1:72 Moebius 2001 Orion III Space Clipper

[Kallisti]

At Telford a couple of years back, the Farnborough club table was situated right ned to Tony James (RIP) stand and I spent the entire weekend being tempted by the plethora of wonderful goodies his shop displayed. My poor credit card got a bit of a hammering!

 

That year I was displaying the Moebius Aries 1B model I'd just completed

and so when I saw this kit, it was a total no-brainer!

 

 

Sadly as has been reported in many posts, they didn't do a good job with this kit. It suffers from some very bad detailing on the surface - panels that are grossly over thick and unrealistic. This kit has languished in the stash for far too long and I finally decided it was time to get it out and get on with it!

 

its a BIG model, here are some of the parts with the older Moebius Space Clipper model for a size comparison

 

 

and here are most of the rest of the sprues - there are not many parts to this kit!

 

 

Needless to say, it doesn't come with Pan-Am decals. Since Pan-Am went bust, someone bought the branding and IP of the company and now wants people to pay to use it, whereas in the old days when Pan-Am were a going concern, to them it was just free advertising. However, I don't want want to use Pan-Am, after all this is an alternate history so why not do a what if? People who know me know my fondness for what-iffery, just look at my Spectrum Angel Interceptor what ifs...

 

So what if business ventures from the past were more successful that they were in our time-line? How about Freddie Laker's Skytrain evolving into...

 

The old Skytrain colour scheme was quite eye catching so I can see it working well on the Orion Space Clipper!!!

 

To compliment this, Cozmic Scale Models do a set of crew and passengers for this kit so I bought some. Sadly i bought this before seeing the floor plans for Telford this year where the Farnborough table is right next to Cozmic... sigh...

 

 

I've started work on this and the first job has been a LOT of sanding... more on that in the next post!

 

Edited October 18 by Kallisti

[Pete in Lincs]

Like the Spacetrain idea!

[Galligraphics]

Wow that's a big beast, Andrew.

[IMG1]

This definitely looks interesting, always thought a DHL cargo version would look good. Always love your what ifs

[Kallisti]

As mentioned, one of the biggest complains about this kit is the terrible "blobs" that have been moulded to the surface to represent panels. They are overly thick and look awful, here are some examples:

 

 

 

 

 

All of these lumps and bumps are fictitious compared to the studio model as you can see here from these screenshots

 

 

 

The bands around the middle of the fuselage are entirely fictitious, apparently copied from a scratch built model from the 70 where the builder used them to disguise joints in the resin fuselage!

So I spent several evenings this week sanding and sanding and sanding to get something that is much more presentable...

 

 

 

 

 

 

I left some of the limps and bumps on the underside as these would represent the vehicle's landing gear panels

 

 

I haven't yet sanded off the clunky door but I'm thinking I should as it now looks totally out of place and the rivet details is seriously overdone

 

 

Thinking about it a bit, it does highlight a major problem with this vehicle - there is only ONE door - I'm sure whatever safety inspectorate for Space Flight would have questions over that, I mean look how many doors modern airliners have for emergency exit! Then again what would they be exiting into? Vacuum of outer space is not a particularly safe place to evacuate too!

 

Okay time to stop overthinking it! Next task is to paint the passenger compartment and cockpit and start looking at how to sort out the lighting - what should be lit and where to place the batteries... more to come.

 

 

 

 

 

[Millennium Falcon Notes]

Stupendous improvement!

 

Moebius’ thinking and corporate priorities really puzzle me. Why go to such lengths to produce a large expensive kit that will only really be of interest to detail-oriented middle-aged fans, then make serious errors and poor choices in implementation that make it look like they’re designing a cheap toy kit aimed at kids in the 1970s?

 

So bizarre!

 

Anyway. Your model looks so much better already.

[Millennium Falcon Notes]

For the door you could get a thin laser-engraved and laser-cut piece of brass that could look great. There are companies now that do laser etching services if you send them vector art files, if you don’t have a laser engraver and don’t want to deal with the messiness of acid-etching the parts yourself!

