As it is easy to guess it is heavily inspired by the Radiant VII or republic cruiser from Star Wars ep1. As I have mentioned before, when I went and saw the movie I was under the impression that all the spaceships were CG. I was astounded when viewing the film that the "CG" spaceships looked as good as models. Around this time, about the best example of CG spaceships was from the TV series Babylon 5, which in my opinion fell well short of the mark when compared to say the miniatures of Battlestar Galactica ( the original series). I must admit I never watched an episode as it didn't have any models in it. It was a short time later when I looked at the 'making of Ep 1' material that I realised that they were indeed models, no wonder I was excited by them. I'm afraid CG just does not get me going the way models do. I found I was very disappointed in the Hobbit as there were no models in it at all, it was all CG and I found it so uninvolving. Anyway back to the model.
In 1999 I got quite carried away on this initially, and rented a welder to make up a steel spine with 6 mounting locations. The steel was 1" or 25mm square section with 1/2" whitworth nuts welded on at mounting locations top, bottom, left, right, front and back. A section of figure eight electrical cable was then let out at each mounting point and carried back to the centre from which it then extended out to the cockpit area and the engines which I intended to light. it is mostly constructed of 2mm high impact styrene sheet ( HIPS) with a few found shapes thrown in for good measure.
The front end is made from two plastic measuring cups joined to a longer plastic tumbler with a now mostly obscured basketball design on it. that in turn is glued to a green plastic cup which then blends back into the main hull structure. here you can see where the front rounded "bedside lamp" shape has been removed for reuse on the "Sony" model.
A 1/72 Matchbox Panzer kit hull is featured on the side, much in evidence around the rear circular vents on the 2 foot diameter Millenium falcon built for Empire, the original ones being the Tamiya 1/35 scale panzer hulls on the 4 foot Star wars Millenium falcon.
Looking back over these old models has got me interested in continuing on with them. So After a scrounge of the hardware store and the local cheap crap shop I came up with these parts to built a new design for the engines. Two PVC plumbing parts, an Acrylic cup and a bendy spring strawed beverage container make a useful engine pod.
The following photographs are of the original engine arrangement for this model except that originally there were six engines not the four that you see here. I was never happy with how these looked and sat on this model, at one point hacking off the two outer engines to see if it would improve it... it didn't. Anyway these things never go to waste and are now part of a brand new model I've just started ( Oh no another project, don't you ever finish anything?), more on that one later.
You can see that the engines have been made from a plastic Parmesan cheese shaker and a plastic ice cream scoop.
No comments:
Post a Comment