NöNö Bärs Spaceport (Completed: Asteroid Base)

[Old Wombat]

 

[Captain Canada]

Nice one ! That sure looks like it will fly. Or orbit 

[Weaver]

Nice onr: now all you need is Jeb spacewalking near it...

The first completed thing is a rocket from "Kerbal Space Program" - a PC game where you have to send little green men into space. Construct rockets etc. If it does not fly, add more booster... 

And if it flies in multiple different directions at the same time, add more struts....

I got rather fond of KSP for a while, but the game's grown to the point where my old PC won't run the latest versions at all. There used to be a company who would professionally 3D print and build any KSP ship you sent them the files for, for a fee proportionate to it's size, of course. Unfortunately they went bust after a couple of years. It seems that they'd grossly underestimated the amount of labour neccessary to get from a 3D print to the kind of polished final product they were offering.

[nönöbär]

Perry Rhodan Kaulquappe (60 m)

Perry Rhodan is a German Science-Fiction series published since 1961. One novel is released every weeks and just a few weeks ago number 3000 was published. The series has a continuous story, starting form the first landing on the moon up to the distant future.
And yes, I have read all volumes so far - there is a huge storage place needed for all of them, ask my GF

Of course there are spaceships in this series, a few of them were released by Revell quite some years ago. The classic spaceship used by humans in this series is a globe with a torus around its equator to house the engines.
Those "Kugelraumer" were produced from "small" 60 meter ones - which also were used as tenders on bigger spaceships - up to the classic ultra-battleship with a diameter of 2500 meters.

Such a ship would be quite boring to build - just a globe with a torus and some landing gear, but with the 3D printer quite easy to make.

The basic appearance will be like this:


However, while I will do such a ship next, I want to go a step further and therefore will try something where I have no idea if I will succeed here at all.

Just before issue 200 was published in 1963 the first so called "Risszeichnung" was printed in volume 192 of the series. This is a cut-way drawing of a spaceship where you could see its inside. As we are talking about the early 1960s, the design look like the early 1960s.

So what I want to try now is to take the cut-away drawing of the 60 m spaceship of the "Kaulquappe" class and make a 3D model inspired of it. And then print it. The idea is to make a 3D print of each deck, so that the inside could be painted and the print could be made without too much support structure. My initial idea was to make it in scale 1:1000  -so it would be 6 cm in diameter, but some initial tests showed its better to go for 1:500, so it will be a 12 cm diameter model.

I hope that I can add a few first pics of it soon.

[zenrat]

I have one Perry Rhodan book in my Sci Fi library.

This sounds like an ambitious plan.  Good  luck in your endeavours.

[Dizzyfugu]

Something like this?

[PR19_Kit]

An amazing idea, best of luck with it.

I've never heard of that series, and certainly not seen the kit that Thomas posted. You learn something new every day. 

[nönöbär]

Something like this?

Yes, I had this one. The MARCO POLO, a 2500 meter ship. Best known for the mission to Gruelfin (volumes 400-500). But a horrible kit to build. The one I want to do is a "bit" smaller, it will fit into the hagars between the name and the engines. Btw, the center hangars in the torrus are for 100m cruisers.

[nönöbär]

So this is the cut-out I want to rebuild as a 3D model:


(C) VPM, drawing by Rudolf Zengerle, first published in PR 192, 1965.

As you can see, the ship has 6 main decks, for each of the decks I will do one 3D print with a cut-out at the front so that you can look inside. I will only model the visible parts in "detail" of course.

The first tests made in 1:1000 scale showed that it would work, but I won't be able to remove all the support structure of the printing without destroying the rest of the model. So I will do it in 1:500 scale.

I now work on deck 4.

[Dizzyfugu]

Cool! Good luck! 

[NARSES2]

Cool! Good luck! 

Indeed 

[nönöbär]

Right now, I am experimenting a bit if things can be printed at all. In parallel, I design the single decks of the Kaulquappe.

For example, this is deck 3, the main engine deck in the slicer to prepare it for 3d printed.


On the experimenting side, I am doing some tests for the landing legs. The problem is that I cannot make them in one piece, otherwise too much support structure would be needed at the model.

So the plan is to have one part build into the hull of the ship, this part does not extend outside, so no support is needed. The landing leg will be printed as its own part and later simply inserted.
Here is a testmodel in the right scale to see if both parts match and it worked

[Captain Canada]

Very cool. Especially the hanger deck !

[NARSES2]

Fascinating watching this come together

[nönöbär]

This is now a testprint of deck 3 that I was working on.



Scale is 1:1000, so the "real" print will be twice the size.

On the design side, I see more and more how inaccurate the original drawing is regaring in size. Some things simply to not fit if they are created in the size as they are described. For example, deck 1 and 2, the smaller craft on board. The drawing shows four of the flying tanks named "Shift" whic hare described as 10 meters long. If you compare this to the spaceship which has a diameter of 60 meters, it simply does not fit.

Here is a an example of a correctly sized "Shift" (scale 1:1000) - the little gray thing. This is among the smalles I can print at all. For the real print of the spaceship, I cam make it a bit more detailed because of the bigger size.