By the end of my previous post in this build log, I’d finished lighting the Paragrafix cockpit for my Moebius Discovery spacecraft. Now it was time for the pod bay. When I first bought the Discovery kit, I acquired the Paragrafix photoetch pod bay to go with it, but was a little disappointed with its general flatness. To be honest, that shouldn’t be a big issue in practice, because in the completed kit the view through the pod bay doors is pretty limited. But after a while, as the Discovery kit languished unbuilt in my stash, I became aware of the Green Strawberry pod bay, which is a mix of resin and photoetch that promised to give a much more three-dimensional result. So I acquired that, too.

I hoped to build this model with one pod extended on its platform in front of the open central door, like the iconic scene in the film when Dave Bowman leaves the Discovery for the first time.

I’d set myself the task of having the pod lights illuminated, but also to be able to remove the pod and its platform to make it possible to inspect my (hopefully) gorgeously lit pod bay interior more easily.

I had an idea for this, but it needed a bit of proof-of-concept work. Key to the process was some square-section brass tubing from Albion Alloys. I got some lengths of their 1.6mm and 2.4mm tubes (codes SSB1M and SSB2M)—the smaller slides fairly neatly inside the latter, meaning I could (in theory) produce a conductive pathway from the pod bay to the pod platform, while being able to remove the pod platform and its supporting brass tubing as required.

So first I needed a bit of surgery on the underside of the Green Strawberry pod bay floor and pod platform, carving out channels for my brass tubing, soldering the wiring in place where it will be concealed under the pod bay floor, and drilling out a hole in the pod platform so that I could eventually run wiring to an LED inside my pod:

At this point, I merely pressed the brass tubing into place on the underside of the pod platform to check fit—I’ll need to get the pod bay to the point of fitting it inside the command sphere before I can decide on the right length for my sliding brass platform supports.

Another bit of wiring has to run through the pod bay floor, to light up the test bench, which is visible in my film still, above. Green Strawberry provides a resin bench, but I decided to use the hollow, folded photoetch version provided by Paragrafix. This is pierced in strategic locations, and HDA Modelworx provides a decal that covers the piercing and can be transilluminated by an LED concealed inside the bench—so the same effect as I’d previously exploited when illuminating the Paragrafix cockpit.

Here’s the bench, lit up:

Then I constructed the resin pod bay floor, painted it white, applied Green Strawberry’s black decals, and attached the test bench, running its wires through a hole in the floor and light-sealing the join between bench and floor with a dollop of plastic filler smeared around the bench’s interior edges.

Then I pushed a couple of balls of screwed-up kitchen foil into my under-floor brass tubes, to improve electrical contact, slide in some test lengths of the finer brass tube and an LED, and wired the whole thing up to a battery for a test:

Yay, it works.

As you can see, Green Strawberry provides a trio of fiddly support structures to sit under each retracted pod platform. These don’t seem to be visible in the film, and for a long time I wondered what reference source Green Strawberry had used. I think they may come from pictures of the pod bay set taken during filming:

It makes a lot of sense that hidden support structures were required for the pods on the set, but they make much less sense in the “real” thing—the pod bay is supposed to be in zero gravity, after all. They’re a bugger to assemble and position, each consisting of one fragile resin part and five photoetch struts, and mine required to be slightly shortened so that the pod platforms could sit level with the pod bay floor. If I were building this again, I’d be strongly tempted to omit them.

For my illuminated pod, I used one of the excellent 3D-printed Falconware pods distributed by Shapeways. These come with premoulded channels for 0.75mm fibreoptics, so that the four headlights can be illuminated with one LED in the hollow interior. I drilled a fifth 0.25mm channel in the location of the red “HAL eye” on the front of the pod, so that I could light that up, too. The pods come with a selection of extremely delicate arms, which are initially protected inside the hollow pod, and need to be carefully extracted. The locating channels for the arms are the same diameter as those for the fibreoptic headlights, and also extend into the interior space, so there’s definite potential for absent-mindedly attaching an arm to a headlight channel, or vice versa.

The pods are moulded in translucent plastic, so I brush-painted the interior with four coats of white primer, then a couple of coats of black, then a couple of coats of white to provide a reflective surface for my LED. All this tended to clog up the fibreoptic channels, so I ran them through regularly with an interdental brush, and intermittently cleared my 0.25mm channel by poking it with my fine drill bit.

