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Subject: 
Re: NASA Space Shuttle and crawler (preview)
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.space
Date: 
Tue, 6 Mar 2001 01:46:45 GMT
Viewed: 
615 times
  
"J. Spencer Rezkalla" <srezkall@mich.com> wrote in message
news:3AA453AF.69A34909@mich.com...

Awesome! Great Work! And a brown external tank to boot! (first I have
seen) Well done! I have to say the Mobile Launching Pad looks really
detailed! Is the crawler integrated to the pad - or can it drive out
from under it?

Thanks! This is a little embarrassing, but I didn't actually know that the
crawler could separate from the pad... :-(  My knowledge of the crawler
transporter is mostly superficial, and the NASA image archives seemed to
contain frustratingly few pictures of it (I could only find two).
Actually, after looking at all the archive images, I've begun to wonder
whether orange wouldn't have been more appropriate. It would certainly be
less photogenic.


Your model brings back some memories for me. When I was a kid I build a
shuttle and booster of similar scale to your model. My orbiter was
eight wide, and had a cargo hold 30 studs in length. Surprisingly I
found that I could hold the stack together with just simple brick
elements at the attachment points.

That's exactly how the boosters are attached, 16 studs total on each side. I
was a little worried about sticking power, but so far there have been no
unscheduled detachments.


Unfortunately my shuttle was rather
crude looking. I didn't have very many fancy elements back then.
The orbiter was constructed in Classic Space blue and gray (with a
lot of 33 slopes on an ugly airliner-like nose), while the external
tank was all red and the solid rockets white. I didn't have enough
Lego left over to do a pad and tower so built those out of my brother's
Construx (sp?) pieces. In fact I had an entire mini-Kennedy Space Center
thing going on in my basement back then!

I'm not building a tower, at least not a detailed one, unless I can build it
using a selection of parts that I'm not intending to use for my next two
large projects (Which both use Technic beams and lots of grey/white 1xNs and
plates).


I honestly don't think there are too many "MOC" Space Shuttle replicas
out there. Before I started mine I did a web search looking
for sources of inspiration. I only found a few:

Selcuk Gore did a very nice version looks ~3/4 minifig scale:
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=146

The incredible Legoland model:
http://hugin.ldraw.org/meyer/LEGO/Officielt/Legoland/Space_Shuttle

These, like yours, are great renditions, more accurate than mine in most
ways... however, I have this thing about "brick jaggies" on the wing edges,
I tried to avoid it as much as I could. I feel that blockiness is part of
getting the form of one's model wrong (although of course we are sometimes
left with no choice).


It's hard to tell from your photo, but I am wondering how you did you do
the black leading edge of the tail?

I'm quite pleased with how the tail turned out. Its stud direction is
unusual, mostly but not quite towards the front, and the leading edge has a
row of that weird 1x3x3.3 slope-with-studs-on-the-angled-side, so that I
could place a row of 1xN black tiles along the tail's leading edge. I found
that those black tiles made an incredible difference to how the tail looks.


P.S: I still haven't ruled out eventually going for a tank and boosters
for mine! Right now it is too costly a project in terms of both time and
money - I'd rather invest in some smaller less complicated projects
that may be just as personally rewarding.

If you see MTT's and Slave 1's on deep clearance, then that's your
opportunity. Almost all of the brown in my external fuel tank (of 14 studs'
radius) comes from 3 MTT's and 4 Slave 1's, with maybe 4 Droid Fighters'
worth of small brown plates to fill in any gaps. You would probably require
at least twice that amount, but I don't think it's out of the question - you
could probably also go for Droid Escape white cylinder pieces for the
boosters, which will look much better than my (somewhat blocky) solution if
you remove the printing with Brasso. Anyway, good luck, and I hope you find
the discounts you need!

--
Cheers,
Paul
LUGNET member 164
http://www.geocities.com/doctorshnub/



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: NASA Space Shuttle and crawler (preview)
 
(...) Embarrassingly I only discovered that fact a couple of years ago myself (and they've been launching shuttles and Saturn Vs for the past 30 years using those same mobile launch pads and crawlers!) One cool site you might want to check out is (...) (24 years ago, 7-Mar-01, to lugnet.space)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: NASA Space Shuttle and crawler (preview)
 
(...) seen) Well done! I have to say the Mobile Launching Pad looks really detailed! Is the crawler integrated to the pad - or can it drive out from under it? (...) Your model brings back some memories for me. When I was a kid I build a shuttle and (...) (24 years ago, 6-Mar-01, to lugnet.space)

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