Luckily I prepared the next posts offline while waiting for the server to come up again - backups be blessed!
Second part is Opalia which looked simplest:
And indeed she was. The only nontrivial place is the recessed stern where you need to close almost the whole circumference at once and there is no way to hold the tabs from inside. I used edge gluing for the petals, half-millimeter tabs don't work.
I think the intake textures on wing leading edges are a little bit wrong:
But maybe they are meant to be vertical thrusters, not intakes, so they may be OK
. I'll be cutting them out anyway, so it doesn't matter.
Solar Explorer was far from trivial:
Main hull is quite long and fingers can't reach all the way in to hold bow tabs, but it's not really a problem. Rear end of the top pod is: a sloping-edged open box has to be glued to seven tabs at once (eighth one can be glued beforehand). My implementation of the joint is not pretty. An internal former would be very helpful, as well as having the sloped segment unfolded as one curved strip instead of petals. But I'll use another technology for the final build (cutting to individual thickly laminated panels), so it's not going to bother me any more.
Leading edge of the bottom wing is also tricky, but doable with a sufficiently long tweezer. I plan to modify the wing by adding internal cardboard beams and formers and sticking the "roof" to the front edge of the resulting stiff slab. Be careful with the side wings, they tend to twist. Main engine nozzle looked scary at first (the whole shape is hollow, without any internal formers at all), but came together surprisingly well. Crooked round emitter on the bottom wing is easy, I'm just too lazy to cut out all the little tabs, so I edge-glued it almost exclusively. From the structural integrity point of view, the most critical spot is the "neck" between hull and top pod. It's necessary to stick some vertical skewers through the whole ship, or at least thoroughly stiffen the two flat walls where the neck attaches, otherwise you get a flapping ornithopter-like wing
.
The next liner to build is... the Next Liner, obviously.
Oval hull is quite rare among sci-fi spacecraft, they usually come in either circular or boxy shapes. Even paper is a traditionalist and tries to unroll to an ordinary cylinder, but fortunately it's no problem to trace the rear bulkhead on a cardboard and make a second one at the front:
It worked well, unlike the idea to edge-glue the front cone to avoid tab work. I'll add a tab strip next time. Round bodies keep their shape relatively well, so the top of the ship is quite strong, but there is still the floppy flat bottom of the top pod, so the ship needs a skewer again. Bottom wing needs tweezers, as before.
As a "guinea pig" prototype is being trained on, final version has been printed:
This time with proper fitting to page, on a nice paper, in laser and full colors. 28 pages total. I don't remember how much time I spent flipping through the kit, planning and drooling :D .
Thanks, Jan!