With that done, I painted up the exterior in white, and then applied fine detail with a mixture of hand-painting and some custom decals I printed to reproduce the larger detail visible in the film. Here’s the final version (still without arms and lights) poised on a UK penny for scale:

Here’s the decal sheet, for anyone who’s interested in using it—the resolution for printing is 600dpi:

With the pod painted, I cut some short lengths of 0.75mm optical fibre, and melted the ends by holding them close to a hot soldering iron. This makes the ends blob up into nice curved surfaces:

The fine “red eye” fibre got a blob of red paint over its interior end, once threaded. I placed my LED in the pod interior, and threaded its wires out through small hole in a piece of thin styrene sheet I’d cut to form a base for the pod. Adding this base made the job of eliminating light leaks between pod and platform easier. Here’s the final result, mounted and tested:

(The red light has inevitably bleached in the photo—it’s redder than that in real life.)

On, then to prepare the various pod bay parts for lighting.

There’s a little lab area on the starboard side of the pod bay, accessed by a ladder, and rather dimly lit in the film—a few instrument screens, a downlight above the ladder, and light from the pod bay itself coming in through a large window:

Here it is from outside, seen behind the astronauts;

Green Strawberry provides some solid resin parts, with photoetch and decals for the instruments. I chiselled out a hole in the resin behind the photoetch computer screens, so I could mount a light box behind the wall to transilluminate the decal and simulate the screens, which will then shine visibly through the lab window. I also drilled a small hole through the lab wall so that I could illuminate the door-control panel, reproducing the prominent red light visible in the film still above.

The main lighting challenge, however, is the iconic illuminated octagonal tunnel that enters the rear of the pod bay:

The Green Strawberry part is made of solid resin, with multiple little photoetch plates and black decals to simulate the appearance of the tunnel, but with no option to light it realistically. Here are the parts, with the photoetch already painted white and decalled:

The photoetch has slots exactly where the tunnel lighting should be, so I decided to eliminate the resin walls and replace them with thin styrene sheet, which I could transilluminate. Here it is, measured, scored and folded, with the photoetch parts ready to be glued in place:

And an exterior view of the final assembly:

You’ll see I’ve retained a cuff of the original resin tunnel. This is because the last short segment of the tunnel lacks lighting in the film—and, as a bonus, the resin part helps shape the styrene. The blobs of black paint are blocking light-leaks at the corners of the octagon, where the photoetch panels don’t quite come together in the interior. I used an LED temporarily placed inside the tunnel to ensure I put my paint only where it was needed.

Then it was just a matter of building a lightbox around the tunnel, using the styrene-and-foil method I illustrated in previous posts when I was building the cockpit. I used warm white LEDs to try to simulate the difference between the tunnel and pod bay illuminants visible in my film still.

Here’s the result:

And the illuminated screens and door light for the lab:

(Looking a bit grubby in that photograph—I’d slightly overdone the dark wash to bring out surface detail. I’ve since fixed that.)

So all the pod bay components are ready to be glued together and installed in the command sphere:

That’s all for now. Next time—the pod bay and command sphere final assembly, and even more lights.

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Last time, I reached the point at which I needed to start lighting my Paragrafix cockpit.

I wanted to provide a source of illumination at the front of the cockpit, which will probably be invisible from outside but will provide a little front-lighting for the couches and pilot, as if coming from the large panel of instruments and screens in the “real” thing:

My light source was necessarily going to be a much humbler affair, crammed into the limited space available—just a white light and a few spots of coloured light. I built a little box around an SMD LED, and pierced it with a lot of little holes and one big rectangular slot. Then I laid on a couple of spare instrument-panel decals from the HDA Modelworx sheet, which helpfully provides duplicates of pretty much everything.

The box stows neatly under the window to which the cockpit will eventually be attached, and there’s room for my wiring to escape through a gap between the Paragrafix photoetch and the kit part. I belatedly had to provide the central light (intended to simulate screen lighting) with a little tilted shade, because I found it was illuminating the window frame above in a decidedly unrealistic manner.

For the rear corridor, I erected a large light-box on its roof, in order to try to get a fairly uniform light coming through the styrene-sheet diffuser in the ceiling.

Above, you can see the LED clamped to some black styrene sheet while the 5-minute epoxy dries. Then I’ll position it at the front of the light-box, illuminating the tilted foil reflector you can see above, which will deflect light down on to the white styrene diffuser already fitting to the roof of the corridor.

