New Galactica with battle damage and a twist

Slowly but surely I am getting settled into my new hobby room. The first projects to leave the bench were two quick Star Wars kits that I did with my son (his first). At any rate, I got to sit down on the ol' girl tonight. I continued on detailing one of the the upper engine pods, it does not look like a whole lot but it is a start.

Here we go with the rest of the detail and a coat of primer...

Ok, I spent some time today drawing up what needs to be lit up in the engine section of the ship. this is what I came up with..



Standard (not quite sure where I will put all the needed buttons but I would like the Engines groups on/off-able)
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Extras (all extras can be turned on/off as needed) See below
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The end of the FO spot lights should be hidden well enough that no direct source of light can be seen. If I cannot find a way to completely hide any direct light i may scrap this idea. Another thought would be to beable to turn off the spots opposite of the view perspective. It will mean double the LEDs, but if I go this route i will separate the left side from the right side and give them their own channel so that they can be turned on/off separately.

I will not know until I get a row of flack cannons up and running and see what it looks like, but the plan is to light up ALL the 64 flack cannons on the left side of the ship so that they look like they are firing. Roughly calculated I will need about 8 or 10 LEDs connected to FO to create enough irregular blinking patterns so that the cannons do not look like they are all in sync.

For the maneuvering thrusters, you never really see them being used in the series but they are there for a purpose and I will light them up to suit that. All the groups of 4 will have their own channel and can be turned on/off as needed. The setup will look like this...



There will be a slow flickering orange LED lighting up the outer ring, with a bit of luck I can get this to look like hot metal. the main worry here is that all the flickering of all 4 nozzles will be "glowing" the same, which is slightly unrealistic. The only way around this would be to add one or two orange LEDs to EACH group of 4 (each with its own flickering pattern), which will raise my power consumption by more than I really wanted to. Inside the outer ring there will be a FO lighted by a fast flickering bright white LED, the flicker pattern will change once the thrusters are turned off and in so that they will have a couple bigger off phases before turning off completely to create a sort of sputtering effect.

Just a minor change in plans... I decided to make a similar effect on the main engine pods' exhaust as I will be doing on the thruster nozzles. The way I figure it is that if I want to try and see if it will work (or if it looks good) now is the time. I just finished molds for the nozzle rings and should have a mold for the exhaust tips done tomorrow and cast a set of them in clear resin. In Theory, once they are primed and painted and have a backlight of red/orange, all I need to do is scrape/sand the paint where I want heat glow.

This is kind of the effect that I am going for...



I will get some pics up as soon as I have something to show.

Looking good, opal... and looking forward to your progress!

-Kris

Thanks Kris, always nice to hear encouraging words.

I bought a new clear resin. It is polyester based and it does not have the god-awful stench that the XOR resin has that I have been using in the past. The only drawback is that it has a consistancy of slightly fluid jell-o, which makes it a pain to get the correct dosage out of the bottle as well as getting it to flow into all the nooks and crannies.

It has a potlife of 45 minutes and the ratio is 10 parts to 6 parts, but as with all transparent resins that I have dealt with so far... it is fussy about the ratio being exactly correct. I must have been a bit off on the batch that I made today because after a couple hours it still acted like a thick corn syrup. I set it on the heater for a couple hours and it is still sticky but it is getting harder, with any luck I will have a usable cast tomorrow morning.

[Update]

Well the clear resin pieces actually cured after 24 hours on the heater and turned out better than expected for a first batch. They still need to harden up a bit but they are now hard enough to take out of the mold and handle without worrying about deforming them. Here are the main engine exhaust tips and the thruster nozzles...



Yes, the exhaust tips are transparent resin too. I sprayed the silicon mold with light-blocking paint before casting. The reasoning behind that is that resin will cure itself to the paint far better than the paint would ever adhere to a finished resin piece. Paint sprayed on the surface of something will always just be a layer on top, whereas resin absorbs the paint and together they become one. Never-the-less, the insides are transparent, so if I light up one end and sand away where I want it to show it "should" work out just like I want it to.

The thruster nozzles did not get resin completely into the mold so more than a couple are useless, but enough of them are good enough to do some tests with. Unfortunately, these pieces were too small to spray light-blocker into the mold. I will have to try to get some light-blocker on them so that the light only shines out at the tips.

One problem that I will have with the exhaust tips is that they are flush with the engine pods, so there is no way to get an LED to shine between the inner & outer layer of paint. One option to handle this would be to cut a notch out of the nozzle where it connects to the engine pod and place a SMD LED there and bondo it closed again. I was also playing with the idea of adding ribbing to the inside of the exhaust tips anyway, that would make them slightly thicker than the walls of the engine pod and give me enough surface to shine an SMD LED into.

Thanks for tuning in and I hope that all this work is interesting for a couple of you out there.

Lighting the Engine Pods

[UPDATE]

so far I have added the stabalization struts to the lower pod and more detail between the ribs on the upper pod.


The black little "dishes" that you see in the picture are actually the backside of the little round push buttons on the plastic cover of the softdrink/coffee cups that you get to-go. they are perfect for keeping the little pieces of plastic separated from the littler pieces and being black it makes them easier to see. I am still patting myself on the back for that one. Here I have "only" added the bigger pieces, I still need to go back and put in a ton of the teeny-tiny ones.