Edited October 21 by Millennium Falcon Notes

[Kallisti]

8 hours ago, Millennium Falcon Notes said:

For the door you could get a thin laser-engraved and laser-cut piece of brass that could look great. There are companies now that do laser etching services if you send them vector art files, if you don’t have a laser engraver and don’t want to deal with the messiness of acid-etching the parts yourself!

Nice idea, I've got some thin plastic card that could also do the job and a rivet wheel tool thingy that could replace the rivets... or even just a home printed decal that outlines the shape of the door with some detail around a recessed handle...I'm pretty certain its going to get sanded off now anyway so thanks for your suggestion

 

I'm currently in the process of painting the interiors - Here are the primed parts: Passenger cabin - this has now been painted overall beige and various lighter and darker panels will be painted

 

 

and passenger cabin ceiling, showing the cut0outs for the lighting...

 

 

This screenshot gives you a general idea of the passenger cabin. I've interpreted the overall colour to be beige but it COULD be a grey, but I think beige is more interesting.

 

 

 

For the cockpit, there are no references from the movie for the main bulk of the cockpit so I think the Moebius one is using a great deal of artistic licence...

 

 

This is about the best reference I could see in the short time the clipper is on screen

 

 

For this one I'll got with a light and dark grey colour scheme.

 

All the seats are being painted with X-18 semi-gloss black and the arm rests will be XF-69 Nato black and matt to give some contrast. Then I'll move onto painting the crew and passengers - crew will be in white(ish) and the passengers, all sots of colours!

 

 

 

 

[Millennium Falcon Notes]

There are behind the scenes photos which reveal some of the cockpit set's design, and the Moebius design does look like a simplified version of that.

 

Edit: Actually it looks like they took some of the details from the Aries cockpit. Which isn't surprising since there are more photos of that one.

Edited October 22 by Millennium Falcon Notes

[PieterC]

It is strange how 'bumpy'' this Orion is compared to my '350 version. In 1/350 Moebius used decals for panel lines which worked quite well.  

[Millennium Falcon Notes]

I can't get image upload to cooperate, so I've put some photos of the Aries 1B cockpit set here, in case they're of interest:

 

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1vpmqDtU-4hA67jd0vjTgzlf2L8EME8Pw

Edited October 22 by Millennium Falcon Notes

[Kallisti]

i see what you mean about them using the Aires cockpit as inspiration. Thanks for the pics, I've never seen these before, so very handy

[Kallisti]

Progress on the internals, first off some painting inside the cockpit, with thanks to @Millennium Falcon Notes for the Aries pictures which gave me some inspiration

 

 

 

Then I spent a good part of yesterday afternoon painting all the figures.. I didn't waste time trying to put a lot of details on them as they'll be barely visible when everything is closed up, the main thing is that they are there... The pilots needed a significant of adjustment to get them to fit in the chairs - the chairs were narrower than their hips so had to enlarge them as well as pit the pilots on a diet!

 

 

For the passenger compartment, all the chairs got glued in after the paint was done. I was a bit ambitious and painted all the arm rests XF-69 Nato Black and the rest of the seats X-18 semi-gloss black. I've no idea why, you can hardly tell but it seemed like a good idea at the time!  😵

 

 

Then after painting the passengers, settled them in for the trip - they aren't glued in yet, so still time to adjust, including their outfits, some of which just don't suit them dahling!

 

 

On the outside, the clunky door has been sanded down, but before I started I scribed a line around the outside which is all that is really left of it now

 

 

Further on the outside, I'm preparing the stand which comes with the kit. Its a larger version of the one that comes with the smaller Clipper kit and after my experiments with the stands Space:1999 Hawk and UFO SID earlier this year, it seemed to be appropriate to try this one out... Its an A4 white decal sheet, not coated with varnish to protect the ink. I'll give it a go later today to see how well it conforms around the base... wish me luck!

 

[Millennium Falcon Notes]

Looking good!

