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Old 07-17-2017, 01:53 PM
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Mirco Mirco is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: Louny, Czech republic, Earth-that-is
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Now it would be handy to know how big the "real" ships are. It determines the size of decks, hatches and other things I might need to build. I tried 1/1000 and voila, it looks perfectly plausible:



So 1 mm on the model corresponds to 1 m in real - great, I love simple math. Numbers of people on board also seem to match. The Jumbo jet and the bus can carry lots of passengers while being small and light, but you can't live in there for long. Marine ships offer more living space, but they're just hollow shells with some little machinery below the waterline, while a nuclear spaceship is full of machinery and fuel. So 602 people plus some recreational facilities, gardens, hydroponics etc. (as mentioned in the official backstory) look pretty realistic. My guess at Neucom's mass is in the order of tens of thousand metric tons. For comparison: Boeing 747 weighs cca 400 t, Titanic 52310 and Bismarck 50300 (Neucom doesn't look very big on the picture, but she's wider than the two sea ships combined).

Scale comparison says that shuttle number 8, which docks at Neucom's back, is so big that a whole family could comfortably live in it. Given how crowded the Robinson is, they certainly would be living there, so the windows would be lit up during the flight. There is no choice but to light up the tiny model too:



Given the window placement, I'll use three miniature SMD LEDs. The windows are "glazed" by cigarette paper (with an interesting square grid texture) and the inside of the hull is covered with aluminium tape to prevent light leaks. The LEDs will be wired in parallel with one limiting resistor (more of those wouldn't fit inside), supply voltage will be probably 5 V, landing gear will double as power connector. Nice theory, I hope it's going to work.

I'm not going to build the wreck of shuttle 8 (I aim for the middle of acceleration phase when it has already been recycled for parts), so its wings will make vertical rudders for shuttle 7. They were not included in the kit, but a rudderless plane is sort of... incomplete .

To be continued next week when I get my bag of cables home and measure how hungry the LEDs are (they are salvaged from an old phone, so I don't have their datasheet).
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