Project: Thunderhawk Part 9

And things are taking shape now. With the main fuselage section mostly built, it has come time to connect the forward section to it!

At this stage it looks more like some sort of futuristic submersible then an orbital lander. I image the addition of wings and engines will change this but time will tell. I am putting some thought into the idea of making a Space marine amphibious assault craft based on the thunderhawk template. *shrugs* Something to mull over.

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Project: Thunderhawk Part 8

Remember when I was talking about having to come up with odd ways to apply pressure to items while glue set? I think I've found the best of the best (so far):

Yup! That is a medicine bottle being pressed into the side of the Thunderhawk by a rubber band, and a tail fine being held in mid-air by a series of 3 mini-bar clamps.

The medicine bottle pressure point is to hold a flat panel against the side of the body while the glue dries. The angle of the body is wonky enough that I couldn't get a clamp around it, and a rubber band wants to slide up and off the panel. The tail fine is being held in mid-air because there are a series of points that need to be glued down and allowed to set.

But enough about the holding the parts while they dry. I've been putting more thought into constructing this monster out of styrene. One of the biggest... challenges with this template has been understanding how it goes together. For example this:

when cut out, and folded up properly is intended to become this:

As you can probably tell from the fact that it's taking 3 bar clamps to hold the piece while the glue sets, this is a rather annoying part. So I'm thinking about other ways I can build it. One way I'm considering is taking a piece of 4mm thick sheet styrene and cutting out the over all shape of the tail fin. Then using .001m styrene cut out the respective panels and pieces and fit them together like a jig saw puzzle. Kind of like this:

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Project: Thunderhawk part 4

So 15 ounces of white glue and about 20 hours of work... and the cockpit is about 90% complete. Well the cardboard version is anyway. 

I included the Land raider in the image for scale purposes. As you can see, the Thunderhawk forward section absolutely dwarfs the Land Raider.... which kind of makes me entertain the idea of building a second one and converting it into a Land Raider. Hmm interesting thought... will need to explore it.

Anyway, the last big things to do on the forward section are the forward stabilizers, and the forward gun mounts, but I think I'm going to hold off on the gun mounts for the immediate moment. One of the things I want to do, either with this particular project or down the line, is to build a model for my Thunderhawk Hunter apoc unit I developed, a Chaos dedicated Anti-infantry air craft armed with a mass missile launcher and several heavy machine guns (think of Reaper Auto-cannons on crack). So I may try to build the weapon mounts to be removable. 

The interior is fairly well detailed thanks to the very detail heavy approach that Patoroch takes with his templates. It's partially frustrating because it means you can build 50 parts, attach them... and still not finished the one wall. But as you can see it leads to some great detail and I think will give me a great guide to follow as I advance into styrene. 

The canopy bracing was an absolute pain to cut out and I had to replace my exacto blade three times in order to keep the cuts neat and even then I failed a couple places. If you look closely you can see where I had to use a strip of paper to re-attach a broken strut.

Something I want to try is building a control panel with in-set screens. What I'm thinking of doing is cutting out the holes for a screen, in-setting a sheet of clear styrene, and then affixing a decal to the back of the clear styrene for the monitor graphics. That way I can put a light or LED under the console and have the light come from the monitor.

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Project: Thunderhawk part 3

So I've run into the first real problem with translating a paper template to a thicker medium:

Yep, the spacing. See this template was designed for paper witch is very very thin. I'm not sure of the actual measurement, but for the point of discussion we'll say it's 1 sheet thick. The card stock I've using is mostly cereal boxes and the like which appears to be about 15-20 sheet thick. The way this template works is by layering shapes ontop of on another to create raised and recessed details. With some details being 3 or even 4 layers on top of one another that's a 4 sheet height. Cool.

Now take the exact same plans and apply them to card stock which is about 20 times as thick as a sheet of paper. You've got part 3, on top of part 2 on top of part 1. And each is 20 sheets thick. A better explination might be a visual explination:

 

The image on the left is a series of 1pixel wide shapes stacked on top of  each other, while the one on the right is a similar lay out but with 20pixel wide blocks. You can see how the difference in thicknesses adds up, and quickly. Now take this, and compound it by 3 and 4 sub structures and you can wind up with parts that are out of alignment by as much as a 1/4 inch and you have followed the directions perfectly.

This is really the crux of why I'm doing this prototype model in cardstock rather then jumping into plasticard. This project is going to take a lot of plasticard and I want the plasticard version to look built, not slapped together. And I don't want to waste a metric crap ton worth of plasticard either. 

So what am I going to do to correct this? Well, one of the nice things about sheet stryene is it's a machined material so it's a consistent thickness. With that in mind I can then go back to the plans and begine breaking down the parts and figure out what pieces of what part will be done with 2mm styrene, what parts will be in 1mm, what will be in .5mm and what will need to be be .01mm sheeting. 

