Friede #1

Well, here's the first peek at what the grandmother of all spacecraft is going to look.

The diameter of the ship is nice, about nine centimeters, without the stabilizing fins, I think.

Today I worked on the top part, which is bi-coloured. I also coloured all the dark edges with a dark grey pencil to prevent ugly white edges.

A cone, a lot of red parts and some other stuff.

Just like the N-1, this model comes together very well. Ralph Currell has made an excellent paper model, I think. Inside the cone there are a lot of reinforcing circles. Up until recently I either cut those out free

hand or I tried and used my cheap compass cutter. The latter always was guaranteed to mess up a nice circle beyond recognition. Dull blade? Bad product? who knows? Anyway, I was fed up with this piece of junk and when I bought new blades for my Xacto I saw this thing in the shop. I could try it out and I really liked it. It cuts perfect circles and with a little more experience it's very easy to use. I used it on the reinforcers inside the cone of Friede and it works really fine.

No, I am not going to promote this gadget. But it works.

Next up were the engines. Although Stage 1 has the possibility to do the engines in 3D, the second stage, although detachable, has not. Just a flat rendition of the 42 hexagonal rocket cones. I did some photoshop magic and reduced the seven hexagonal first stage engines to 78% and copied them until I had 54 of them.  These were just the right size for the 2nd stage motor part and now it's cutting and folding and more of the same until I have enough for the whole cluster. Might take some time...

2D versus 3D. I prefer to have a paper model in 3D. So cutterdecut one gazillion little engine cones I will.

 Right, so far for the first update.

See you soon.