The Princess Cecile build continues…

Off and on, off and on. In bits and pieces I have a few other items finished. Designing this ship while I build it is pretty interesting!

In my previous post, I decided I needed to add some kind of “pods,” for lack of a better term, to provide more living space. I also decided the missile tubes would be located there.

After cutting the acrylic tube in half, I cut curves into the ends. Then after a lot of sanding I primed them and started to figure out how to attach them.

I hit on making some curved bulkheads. The tube halves, as they were cut, gained a bit of a twist, so I knew I couldn’t just epoxy the edges and hope. I started making bulkheads out of styrene, but that didn’t work very well unless they were very thin. I hit upon using some balsa foam I had around. It is pretty delicate stuff but it sands fast.

The “pod” half-round acrylic piece with the ends curved. Also, various bulkhead types I experimented with.

 

Each individual bulkhead was cut using the first one as a master, then sanded to fit.

A balsa foam bulkhead.

Then I made some more of the sheet styrene copies so I could cover the balsa foam, hiding it from view. I also put together a short piece of Plastruct girder, sanded down, and a piece of plastic tube (the missile tube):

Bad iPhone shot of the completed pod. The original bulkheads were sliced in two and spread out more.

It looks pretty bare, with no putty, paint or greeblies. And the forward end cap isn’t on yet!

A lot of the “personality” of the ship will be in finish details – little greeblies on the bulkheads, hoses, etc. Since the plan is to display the ship in the water, floating on the outriggers, I will need to cut some small openings all over the ship and add some hatches. Those will come later.

Before I can attach the other pod I need to cut a hole in it to continue the cargo hold opening that I originally placed in the side of the hull. I’m going to do that before I epoxy the pod in!

Then a little epoxy and the first pod was on the side of the ship:

The continuing adventures of the Princess Cecile…

Off and on. Fits ‘n starts. An hour here, an hour there. I got a couple of ideas that sort of took me in another direction. (To catch up, just use the search function over on the right using the keywords Princess Cecile.)

I originally thought of the Sissy as a simple with rounded ends…sort of like a modern submarine. But a sub uses that shape to equally distribute water pressure, and while the Princess Cecile has to withstand a vacuum, it probably encounters more stress from manuevers during battle than from any other source. (Drake notes that the ship rarely accelerates at more than 2 g’s.) Then I saw a set of 3D graphic images from someone on Flickr named xriz00 who did some beautiful renderings of the ship. (‘ve emailed him about posting one of his images here – no answer yet. Go onto Flickr and search for Princess Cecile and you will find his images as well as those from a gentleman named Marcelo Glenadel. His are more “realistic” renderings, if that’s the word…not as futuristic-looking, but more like I envision the ship should look.

Mine won’t look so slick, I’m afraid, but it’s beginning to take shape. Here’s the  taped-up mockup so far:

 

The other outrigger isn’t placed – I just put that one there to get a feel for it. The knobby thing in front is the prototype High Drive motor – behind it is the Mark I prototype HD motor that I ultimately rejected. The barbell-shaped thing behind it is not attached to the outrigger – it’s just there to get a sense of proportion. It’s a prototype oleo strut for the outrigger. The big knobby end would be embedded in the main hull, and the small one in the outrigger. I don’t think it’s too long…maybe. . I want to try casting it in resin to see how it looks. Patterns made of a bunch of dissimilar materials always look a little weird to me.

The clear plastic half-tube taped to the hull is the new addition. I decided the straight cylinder looked too plain, and i still can’t see how you can stuff the drive systems, environmental, stores, missiles and living space for over a hundred people in that small a ship. So I added a bit of living room. Inspired a bit by the images I spoke of above, I decided the missile tubes should run the long way in the ship. I don’t recall Drake mentioning their orientation. The hole in the top of the hull was originally going to be a missile tube, paired with another that launched down. It will be some kind of access port now, I guess.

The turrets for the plasma cannons got a little dressing up with some plastic tube and some milliput. I’m sort of making them look more like tank turrets, I hope.