 

Might be worth replacing the supplied 10cm thick slabs of clear plastic window glazing with super-thin PETG so your details will actually be visible.

[Kallisti]

1 hour ago, Millennium Falcon Notes said:

Looking good!

 

Might be worth replacing the supplied 10cm thick slabs of clear plastic window glazing with super-thin PETG so your details will actually be visible.

 

I had considered replacing them with clear acrylic.. I've already got plans to paint the outside of the fuselage along the window level before joining the fuselage together to avoid having to mask such small window holes.

[Kallisti]

So I had a great idea following on from my previous Space:1999 Hawk and UFO SID builds for the base - the kit comes with a large triangluar base which is a scaled up version of the base for the smaller kit!

 

 

Thats an A4 printed decal... and it went on over the base reasonably well...

 

 

and the transparent support arm almost disappears

 

 

I think it looks quite effective...

 

 

The last 2 days have been spent joining the rear fuselage halves together and a lot of filling and sanding to fix the joins...

 

 

 

 

You can see around the smaller thrusters where there is still some Mr Surfacer 500 to sand off and even up the joints.

 

More to come later...

 

[scautomoton]

I really like your idea for the stand, so obvious once you've seen it.

[Pete in Lincs]

Just did a catch-up with plenty of likes. 

It's coming along very nicely. I like the stand. Planet Pizza!🍕 

[Thom216]

The odd panels remind me of their Kelvin model, where they had an unexplained batch of those on one side of the upper saucer.

Looks a lot better with most of those sanded off. 

[Gondor44]

On 10/26/2025 at 1:55 PM, Kallisti said:

 

 

I am wondering if the woman at the front on the left, looking forward, is on her way to Moon Base Alpha?

 

Looks good so far 

[Kallisti]

Good spot - I think Cozmic were a little cheeky and used existing figures for Space:1999 as they had the flared trousers, wide belts and comlocks!

[Kallisti]

Red and blue stripes for the livery have now been painted and then covered up again for the rest of the build...

 

 

 

before joining the two sides together, the ceiling of the cockpit was fitted, the passnger comparments transparencies were glued in place and the windscreen framework was glued into one side of the fuselage.

 

 

I decided to use the kit pieces rather than mess about with acrylic replacements

 

 

The transparency is still to be fitted here - it fits best over the front of the cockpit before that is place inside the fuselage - there is some fit issues here, but some careful adjustment made it ok in the end

 

 

The passenger compartment was then fitted and the two fuselage halved were then joined together. The joints were pretty awful, not so much gapping just really crude joint surfaces so that a LOT of filler was needed...

 

 

 

 

The mating ring that attaches the rear and front sections was glued to the rear section and the gaps filled and sanded - this was a tricky bit of sanding! As you can see bottom left, the other thruster pieces need some filler too - this pic shows what they looked like before the filler...

 

 

The camera doesn't show the worst parts, but the gapping is considerable (blimey I'm sounding more like Craig on Strictly now!)

Next the solution to the access to the batteries for lighting was completed, with strong magnets attached to the outer surface of the mating ring...

 

 

While the other magnet of each pair was attached to the fusealge and wings of the front section

 

 

 

I was initiall concerned about getting the alignments correct then realised I could use the magnets themselves to do the alignment simply by attaching the magnet pairs together, apply the glue where I expected it to be needed then pushing the parts together and letting the magnets sort themselves out then leaving it for the glue to set! I was concerned that it would be a strong enough attachment for the weight of the rear, but once fixed, the magnets have a really strong hold!

 

 

I'm just waiting for the filler on the rear thrusters to set to be able to sand and then I can start painting!

 

 

Edited November 2 by Kallisti

[Eric Mc]

Fantastic project.

 

I built the old Airfix version many years ago. This is on a different planet entirely. Looking forward to seeing the finished product.

[Jeddahbill]

Catching up on this wonderful build.  Excellent work on the ugly raised details and hideous fuselage strips!  If only Moebius had done some proper research!  

 

Bill