This is easily my scartchbuilt with the most parts - almost all have been 3D printed. Builds like this are one reason I bought my resin printer - while cleanup and processing is annoying, it's less annoying than dealing with Shapeways.
I enjoy reading old SF stories and magazines and I love the artwork. One cover that caught my eye was the October 1955 issue of "If: Worlds of Science Fiction":
I started the 3D model but in 1/350 scale, it would have been expensive to print at Shapeways. I could print it on my FDM printer, but wasn't looking forwards to the extensive post-processing to get rid of the printer artifacts. It stayed unfinished until I got my Anycubic Photon printer.
The first version I printed was in 1/700 scale, which came out well. I thought I'd light the interior, but it would have been cramped at 1/700. Instead, I rescaled it to 1/350 (inadvertently making the shere's walls extra thick). Here are the results - I'm ready to start building.
The magazine has a view of the cargo ship in space:
I took some liberties with the design and added some details. The images are hard to make out because the resin is semi transparent. The parts have been sanded to remove the support points:
The floor/roof are thin wafers with many holes (for the lights) and to indicate some sort of floor structure:
I printed a
lot of cargo containers. I'm still learning how to add supports to ensure a proper print. I thought the smaller parts would have a lower yield than the large cargo boxes, but it was the reverse. Now I have tons of small cargo boxes and oxygen/gas tanks:
The cargo hatches, interior ribbing and landing pads (I need four, printed 6):
The crane on the cover will be from a random sheet of 1/350 ship PE.
I also needed astronauts, so I made 4 different poses and found two other astronaut types (one a 2001 astronaut) online. These 30 or so are the best of the lot; I have another 20 or so missing limbs that I can place elsewhere:
I also needed cargo tractors. I didn't find a better image of the tractors until yesterday, so I made a guess. I also made a wheeled cargo trailer and a "sausage" pressurized crew transport:
The clear resin makes it hard to see the details:
Here's one of the rejected Oscar Meyer Weinermobiles and a handicapped David Bowman astronaut:
I neglected to add a drain hole to the sausage, so it has some liquid resin inside until I cured it.
Thanks for looking! Next I'll start priming parts.
Here are the
If issues with images and texts to go with the pictures. As far as I can tell, this was an Ed Valigursky idea and not based on any "real" studies:
If, June 1954 Just saw this one - it has a closeup of a tractor.
If, August 1954If, April 1955If, Oct. 1955 This has the cover image