Not to toot my own horn, but....

**dhanners** · #1 09-19-2009, 08:19 PM

...my 1/96th-scale Atlantis shuttle stack took home a Gold at today's Nordicon, the annual contest sponsored by the Twin City Aero Historians chapter of the IPMS, and that's "P" as in "Plastic."

I entered five models; the Atlantis stack, one of Erik's Delta IIs, Leo's Proton, a Delta 7 Studio Gemini VII and a scratchbuilt Ares 1 in 1/96th scale. There were three plastic kits entered, and two of them took the Silver and the Bronze.

My shuttle also took a Bronze in the contest's theme category. The theme this year was "A date in time," and the date for my model was May 11, 2009, the date of the launch of STS-125, Hubble Servicing Mission 4, which is the one I modeled.

I should also note that Mark Hembree, associate editor of FineScale Modeler magazine, was there with his photo equipment, and left a note by my Delta II saying he wanted to photograph it. The model I built was a Delta II 7925-9.5, the launch vehicle for the MER-A ("Spirit") mission. No idea if it'll ever show up in the magazine or on their website, but it was nice of him to ask. And if it did show up, it'd strike a blow for cardmodelers everywhere.

Here are some photos of my shuttle build. The Orbiter is a Fortezza shuttle, re-sized from 1/100th to 1/96th. I added quite a bit of detail. The External Tank and the Reusable Solid Rocket Motors are scratchbuilt.

(And I should note that before the contest -- and after the photos were taken -- I made a couple of "tweaks" to the model to make it more accurate. Since I built it, I came across a few photos that showed certain sections in better detail than what I had seen before, so I fixed the model to incorporate the more accurate additions.)