SF and fantastic models

After finishing a model, I like to write an analysis of the ship’s design, when it’s possible. I’ve already published an assembly review of the imperial destroyer here and in the Work In Progress posts.

Two types of the project’s evolution that lead to the imperial destroyer as we know it can be distinguished : what I call the conceptual evolution, dated 1977, fruit of the work of the ILM model makers and illustrators and what I call an historical evolution that the prelogy and postlogy scriptwriters imagined from the original concept.

After talking about the optical fiber and the Arduino programming, last WIP for this build up : the Imperial Star Destroyer paint job. Two major challenges in this paint job : the model is single-coloured (in fact that’s not totally true but that’s the most common representation) and the colour is hard to define : white ? grey ? grey-white ? Tricky. In this article I try to explain every step required to get a satisfactory result. Bye the way, many Star Wars ships (or others) can be treated this way.

A few weeks ago I began to make an Star Wars imperial star destroyer. I decided to educate my self on the Arduino cards. These cards allow to upload a program wich runs automatically as soon as the card is powered. I won’t explain here the all card operation ; if you’re interested you can go directly on the Arduino website. I just want to show you what you can do with an Arduino in your models.

Giving life to a model as the Imperial Star Destroyer from Star Wars cannot be sufficiently achieved by just assembling the model “out of the box”, it is necessary to light it up. I’ve already talked about lighting up a model on Fantastic Modelers but never using optical fiber. Optical fiber in scale modeling allows to realize a multitude of small spotlights on a model surface. These spotlights can represent dashboards lights or small portholes, depending on the scale. Here of course, they represent the countless portholes of the Star Destroyer.