I had an old Monogram "Passenger Rocket" kit sitting around, unfinished. Years ago, I sanded off all of the many, many rivets and started gluing it together but just lost interest. Recently, I wanted to build a SF ship, try out some lighting ideas and use up some of the kit carcasses I had laying about. So with nacelles from a 1/1000 Enterprise and some 1mm extruded foam, I got to work.
I didn't have much of a plan for the model; it was going to be more of a "hack" to hold some of my experiments. This is what I started with (some parts in progress):
First project was to design and print out (on paper) a 1/350 scale starship bridge. I had a small keychain flashlight that I got from Digital Computers back in the 90s. It was shaped like one of their mice and the upper part (with the button) looked perfect for the bridge, so I scaled everything to fit the part.
I imagined this to be a small ship with a crew of 10; sort of a space tramp steamer. The captain's and chief mate's quarters would be right off the bridge:
The figures are long out of production resin sailors from Gofy. They appear to be copies or modified versions of Preiser's pricey 1/350 sailors.
Everything except the figures and the railings are printed. thick paper glued to a 1mm thick foam base.
The long "hallway" was to allow two fiber optic fibers to pick off light from the rear LED; they blocked too much light, so they were removed.
I also added a cargo bay. Iain M. Banks died around the time I started this project, so I used his birth date as the ship's registry number. GCU is "General Cargo Unit", but in Bank's "Culture" series, they are General Contact Units - much larger ships. "Cargo Cult" is also the name of an AI/ship in one of the books.
I also made a small shuttle from parts. It's not yet finished:
Finished bridge. I used the LED flashlight's button to heat smash clear plastic for the bridge dome. It worked well. The crud around the edge is dried masking fluid that has to be removed:
The cargo bay. Obviously a force field is keeping the atmosphere in! The docking port and the impulse engines are mecha model add-on parts:
Finished ship:
The base is from the Glencoe/Strombecker Atomic space station. It has two tea light LED bases (minus the LEDs) and a voltage regulator I designed:
I miscalculated the resistor values for the flickering tea light LEDs in the nacelles, so they're very dim. The blue area in the front is the deflector, powered by a blue LED:
Leaving orbit:
I used six white LEDs (three in the cargo hold, two in the bridge, one in the body, for the colored nav lights), four flickering amber LEDs (one in each nacelle) and one bright blue LED for the deflector.
It was a fun project! Thanks for reading this far.