I like the idea of using spheres as a primary shape a lot…it’s a shape not often used today on science fiction spacecraft, many of which are made to look really sleek and aerodynamic  even if they are not atmosphere-capable. (That was the cool thing about the original series Enterprise – it sort of look airworthy, but you could tell it was really only designed to fly in space. Then they supposedly brought it into the lower atmosphere in the episode where they went back to the 1960s. Subsequent versions of the Big E got sleeker and sleeker, but I would hate to try to bring the Enterprise-D into an atmosphere. Oh, wait…they did, and crashed it. I forgot!) Of course, the ships designed by Fred Ordway and Harry Lange for 2001 had spheres, but they were based on real science and utility as much as possible…not art. Sort of like a VW Bug vs. a 1959 Chevy Impala.

Cool lookin’ car, but really, did all the streamlining make any difference? (My dad had a brown one. Even in brown, it was cool.)

So anyway, I cut a 2 inch diameter acrylic tube in half and I will attach half to each side of the hull. Not sure how the ends will look. Maybe scalloped, maybe quarter spheres…I’ll have to see.

Of course, now I have to cut another door for the main hatch. The styrene tube of the hull cut a lot nicer than the acrylic, which tends to melt on the Dremel.

Go check out Flickr. These guys did some truly beautiful work! More later, when I get the sides attached and get some resin outrigger struts and HD motors made. Oh, and I have to redesign the plasma thrusters…and figure out the sail rigging…

More Princess Cecile work

I’ve cast and assembled a whole bunch of thruster quads for the Princess Cecile build:

I really only need six, tops, but I don’t know which ones will look best painted. Since they were resin cast by me, they are “somewhat inconsistent.” Here’s a closeup of a couple of them – they are about 3/4″ across:

And here’s the next idea for the High Drive motor:

It’s a little over an inch long. I need a bunch of them, also. About half the resin I mix is wasted because I’ve been casting such small parts and I need to mix at least a half-ounce so I can get the amounts equal using my little plastic mixing cups. I figure once it’s ready, I’ll make one mold, then cast one, then make another mold. At least that way I can get two out of one pour. I don’t know what else I will need multiple copies of. It would make more sense to make more stuff at once, but I also hate to burn too much rubber making more molds. I have to think about that a bit.

I’ve been too busy to do much on the build. I have to tackle the masts next. I can’t figure out something that looks cool for the struts for the outriggers yet. Hmm.

 

More on building the Princess Cecile

Those of you who have followed my ramblings as I slowly work on a (mostly) scratchbuilt model of the starship Princess Cecile from David Drake’s Lt. Leary science fiction book series – here’s your next little bit:

The thruster quads I was trying to cast in resin turned out to be a challenge. I tried several different molds, trying to make one as a one-piece casting with the mold in two halves, and as two separate halves poured, sanded flat, and glued together.

In both cases I had problems with air bubbles or voids. Splitting it vertically in two helped a bit, but that still required getting the halves exactly flat and so they would line up when I glued them together. I learned a lot about the behavior of resin and moulding rubber, though!

The more time I spent with these parts, the more I was convinced the quads were just too big. They would scale out to 10 to 12 feet across, nozzle to nozzle. Granted, a warship has to maneuver quickly and so they would need to be larger, most likely, than on a commercial spaceship.

The trend today is that such thrusters would be mainly contained inside the hull of a spacecraft, I guess, if there is such a trend. The thrusters on the SpaceX Dragon vehicle only show the openings of the rocket nozzles.

A test firing of the Draco thruster for the SpaceX Dragon

You can see the thruster openings on the SpaceX Dragon – the four ovals below and to the left of the hatch.

No doubt about it, the Dragon is a well-designed little ship. But she’s not a fighter, and (hopefully) she will never have to take battle damage. The ships of the RCN routinely are repaired during battle by the riggers, who wear armored spacesuits because there’s stuff flying around out there. Drake usually refers to the riggers as needing to repair the rigging and sails so the ship can re-enter the Matrix. The design of the RCN ships was predicated on making them as similar to sailing vessels as possible for narrative purposes, I think.

One other point is that the RCN ships are built on steel hulls and are an interesting combination of high tech and low tech. In one of the books a ship is radically rebuilt on the ground on a mostly uninhabited planet. Just like the sailing ships of Aubrey or Hornblower, sometimes the crew finds it must effect major repairs without the benefit of a shipyard.

So…external thruster quads just sounded like a good idea to me. Here is the Apollo command and service module combo, showing the thruster quads:

See the thruster quads?

