Now let's back to the serious stuff again. Here's the Gatchaman Godphoenix. Scale is unknown, but is is at about 70% of the original model. I liked the build, nice parts and shapes. Inventive way of making the air inlets. Result is pretty decent but this just was for fun and I didn't really intended this one to be meticulous. It's all paper apart from the deck dome, which is heat-shaped transparent plastic.
Here I am, a month from 42 and I am doing a plane from a kid's cartoon show from the seventies...
Today I read another article on how someone got hold of a cylinder of helium, a weather balloon and made an amateur weather package as a payload. For fun, he added the little toy train of his son and sent it up. He didn't forget to record this event and put a small camera in the science package. The result was a very sweet film of a toy train, very high up in the sky:
The video, as a lot of similar Youtube creations, with similar weather balloons, equipped with cameras and some talisman, was named "[fill in your favourite object here] carried to the edge of space" Of course, at that height one can see the curvature of the earth and the thin line that makes up the atmosphere. But it is not the edge of space. Not by far. And however ingenious and spectacular the videos are I have strong objections calling things like this "to the edge of space". Because it just isn't. Why? I'll show you after the jump.
Like someone said on Papermodelers.com, it looks like I'm turning them out like sausages, just like Nikita Khruchchev said. the Dnepr is ready for gathering dust. What is there to add to the story already told? I took some pictures of the detailing work I did on the hull. The small strips of paper I used and the strips of sticky aluminium. The pedestal I used came from the thrift shop. In a previous life it was a party cup for peanuts or other nutty stuff. The wasp waist of the fairing looked like it was a small obstacle to tackle but it was very easy and it looks very good. This overall is a very well fitting kit, as usual with Leo Cherkashyn's models. I also like the way the colour turned out. Although the lettering would have been white in the real world and here it clearly isn't, I like the metallic shine of the rocket. Now here is a picture. After the jump there are some more.
The steppes. In the middle of the Russian part of nowhere. A hole in the ground. An open hatch. Suddenly a green and silver pole emerges upon a bellow of orange smoke. It rises out of the hole and slows down. A bang. A flash. A small cylinder appears out of the cloud underneath the rocket and drops away to the side and with it a dozen or so small sealing rings are jettisoned. Then, after a fraction of a moment in which the rocket seems to be floating still in the air, the engines of the first stage ignite and with a roar they kick the rocket upward into the sky.
The launch of a Dnepr. At 1:13 a replay from another viewpoint
That's how a Dnepr [n-YEP-pr] gets wings. Ever after I saw a video of this happening, the model I had was pushed into the top regions of my to-do-list. Designer Leonid Cherkashyn has made a very nice model of the rocket, although, after printing I found the colours were not much like the real thing. Much too blue - and with an imprinted shine on the rocket's skin, something I have come to dislike since I use metallic paper for such things. After some modifications I had a better matching colour and I printed it all out on semi matte metallic paper.
And there she is, ready for lift-off. The end result is very pleasing to the eye, it certainly is a big hulk of a rocket, three of those orangey-white candles next to each other. the real one is 72 meters in length, I really think it is America's most impressive rocket today. As usual, it isn't your straightforward out of the printer build, I added a couple of things. The engine bells all got a layer of paint outside and inside ant an aluminium shielding made from sticky alu-tape I have laying around.
The skins of the rockets were printed on textured paper to imitate the foam coating on the real thing. It really improves the look, I think. The insides of the Common Booster Cores all were reinforced with sturdy cardboard circles and the upper struts, holding the three CBC's together were made from florist's wire whick I painted white and red. There are some less satisfying points in the end result which I'll show after the jump, together with some other detailed shots of the Delta. All in all I am very happy how this one came out and I enjoyed the build a lot. Mark Cable's kits really are recommendable. take a look at them at Ecardmodels.
