Ah. Yep, that's what I get for doing the math in my head. I worked from 1/3m, and came up with a hair over 13".
But, that'd be the difference between .3m and 1/3m. 11.811".
An even foot in diameter would be 0.3048 meters. Either way, I don't think anyone's going to be complaining if you're off by 0.19" or .5mm in either direction.
Knocking it down from 13" to 12" does give a few more options as far as base materials for the shell, and puts the 11.9" diameter foam bowls I'm figuring for the outermost layer right at the sweet spot, with room for a polyurethane hard-coat to finish it off.
There's a
model on sketchfab seems pretty accurate based on the *one* decent model shot I've found.
That modeler responded pretty quickly when I asked for a version of the model that could be converted for 3D printing. Unfortunately, my back-of-the-envelope estimate puts a 3D print (2mm thick) at about 6 lbs, which makes it *entirely* impractical for my purposes. That's just far too much weight for a 5" drone to carry around, and that's as big as can reasonably be squeezed entirely inside when you add the extra space for the propellers. I've noticed a tiny flaw with the rear center detail, where the truncated cone is slightly off center, as if the rest of the model has been rotated a couple degrees. Unfortunately, that's beyond my ability to fix.
(Or, looking more closely at the render, it may be an invisible shape that is being rendered in SketchUp. Hmm...)
Someone with some 3D modeling experience might be able to do the necessary cleanup and tweaking to turn it into a good STL for printing.
I'm starting to look for places that CNC form foam to see if I might be able to source a ready-made shell. Definitely more expensive to go that route, but then I wouldn't be relying on my completely untested sculpting capabilities beyond the prototype stage...
<wishfulThinking>Anybody know someone who does that sort of stuff on the cheap, and can clean up models, too?</wishfulThinking>
Not sure what I'm going to do about that main lens, though. I need to be able to park a camera behind it to fly the droid FPV when I'm done, and the RunCam lens is only 11/16" across. Either that, or I need to put it in one of the 'pods'. (Hmm... that could work.)
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I took a long shot last night, and fired off an email to the LucasFilm publicity contact to see if there were any way I could get my hands on some better pictures.
I figure it's almost certainly a dead end, but it can't hurt to ask, right?