At the back of the corridor part, I covered the windows in the door with a bit more styrene diffuser, and then added a small light box. At the sides, a pair of light boxes illuminated a red “HAL eye” on the left, and a little computer display on the right.

Here’s the final assembly:

And the view of the inside:

Moving back to the cockpit, with my little light box in place I eventually folded up the Paragrafix photoetch into its final configuration:

The kit part for the windows needed a little surgery to accommodate the corners of the Paragrafix cockpit, as you can see above. I’ve also placed my styrene-sheet diffusers over the various lighting panels, and started work on a slim little light box to illuminate the forward instrument panel in the cockpit ceiling—there’s very little room between the cockpit roof and the dome of the command sphere, here, so I’ll borrow light from the LED above the ceiling light panel, which I’ll set high enough to throw light into a flat reflective tunnel over the forward instrument panel.

With the cockpit assembled on to the windows, I did a test fitting into the command sphere to confirm that everything still came together okay, and that I was producing the desired glimmer of light on the pilot’s face from my little indirect light box immediately under the windows.

You can also see, above, how I’ve added some styrene strip to produce a bit of depth in the window frames, as an approximation to the appearance in the film.

The overhead light box went on easily, and then I needed to build a complicated pair of boxes to illuminate the side lighting panels and instruments. Here’s an early stage in construction, showing the array of right-angle styrene strips I used as a support structure for black styrene panelling covered in reflective foil:

You’ll see I also used a bit of the same styrene strip to add a little step to the back of the cockpit, where it opens into the rear corridor, and added padding detail from a spare bit of HDA Modelworx decal.

Here are the side light boxes at a later stage of construction, with LEDs in position and the reflective side walls in place.

All of this has to fit inside the low dome of the command sphere, so a lot of dry fitting and readjustment was required.

Once everything was in place, I was able to check the result by peering in the “rear door” of the cockpit, before attaching the corridor. Here’s my overhead panel:

And the two side walls:

All of this detail, of course, will be fairly minimally visible through the front windows unless you go looking for it.

After checking that the cockpit lights were working properly, I attached the rear corridor, and then soldered the cat’s cradle of wiring to the two master wires for this assembly.

I find it difficult to do the final assembly justice with photographs—the combination of “cool” lighting in the corridor and “warm” in the cockpit tends to make either the corridor look blue or the cockpit yellow, or both; and the coloured lights tend to blow towards uninteresting pastel shades. But it here it is, anyway:

For reference, the Tamiya paint pot on which the cockpit is perched is three centimetres in diameter.

Next time, I’ll move on to start work on the pod bay. There will be a lot more lights and wires.

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Last time, I finished lighting and preliminary painting on the engine compartment of my Discovery spacecraft from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. This time, I’m working on the cockpit. I’m using the Paragrafix photoetch set for this, combined with the HDA Modelworx decal set.

There are two areas to light—a rear corridor and the cockpit itself. There’s a degree of inconsistency in how these two areas are lit, especially when comparing the two films, 2001 and 2010.

But in exterior views the cockpit looks fairly warm and dim, so I’m going to light it that way using an array of little SMD LEDs, while making the corridor brighter and colder.

Here are the photoetch parts primed and glossed, ready for the decals:

The two objects in the middle are the acceleration couches, which are provided as plain bits of brass to be folded into shape. In the film, they’re covered in the white padding that appears on many interior surfaces of the Discovery.

I printed up some coverings for the photoetch, intending to make decals, but then decided that just wrapping the parts in printed paper would work fine:

Notice the big expanse of empty floor in front of the couches in the model, compared to the area of controls and screens visible in my film still of the cockpit interior, above. It’s actually impossible to reproduce the film’s appearance using the Paragrafix kit—there’s just not enough room below the windows. But, to be fair, that’s largely because the Discovery film sets notoriously wouldn’t have fitted inside the command sphere as depicted by the models used in the film. And, in any case, the sight-lines through the narrow windows of the cockpit probably don’t allow much of a view of the area in front of the couches, anyway. But I do want to put some sort of light source there, tucked out of sight, so that the couches and pilot get some front illumination, as if from that bank of television screens.

I also needed to revise the appearance of the rear wall of the cockpit—the photoetch and decals make this look like it’s striped with white padding but, as my film stills show, this wall was a pretty dark grey (with a few white panel lines evident in 2001, but not in 2010).