Closeup of the Apollo Service Module thruster quad

So…I still wanted them on the exterior of the hull, so they could be repaired or replaced without quite as much danger of explosion. It didn’t make sense to me to have them located inside the hull placing a bunch of small (relatively)  rocket engines where they could be dangerous to the crew, with openings through the hull for the exhaust.

So I made a couple of sort-of tetrahedrons about 3/8 of an inch on a side out of balsa foam. It’s a little too porous, but once I cast some I could sand the sides smooth. I also made a few small rocket engine bells based on the FP von Braun ferry rocket engines. I glued one set together. Here it is, next to the old master:

Test version of the new quad.

The whole thing is less than  3/4 of an inch across. That still makes it about 12 scale feet across, but I think they will look more in-scale and they are about as small as I can make them. I may try making one with the “shoulder” on the engine bells removed. That would make it smaller, but it would also make it far more delicate – the nozzle throat is about 1/16 of an inch!

I’ve not drilled out the engine bells. I should have done that first, with a pin vise. I’ll have to do that on the next set before I attach them.

I think these will give the ship a bit of a “retro” look, which is what I’m going for, anyway. I don’t see the ship as a beautiful, streamlined aerodynamic vehicle – in fact, Drake notes than when entering the atmosphere too fast it is far too easy to tear the rigging right off the hull. This is a ship that does not enter an atmosphere ballistically. It is under power at all times.

So, slow going. One other thought it to somehow create even smaller engine bells that would look more like the Apollo bells. I just don’t know how I would hold them on!

Scratchbuilding the “Princess Cecile” – the perils of resin casting

If you read the previous post on my scratchbuilding project, the Princess Cecile from David Drake’s Lt. Leary/RCN novels, you know that I have been working with resin casting a bit, trying to duplicate my master for the “thruster clusters.”  I have a couple of issues with the design of the thruster clusters yet, including the fact that they are big – not big on the model, but in the 1:200 scale of the model they would be about 15-20 feet across! Each rocket nozzle would be about 5 feet tall. However, the ship is supposed to be 230 feet long and it should displace about 1300 tons, so moving such a massy object would take some pretty big thrusters. In particular, the thrusters on a warship should be oversized compared to a commercial vessel so that they can maneuver quickly in a battle situation. The Sissy must be nimble!

So, I’ve been trying to get better results making resin castings of the master. The first mold I made yielded only far results, with some bubbles in the surface because I was overzealous in using mold release. I also used the wrong mold release agent – stupid! I used the aerosol kind intended for making resin castings, not the liquid stuff used to keep the master from adhering to the master.

I decided I needed to make new masters. I tried making them in the other orientation – with one nozzle pointing down – and making it in two halves that would be poured without putting them together. The problem there was that two thrusters would be made in halves, and the downward-facing one would be hard to pull from the mold. The technical term is undercut, meaning that the bottom of the nozzle has a larger diameter than the throat above it. That would require me to pull the resin copy out by forcing it through the rubber.

I actually tried a couple of these and they, frankly, sucked. I decided that I would just make a better version of the first two-part mold.

The master, sitting in clay, for the mold that didn’t work.

The master that didn’t work, both parts.

Both halves of the new mold, which looks a lot like the first one. I used big toothpicks to create the air bubble release holes instead of wire.

And I was so excited that I forgot to spray the inside of the mold before I poured the resin, and got this:

Ugh! And the nozzle broke off trying to pull it out of the rubber.

I sprayed the mold and tried again. This time I got a better result:

It was easier to pull out of the rubber this time, but it was still dicey.

The problems pulling the copy out of the mold were reduced, but not eliminated. Those long slabs on the image above are the air bubble holes, filled up with resin. The resin flowed through the mold well, however, and there were no large bubbles. The other problem is that the very bottom of the mold is made of clay, not rubber. It helped hold the master upright when making the mold. A little comes loose with each pull, even after spraying it with mold release. This one looks a lot cleaner, though, and except for removing the plugs on the ends of the nozzles, this one will take much less time to clean up.

By the way, while this one was curing, I cleaned up the other one to see if it was salvageable.

I still have to find a way to glue that nozzle on.

It would need more precision sanding before I would be ready to prime it.

I’ve considered having a more complex shape made in CAD and then having it grown in a 3D printer. I just don’t have the chops with a 3D program to make that happen. I tried a couple of programs, but the free ones don’t seem to work very well and the cost of the higher-end versions – whew!

