Holding a circular patten, waiting to land.

The leopards eta was 7to10 working days and 10working days would of been yesterday. The 3d printers contacted me yesterday to say they were 2days behind (plus a day ro 2 for shipping)

So just a little longer hopefully Friday if not maybe Saturday or worse case Monday (I hate weekends).

In the mean time I've been getting the armorcast vulture and madcat ready to paint. I was thinking for the madcat the same jade falcons scheme (duck egg green and pink accents) but for the vulture this

Which kinda looks something like this from the cartoon Kristen Redmond mech grey/purple/green but i'm not a fan of purple that's going to ceramic red;

 I might try to mixed a hint of grey/green for the barrels and a charcoal strip for the nose kinda like this;

My photo shop skills failed me the barrels should be more matte and more subtle tint of green, not sold on the centre being grey either will have to stare at it some more.

And the madcat something like this

Again the green to pink would be much more subtle

TT dragon and cent

degreased given a base coat. They're just free standing in this photo

Not great prints but for the price I wasn't expecting miracles, just some cheerful TT scaled mechs.

Coincidentally a friend had some of his concept art turned into 15mm models and the prints look A1. I'm going to have to get in contact with those guys and see about prices for the bigger stuff.

As for these 2 I'll make a spruce for them and cast them at the same time I do Leopard.

No its not a Borg cube but dropship tetris and hey what did UPS bring me!

This'll be a long post td:lr "leopards gone to the printers, TT scale dragon and cent arrived."

My printer services uses swept volume to price prints, it means you pay for the an imaginary box that your model would fit in. Pricing in 3D priniting is cubed so every mm oversize you playing a hefty multipul for it. But the up side is you can stuff a lot of things in to the void space around and inside larger parts.

The first quote I received was enough to floor me enough to buy a small second hand car. But it was a rough cobble together just to get an idea of cost I knew there a lot i could do to get the swept volume down.

And so began a 2day game of 3D Dropship Tetris. I managed to get a swept volume decrease of 50% yippee!

what you see below is the final result "resistance is futile"

That brought the print into an acceptable price range along with the following adjustments;

- I had to scale the drop ship down to 6.1cm door height (the ceiling I thinned to allow 6.4cm ceiling height) so the altas may have to stoop to get in but that small decrease in high brings in good cost reduction.

- I added a pop-out panel to the dropship nose (top left) to be able to utilise the interior space. I managed to get in one of the thrusters (netting a big cost saving) and a few other odd items. The void space in the nose will be filled and the pop out panel added back for casting.

- I still had some voids left over and decided to fill this with dropship bric-a-brac. I made shipping containers (six), crates (six) and ammo boxes (eighteen). I made them stackable too. You can see them nested in the top right picture. If I have any left over RTV I'll make some casts of those but that's a stretch goal otherwise They'll be for decoration for my personal model.

- I knew all along I would have to go for SLS printing on this. Since it would be larger than the mechs I've printed and cost would be high. SLS is common form of printing and one of the cheapest profession grade prints. However the surface (pitted/printlines) needs a prep and details can easily vanish in the printing process. With that in mind all the details I added are chunky and scaled appropriately for what the printer should be able to do. I have some special filler paint and i plan to spend a good deal of time surface prep'ing the model so that it should be good to paint right out the mould.

So the order has been placed etc is 10working days.

 

And something that came from UPS today;

 

Fresh out the bag. Table top scale dragon and centurion. I'll pop them into the sonic cleaner with some degreaser to get the free off the printing wax. If your wondering the cent looks a little taller but that's just because I didn't fuse his parts before printing so he's a bit stretched. I'll glue him before casting (tosro, left arm, left leg, right arm, right leg) The details aren't going to be super sharp at this scale but they're on par with the metal Battech minis. Just some fun to go with the dropship and scales of the bigger 1/60 stuff.

And finally

We expecting another addition to the family before the end of the month (the wife's thinking next few days). So once that does happen it tend to be chaos for at least 6 weeks which dumps us right at the 4weeks of Christmas chaos so more updates might be sparse.

Leopard - Scale and bay progress

"What is table top scale?" - Well MWO is based off Battletech and battletech is a board game played with metal miniatures around 5cm in height on a hexagonal board.

In green are 2 mechs scaled to table top height. Those centurions are 4.8cm tall so you can see plenty of head room for the larger models with bases. All said and done you could probably fit 6 models in the drop ship (three on either side)

I've also added a battletech themed floor to the bays there's some finishing touches to be added but making those hexs work took longer than I thought.

As well as seeing how the new central spine works you can also see the lugs I have been adding for strength when gluing the sections together.

I have to add some more lugs then go though the model again to make sure there's no holes in the parts or internal geometry then I should be ready to get some print quotes (if i dont get side tracked adding details).

Leopard Hanger

So last night I start to fret that the midsection of the drop ship wouldn't have the strength to support the bow and the tail without falling over like a deck of cards since the its only connected but the top and the bottom of the mech hanger.

I solution was to add a vertical central spine the turning the top and bottom of the hanger into an I beam

The spine is about 1cm thick and you can see there's a shutter door I made 5cm x 5cm as well as lots of cross beams (Should you want an open hanger but keep the strength you could drill out these sections). I've also added cross beams to the the other walls as well as personal doors and observation windows. I might add something to the floor but i wanted to keep it flat so models don't wobble.

Leopard update

Not much work has been done on the leopard. Our 2nd child is due this month so I've been running about finishing all those jobs around the house that need taking care of before the gremlin arrives.

But i have been musing how to break down the drops ship this is the first draft

As you can see allot of parts about 40.

I might put the 2 bow slices together and the 2 stern slices but I have to make sure they all fit in the vacuum/pressure chamber (the cylinder you see behind) with enough clearance for a few cm of rtv and the mould boxes. Ideally I would cast them in as bigger chunks as possible means; less rtv (cheaper), less seams, quicker casting. But it never so simple as I also have to think about orientation and where the moulds will open, so I will have to take my time and think this one through carefully.


On a side note I finally painted my mini commando thats been sitting around in a spray can lid for a year.

It was a last minute idea to rescale and print so the detail was never really there (lost in the rescaling). The paint job was quick done between MWO drops in a Saturday and I think it looks cool. I enjoyed it so much I sent a TT scaled cent and dragon to the printers, which turned out to be a far more involved job than a 2min rescale end up being 2 days of fighting my 3D modelling software daemons which hates any thing tiny and detailed!