So what I'm doing is as I build the model in cardstock, I make notes about how each part lays in the plans and on the finished part. Then dropping the plans into photoshop and color coding those parts to differentiat styrene thickness. 

 

The light blue is indictive of the part being made of 2mm sheet styrene. The light green .01mm sheet and the orange in 1mm sheet. If my measurements are right the parts should lay op on top of one another, and then with a little filler putty, should produce something comparable to the tank kits from Games workshop. I hope anyway. We'll see.

As an aside I've been thinking about lighting. I mean wiring up the model with LEDs and lights.

Operating purely on the "This would be awesome" level of planning right now, I'm looking into having 3 circuits in the finished model. The first circuit would be internal lighting for the cockpit and lower deck with an on/off switch, the 2nd circuit will be a pulsing circuit and will be the engines, while the third circuit will be on an active switch. The idea being I can turn the lights on in the cockpit and lower deck, I can press and hold a switch and the inside of the thunderhawk cannon barrel will glow red, while if I flip the third switch the interior of the engines will pulse blue/white.

Now I admit that lighting plan is well above my electrical skills. Hell skills make it sound like I actually know what I'm doing with electronics. All I can do is wire a switch and light to a battery pack. But I also like challenges and I am pursuing several avenues to help me with this.

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Project: Thunderhawk Part 2

So I've been working on the Thunderhawk project. The designer of the template, Patoroch took a noteworthy approach to his templates and created a 3 part template. Part 1 provides the parts and the plans for the cockpit, part 2 the fuselage and part 3 the wings and engines. In a simpler template such an approach wouldn't be an issue in the slightest. But Patoroch's templates are very detailed and frequently have parts numberings in the hundreds. So my first real step was taking his 3 templates, stripping out the colored parts and the plans from the templates and assemble a file that was nothing but the black and white line art parts. I printed that out and have been building the pieces in sections.

So the section I'm building now is the lower deck of the forward section:

Here is the lower section as it stands now. As I build the model in card stock I'm making notes about how parts go together. One of the big things I want to do in my plastic model is to build the interior details. This is really the challenge of the project at this point. Deciding what I want the interior details to be. You see, Patoroch's templates are layers of details on top of one another. This approach works quit well with paper and card stock. But it's rather limiting when it comes to plastic. You can't have round cables with card stock for instance. When working with plastic you can file down the edges to make it a rounded shape, which is something you can't do with paper or cardboard.

So I'm building the cardboard model as it's intended to be built and in the process making notes about what I want to do with the plastic version. One of the big things is that I want to add cables, monitors and interior lights to the plastic model. I've even considering wiring up actual lights for the interior.

For the power cables such for the interior, I think I'll using Dragon Forges' small and medium cables. I'm thinking about building a large monitor bank for the interior as well, a bit like the bank of monitors on the inside of the Land Raider model.

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Review: Storm Talon

So, today I'm taking a look at Games Workshop's latest entry to the "Aircraft" category the Space Marine Storm Talon!

Let's begin. I have to say, in comparison to the Storm Raven model I am rather underwhelmed by the Storm Talon. First off, the box is way bigger then it needs to be.

At first inspection of the model, I see that it's entire contents  occupy less then 1/2 of the inner volume of the box. I know it's very petty but this really bothers me. If you look at the Predator model that model fills the box to the brim. And frankly, that's what I was expecting from this model. A predator with wings and jets. The model just doesn't live up to that expectation.

Though in comparison to the Storm Raven, the Storm Talon the part density of the Storm talon is much higher. You can see very little wasted space in this kit so that's a plus.

Now moving onto the finished model.

The model is surprisingly small. Once again I was expecting something more akin to a predator size and mass. Instead the model just seems to be closer to a beefed up attack bike. The engines on the sides of the main body do rotate about 80 degrees so you can make the Talon appear to be flying forward or hovering which is nice considering the rules for the unit. Which leads me to my next disappointment in the model: The "hover jets" on the belly of the craft.

They are literally just plastic thruster nozzles glues to the bottom of the craft. I was really expecting the model to be somewhat more involved with these hover jets. Swivel mounts like the Storm Raven VTOLs perhaps. Instead they are literally just suck on the model.

 The Twin linked assault cannons on the chin mount are my second biggest point of annoyance with the model. These cannons really seem like a throw back to the older style of assault cannons found on the dreadnought and the previous version of the Baal predator. Big, and clunky and not particularly well thought out. Honestly, a single Assault cannon from the Raven Guard or LandSpeeder sprue with a targeting array would have worked much better for this model and I think helped to give it a sleeker profile.

The weapon pods on the side are kind of nice and are over all the best part of the model. They are well designed and look very comparable to the Typhoon launchers from the land Speeder and the missile launcher from the dreadnought, helping carry the idea that all these units are from the same force and share technology. I'm somewhat tempted to adapt the design for a Razor back turret by attack them top to top and mounting it side way:

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