stop in on the sci-fi section of the forum but glad I did today, I think what your doing here is very impressive and inspiring, also means I'm berating my lack of courage to try lighting one of my current projects,

Thanks for the kind words. It's by far the most complicated lighting project I've ever undertaken, certainly, because of the sheer number of different light sources, and the need to produce, at the end of the day, a couple of convincingly illuminated rooms. That's a long way from anything I've done before.

But the individual tasks involved are all straightforward. I'd certainly encourage you to give it a go. I built confidence by starting with a cheap kit that I wasn't emotionally invested in---if it had all gone horribly wrong I'd have been able to cheerfully put the thing in the bin.

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