So I printed up replacement detailing for that wall, and again just glued the printed paper in place.

Here’s the rear corridor, partially folded with its decal in place.

The decal covers holes in the photoetch brass, which I’m demonstrating above with a bit of backlighting—I’ll build light-boxes behind all these holes to illuminate the various windows, buttons and screens.

And here’s the little corridor box assembled:

Those big gaps in the ceiling will be covered with a styrene-sheet diffuser and another light-box, to simulate the overhead strip lighting of the real thing.

And here’s the partially folded cockpit, test-fitted into the kit part that forms the spacecraft windows:

All those multicoloured details represent illuminated control panels, which I’m planning to light with wrap-round light boxes, along with the main overhead lighting panel and the six side panels.

The Moebius kit provides a transparent window, but I’ve decided to dispense with it, since it’ll obscure some of the interior detail. I’ve replaced it with photoetch window-frames from Paragrafix:

These are unrealistic compared to film images—I’ll deepen them with some styrene strip in due course.

I’ve also added a photoetch pilot figure, representing the character Frank Poole, as seen in my film still above. I’ve had to amputate his feet to get him to fit into the correct position, because of the rather high floor of the Paragrafix part, but this intervention will either be invisible through the windows, or obscured by the little light-box I’m planning on adding.

Next time, I’ll get some lights into all this.

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Last time, I got all my wiring runs in place to illuminate this model. Now it’s time to add some lights, starting with the engine bells.

There’s room for a couple of large LEDs inside the flare of the engine bells, which means I can get a light behind both engine nozzles on each of the three engine bells. Here’s one LED in one half of an engine bell, showing how I plan to position my lights:

With that decided, I wired up and tested my three pairs of lights:

Then there was a decision to make about what to do with the engine nozzles. The kit parts are solid, with a moulded grill. Yay! Monsters make a replacement part moulded of translucent plastic, so there’s the option to paint everything on these parts except where I want light to leak through, between the grill bars. But the Paragrafix photoetch parts I’ll be using for the cockpit interior include a set of nice engine grills, too—so I could drill out the kit parts and insert the metal replacement grills. Here are all the relevant parts, next to the Paragrafix photoetch—Yay! Monsters nozzles at left, kit part at right, engine bell below.

My concern with the Yay! Monsters part was that the back isn’t finished. Here’s a comparison with the kit part (on left):

You can see that the Yay! Monsters part would need a lot of work to get it to locate properly within the hexagonal engine bell. I also wasn’t sure how neat a final effect I could produce, applying paint on to the translucent grill. So I drilled out the nozzles and used the Paragrafix grills:

There’s quite a lot of light inside the engine bells, and I didn’t want it to leak out anywhere except through the grills. So I lined the bells with metal foil on top of a layer of flat black paint, and then painted the exterior black, too, before finally placing the external layer of kit parts that add detail all around the bell.

When I checked for light leaks in a darkened room, I picked up a couple of seams that needed just a little filler and more paint, and one bright spot in the middle of an exterior part, where its locating tab had pushed through the interior foil and was acting as a light duct—a little more foil cured that.

But the hexagons containing the paired engine nozzles presented a problem, with the potential for unsightly light leaks around their edges. The position of the nozzles, very close to the edge of the part, meant that it was going to be difficult to fill any leaks around those edges. After a bit of contemplation, I came up with a solution that involved the diffuser I was going to place inside the grills. I wanted the nozzles to look uniformly dark when not illuminated—no glimpses of the interior foil and LEDs. And I wanted a diffuse illuminant when my engine lights were switched on. Eventually I settled on using a piece of the plastic packaging my LEDs had been delivered in. Here’s a demo—dark side of the plastic at left; plastic stretched and glued over the back of the engine hexagon at centre; final product at right:

I dealt with the filler problem by “pre-filling” the edges of the hexagon—leaving a little edge of my plastic diffuser all around the part, and anointing it with fine filler before gluing it into the engine bell:

This auto-filled the gap around the edges as I pushed it into place, and the small amount of excess that squeezed out was easily removed with the edge of a damp tissue. Then it was just a matter of checking the final effect:

And the dark-room test:

Now it was time to add some detail paint to the engine compartment and nozzles. My idea is to produce a quite strongly variegated effect, which I’ll eventually moderate with a uniform blending coat across the whole model.

