Recreating the PALOMINO (The Black Hole)

[star-art]

Since I've been working on the Cygnus, several people have asked me about the Palomino. (My Cygnus is about 85% done but is on hold until I can devote more time to it.) A couple of good friends want to recreate the studio miniature (of the Palomino) so I agreed to chip in and help them out by making patterns for it. We plan to make the finished blueprints available to everyone. Hopefully a nice and accurate studio-scale replica will be the result of this project.

The Palomino is somewhat simple as ships go, but don't let the old girl fool ya. She's got quite a few challenging details to work out. I decided to start with the worst of it, so I tackled the engines and interconnecting girder framework first. So far I feel this is a really good match to the photos I have of the original studio model.

I was fortunate to locate the original studio plans since they have been published. They were slightly distorted and needed some cleanup, and the two views do not appear in scale to each other. Some of the detail underneath the ship is hard to work out due to limited reference. But I think I can get it.

I'll post more progress renders as I finish this baby up. I hope it will be a fairly quick and easy build (since some of my projects can take years.). There are no less than four threads going about this on various boards so I'll try to keep them all updated. But please consider the thread on my site as the "master thread" where all the latest updates can always be found:

http://www.starshipbuilder.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1597

For those who are not registered at my site and can't see the attachments there, here are some images:

http://www.starshipbuilder.com/projects/Pa...esFrameWire.jpg

http://www.starshipbuilder.com/projects/Pa...intScanPost.jpg

http://www.starshipbuilder.com/projects/Pa...no/CoolView.jpg

http://www.starshipbuilder.com/projects/Pa...mBelowWrfrm.jpg

 

[motivealloy]

That's cool. Brings back childhood memories of the Black Hole punch-out book that I had. I really wish i had kept it. Keep up the awesome work.

 

[mslz22]

Looks great Charles, great memories of that ship. Thanks for the book too BTW, i finally started thumbing thru it the last few days, great work.
mike

 

[star-art]

Thanks. And glad you like the new book..

 

[SVTStingRay]

isnt the original model still in mgm studios, i could have sworn i saw it years ago amist alot of other props.

 

[star-art]

Unfortunately, not anymore. It was hanging up near the ceiling in an indoor-outdoor area of a backstage tour made up to look like a warehouse. But that area has now been remodeled for something else so the ship is gone. One of our members who lives in Orlando and works for Disney is looking into what happened to it.

 

[star-art]

I was very sad to hear about the recent death of VFX pioneer Peter Ellenshaw. I was just rewatching The Black Hole to make screen captures of the Palomino for reference. Peter was credited as Production Designer on that film. A lot of folks don't think it was a good film, but the work both Peter and Harrison did was certainly very excellent and, in some ways, groundbreaking. No matter what you might think of the storyline, the production values and special effects were absolutely first rate for the time.

I had more time to work on the Palomino this weekend. The structure of the model is now basically finished. All that remains are the details applied to "the bucket" (whoever said this was a "trash can ship" sure got it right.). Since the purpose of this 3D model is to produce patterns for a physical recreation, I don't really have to make every surface detail to consider it done. As I have time, however, I'll try to add as many surface features as I can for the sake of completeness and so I can generate thorough blueprints of the finished model.


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