There is an advantage to using these big thrusters on the Sissy, though. In the books, the riggers sometimes had to remain out on the hull while the ship moves in real space, not just in the Matrix. In the Matrix the ship moves by adjusting the direction of the sails, but once the ship was out, it often jumped right into the thick of battle. One of Daniel Leary’s skills is being the best astrogator this side of his uncle Stacy Bergen, who plotted many of the routes from star to star still used in Leary’s time. Leary could drop out of the Matrix closer to a planet than almost any other captain. This advantage meant that often the ship dropped out of the Matrix and right into the fighting, without having the time for the riggers to come back inside. Often they stayed outside anyway to cast off broken rigging before it fouled the guns or the missile tubes.

So anyway, if the thrusters were smaller and closer to the hull a rigger could be in the way of the exhaust of the rocket engines. Bigger clusters put the nozzles higher, farther away from the hull, where they would be less danger to the riggers. At least, that’s my rationalization!

One other thing. I’m playing with this possible High Drive motor:

I don’t think I like it. And i’s too big.

This thing is about an inch and three-quarters tall. Since an average person is about 3/8″ in this scale, this motor would be almost 30 feet tall in scale! In one of the books – I think it’s “The Far Side of the Stars” – the crew has to install some High Drive motors on another ship while both are on land, not in the water. Adele had hacked into the other ship’s computer and re-routed the plasma thruster controls to the High Drive motors. Using High Drive motors anywhere other than in vacuum is very dangerous, because they operate by matter-antimatter annihilation. The result was that the ship was badly damaged, but the was repaired by the crew of the Sissy and sent back as a sort of Trojan Horse. Since the High Drive motors were destroyed when they were used on the ground, the crew pulled some motors off of a “country craft” that was abandoned in the jungle nearby.

The description doesn’t make it sound as if moving the motors was an insurmountable problem, just with the resources carried on the two ships. It is mentioned that each motor weighs about half a ton. This is about the same weight as a SpaceX Merlin first-stage rocket engine probably weighs. I could see the High Drive motors as about the same size as a Merlin as well. This puts them about the same size as one of the rocket nozzles on the thrusters.

Part of the problem of the prototype above, besides size, is that the wire winding (which is to represent that used to create the magnetic field required for an motor using antimatter) is too big and probably beyond my skills to make prettier. A High Drive motor should be a device that generates and manipulates magnetic fields to control the mix of matter and antimatter.

In the second book the High Drive motors are on the bottom of the main hull, all together. Later they are described as being on the outriggers, in case something bad happens. However, how do you send antimatter to the engines if they are on the outriggers? That’s almost a bigger problem than building the engines!

The motor may not even need a physical nozzle, since the antimatter can’t touch it. I think I have to look into antimatter engines more. Robert Forward described how to make ships operate using “mirror matter,” but not in detail for small motors like this. And most of his required just a little antimatter mixed with more regular matter, usually hydrogen, and superheats the un-annihilated hydrogen to use as reaction mass, as a sort of super-rocket engine.

I know, you can’t study this so close or the physics breaks down! How do they make antimatter, anyway? They even have missiles with small High Drive engines on them, so controlling the magnetic fields must be old hat for these crews. I know – just ignore some of this and read the damned stories!

But to build something that looks believable – well, I have to get my head into the RCN universe and extrapolate. A lot.

My next project after this is the Alliance Space Ship Vorpal Blade, from the John Ringo/Travis Taylor book. It was built from the former USS Nebraska, a ballistic missile submarine! And it has a gigantic – well, sword – on the front! Doc Travis gets the science as right as possible, within the limits of storytelling. Giant intelligent chinchillas on antigravity golden surfboards?

(I have to do this one because I was a “red shirt” in the book. Long story, but John Ringo put a bunch of folks in as red shirts and then of course got them killed off. My character, an intel geek who completely misses the evidence pointing to an incoming invasion of “demon” dog-like creatures, gets torn apart by one of said creatures. And hey, John, I wear glasses and I suppose I’m kinda geeky, but my ears do not stick out! :))

Updated scratchbuilding pictures

Alien dude and plasma engine nozzles

I got the macro function to work better on the camera so you can now see the castings of the plasma engine nozzles for the Princess Cecile. Along with them is one of the little tripod-aliens that will go in the Apollo 27 diorama.