I also got the thruster nozzles cleaned up and put everything together for a test. Here is a picture of the nozzles without lighting...



Here are a couple shots of them lighted up. This is only to test if the light is segregated the way I want it to and done only with a white LED and a red LED, so this is nowhere near the effect that I will have once I am done.



All in all I am satisfied with this, now all I need to do is get a microchip in there to control a flickering effect and of course the on/off aspect. I will have to decide on the color of the lights as well. The nozzles that are red above should be a shade of orange, but the thrusters themselves (which are warm white above) I do not know if I will go for the same white/blue as the main engines or more of a firey red/orange. The second would be best as it would complement the bright white of the main engines, but at the same time I would be hard to differentiate from the glowing nozzles. Luckily it is just a matter of testing and trying different LEDs and nothing to stand in the way of continuing building, so I will tackle this once the rest of the engine pod is finished.

Hope you liked it, and thanks for tuning in.

Meticulous work that will be well worth it in the end. I got a mobeius kit, slapped it together and that's as far as I got.

I'm a big fan of the new series. Loving your build and looking forward to seeing the end result.

SB

Wow!
R/ Robert

sandbagger said:

[...] Loving your build and looking forward to seeing the end result.

SB

Click to expand...

Thank you Sandbagger, when it is all fitted together, it is hard to spot the individual bits of fine detail, but the overall picture just gets better and better.

rbeach84 said:

Wow!
R/ Robert

Click to expand...

Thank you also Robert. Glad you like it.

[Update]

I got the detail between the ribs of the upper engine pod...



I still need to do all the other pods, but I want to get one finished so that I can get some LEDs in it to test different colors and patterns.
the detail for inside the engine exhaust ports is looking really good. I will need to print a new batch and adjust the size a bit but I like it.

If enough people are interested, I could open up a shop for orders. Here is a couple pictures of a dry fit...



Once it is lit up it should look pretty much as what I was aiming for...

This thread is getting better with each post. I'm interested in seeing the end result.

Very impressive on such a small model! You are packing a lot of detail in there.

CB2001 said:

This thread is getting better with each post. I'm interested in seeing the end result.

Click to expand...

Thanks CB2001, You and me both. It is still going to be a very long road until I am finished, but it feels really good when each step gets finished.

Duncanator said:

Very impressive on such a small model! You are packing a lot of detail in there.

Click to expand...

Thank you Duncanator, I am glad you like it. Although the size of the model itself does make things difficult at times, I feel that the detail just does so much more for it as it would for the same model at a bigger scale.

The weather here is starting to get a bit warmer so I am eager to spend a bit more time on her, it is insane how much time each little area requires. Never-the-less, the picture in my mind's eye drives me forward.

Update:

Nothing you have not already seen on the various other parts, but I got some more detail on lower engine pod...



I also added a bit of detail to the first rib of the upper engine pod, the fourth is a screen capture of Lee's mesh as comparison how it is supposed to look...



As everything is very small and grey on grey, it was not easy getting decent pictures where the detail can be seen so I took a couple from different perspectives to help get an idea of what it looks like. The little round satellite dish is a bit too big, there are actually supposed to be two of them next to one another but I had a heck of a time just getting one of that size fashioned. The larger of the 3 "prongs that stick out has fiber optic in it and will be lit up with a red LED later. I will setup something temporary to get a picture of the lighting and post it later.

If you can remember in some of my earlier posts, I really did not like the Point Defense Cannons (aka PDCs or Flak Cannons) that are nothing more as little rectangular blocks all over the ship. Well I printed a first draft of a more realistic version...



As I was not sure if this would print, the printout has two versions on it. The upper row of the print has a vertical wall between the upper and the lower cannon body (the lower row does not), but it turned out perfect, so this will be more or less the end version. The base still needs some fine tuning, but I am happy with the overall look. The idea is that I will drill 4 holes (one on each side of the center wall), where I will run 0.25 fiber optics through. they will be sticking out about a millimeter and will be the actual cannon barrels. After that I will attach the roughly 75 fibers to about 16 randomly blinking LEDs to create an effect similar to firing cannons. The one that is mounted between the ribs is a failed attempt to drill 4 holes in it for the fiber optic (0.5 was too big), so that will be replaced but you get the idea of how it will look.

Thanks for tuning in.

As you know, I have been using different types of plastic bags to cut the small paneling detail between the ribs and on the armor. This looks really good as it is really thin. I did use styrene to give the detail a variance in height, but only here and there, on a whole it is just too thick.

The major drawback to using plastic bags is that plastic just does not glue very good. I got different results using different types of glue but at the very best I achieved about the same adherence as a yellow Post-It. A layer of paint etc. does help a little bit, but still not enough to ensure that these bits of detail remain on in the years to come once it is finished. Even now through all the handling, a couple of the bits have come off and I have had to replace them.

Well, after I am about halfway finished with all the detail, I think I finally found a method that gives me the thinness that I want and yet allows itself to be glued. I do quite a bit of casting, and I started using pieces of flash (the resin that got trapped between the silicone halves). It does require searching through all the "trash" to find flash that is thin enough, but it is perfect, you can cut it much easier (but you do have to be a bit more careful as they are more prone to break) and once they are glued, they stay that way.

I hope that helps any of you out there that plan to do the same detailing.