Re: Studio Scale TIE Fighter - Take 2
Mark, there was several discussions about this in this forum (one of them was in my other TIE thread).
Steve said somewhere that ILM used a 5" ball with styrene over it which means a bigger diameter.
With new refs, I can be 100% the master was not made from plastruct hemispheres. The walls are very thin, about 1.5mm while a platruct hemi is at least twice that thickness. The master was probably made from styrene vacformed around a plastruct hemi, but bigger than 5".
No need to laser scan an original casting (and that would not give us the original size of the master due to shrinkage), when you put the kitpart on the hemi it becomes obvious on a 5" that there's not enough space between the parts.
If someone could measure the diameter of the top hatch of an eFX TIE Fighter and post the result here, we could compare it with the known diameter of an original ANH TIE hatch.