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.