I did ten castings of the nozzles, and will only need eight. I think I will build a box for the bottom of the ship and attach the nozzles to that…it will give me a flatter surface. Otherwise I would need to recess part of the nozzles or angle them, and I like neither of those options. I have some plastic sheet and can build the box for the bottom pretty easily, I think.

I’m experimenting with a bigger mold for the “thruster cluster” – like the ones on the Apollo Service Module or on the Lunar Module. These are scratched from a small wood bead and four of the resin nozzles left from the construction of the Fantastic Plastic von Braun rocket. (There were extras provided with the kit.)

I put the thruster cluster on top of some cut up pieces of the first mold I made. I poured some rubber around them. Then I poured rubber over it. I will cut the mold apart once it’s cured. Since it’s a small part, I hated to spend all the time doing the two-part thing.

Images of that when I get it done, if it works.

Here’s another alien image:

Green dude

He’s the other one. (She?) More detail will be included later.

Here’s one of the outboard engine pods from the Apollo 27 kit, sprayed with Alclad II Aluminum:

Engine pod

It will still get buffed once the lacquer is cured, then sprayed with Testor’s Metalizer Sealer. I may add some Metalizer weather effects later.

Here’s the cockpit – it’s light on detail, but the clear dome is pretty thick and would distort anything inside anyway:

Cockpit

So the Princess Cecile work continues. I’m just glad that the resin castings worked out so well.

More modeling updates

Flying sub on an old base I bought years ago

I finished the Flying Sub, One-Man Sub and Diving Bell a few days ago. These are from the Moebius big Seaview kit, although they are available as a separate kit without the Seaview. I will try to get better images. I lit the interior of the Flying Sub with two LEDs and used the photoetched interior set from Paragrafix. The images of the other two suck right now, so when I get better ones I will post them. I also used the decal set from TSDS.

As a break from the picky detailed stuff I started work on the Apollo 27 kit from Pegasus Models. It’s kind of cute. I decided the way to go was a diorama where one of the crew is negotiating a buy from the local aliens. I created some aliens using two part epoxy putty. They are trilaterally symmetrical…and green. My human is a modified US fighter pilot. There are a couple of things lying around that I made for him to buy from the Greenies. One looks like an egg – is somebody selling Junior?

Green dudes

I’m painting the engine pods with Alclad aluminum lacquer, with several coats of black Alclad primer underneath.  They’re mostly done, after a lot of polishing. The seat cushions in the cockpit are bits of epoxy putty as well. Behind these you can see the Princess Cecile end caps, with wooden spheres built in for the turret guns. I’m stuck on those because at the scale I’m working in the gun barrels would look like needles. Maybe that’s what I’ll use.

Engine pod and cockpit

More later when I figure out “macro” mode on my camera!

Update on the “Princess Cecile” scratchbuild

Plasma engines being cast

Well, a few things have intervened with the Princess Cecile scratchbuild. First, I finished the Flying Sub, One-man Sub and Diving Bell from the big Seaview project. (More on that in the next post.) Second, I finished a novel. Third, there was real life, and Christmas, and other stuff.

When I got back to it I had sort of an idea for the plasma engines. Drake describes them as having petals that open and close, varying thrust; this makes the ship easier to land and semi-maneuverable close to the ground. I envisioned them like the “turkey feathers” of modern jet engine nozzles. So…that’s what I started with – an F-18 1:72 scale jet plane model part. I added some detailing with small bits of solder. I used a rocket bell from a set of Japanese scratchbuilding parts I got from Starship Modeler to give it an interior. The whole thing is maybe a half-inch wide and three-quarters of an inch long.

My first mold attempts were thwarted by old materials. I bought a Micro-Mark casting starter set in 2005. The materials, which really have a shelf life of about six months, were no longer usable. I ordered some more from Micro-Mark.

The new stuff worked fine but it took me two tries to make a mold I was happy with. I added a little plastic vacuformed bulkhead from a set of parts I bought years ago from Apogee Rocketry, cut down, to the master as a pour-stub handle.

After that everything was fine. The image here isn’t very clear, but the parts came out well-defined. I only mix tiny amounts, less than 1/2 ounce, of resin at a time because I can only cast one part at a time. There is some waste. I need eight, and I will probably cast ten.

Next is to settle on a design for the High Drive motors. I have a few ideas about those, but none I’m completely happy with yet.