For the engine compartment itself, I used a set of paint masks from Aztec Dummy.

The idea here is to layer on several shades of grey, with the paint mask orientation shifted and rotated between layers, to produce an overall mottle suggesting fine detail.

For the smoothly panelled front end of the compartment, I started with a dark shade, masked a few panels, added a paler shade, and so on. Here’s the final result:

I painted the engines bells mid-grey and then brought up detail with a dark wash:

At present the engine bells are just tacked in place with some clear glue. There’s a slight problem with the bells, which is that in the “real” thing, the three hexagons containing the engine nozzles align edge to edge. But the kit parts want to sit very slightly apart. The solution is either to slip in a little sliver of plastic to fill the gap, or to tilt the outer engines very slightly to bring the hexagons together, and I wanted to take a look at my options at this stage.

Here are the hexagons aligned edge to edge:

And, actually, the slight tilt turns out to be no big deal, discernible only if you press the hexagons against something flat. So that’s what I’ll go with when I assemble this section permanently.

I was also able to check my wiring runs and light up the engines:

So that’s all good. Next time, I’ll move to the other end of the kit and start wiring up and illuminating the Paragrafix photoetch cockpit.

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This is the large styrene model of the iconic Discovery spacecraft from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. And when I say large, I mean large—assembled, it’s going to be 42 inches long, which will necessitate the hanging of a whole new shelf chez Oikofuge. To get a sense of its weird proportions, take a look at the “real” thing in profile, in a still from the film:

To keep the kit rigid, Moebius have provided it with a steel spine, which runs from the centre engine bell at rear to the back of the command sphere at front. It consists of two hollow steel tubes, connected by a steel sleeve concealed inside the antenna module, halfway along the length of the spacecraft. That narrow tube running the whole length of the model is going to be important for what I’m planning for this kit, because I want to add some aftermarket detail (cockpit and pod bay) to the front of the model, and also want to add (quite a lot of) lighting.

So I need a place to put the batteries. The command sphere is going to be pretty full of aftermarket detail and wires by the time I’ve finished with it, but the rear propulsion unit contains a lot of empty space. Here it is, partly assembled, showing the run of the rear steel rod.

To turn this into a battery compartment I need a removable lid, so I modified the upper kit part so that I can pop it on and off.

I’ve extended the locating holes in the concealed side and rear flanges into slots, so that my lid can slide in and out, and I’ve removed a front flange which would otherwise foul the tapered front section of the propulsion unit. Here’s the assembled unit:

Before going any further with modifications, I needed to convince myself I actually could run a pair of wires along the hollow steel spine of the kit, from back to front. And, with a bit of effort and some mineral oil, I managed to screw a twisted pair all the way through both metal tubes. Here they are with a battery pack and test light connected:

And here are the steel tubes assembled end-to-end, demonstrating the length of the kit:

With that option confirmed, I next planned to reduce the length of the rear steel tube so that it terminated inside my battery bay, rather than traversing it. It would, however, need some sort of support structure within the bay, to replace its original anchorage at the back. Here’s my solution to that problem, knocked together from brass rod and styrene. It’s being held in place by the steel tube while the glue dries.

Then I needed to measure off how much tubing to remove. I dry assembled the rear engine bell on to the steel tube, and marked off the length at the rear of my support structure:

On the principle of measuring twice and cutting once, I also assembled the central cores of the four rear cargo pods, and threaded them on to the rear steel tube, ensuring that enough tube protruded to engage with the central sleeve. Then I pulled my wires back far enough to be out of harm’s way, and Dremelled 1¾ inches off my steel tube. Here’s the post-trimming tubing in position, showing that it both engages with the steel sleeve at the front, and allows my wires to enter the battery bay at rear:

There’s room inside for two AA 3V switched boxes, one to supply light to the engines, and one for the command sphere. In due course I’ll glue down a couple of electrical connector blocks in the rear space.

To get power into the command sphere itself requires only one hole to be drilled, in the kit part that forms the rear of the sphere. I made the hole just large enough to admit the wires, while still leaving enough plastic to form a stop for the steel tube.

At the rear, the original hole for the steel tube gives access to the central engine bell. For the two side units, I drilled holes through the original supporting stubs.

And in each engine bell, a few seconds with a rat-tail file was required to create a hole that would allow wires to run all the way to the back of the structure.

So far so good. Next time, I’ll start installing lights, and do a bit of painting.

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