Saturnial interlude: Design and doodle time.

While I appear to be idle at the moment, there's a lot going on in my grey matter up in my head.
Mostly when I am doing boring or numbing stuff like trying to get to sleep or while I am doing some training exercises on some fitness contraption, I am thinking about how I have to tackle certain aspects of the Saturn V build I am planning. Studying imagery of the beast and sometimes asking experts on the web about details I cannot seem to find an answer to.

During this process the rocket comes to life in my mind. I am starting to be able imagining all the nooks and crannies, or at least the ones I can make and put into my model. I start making little doodles and detailed drawings of parts in the sketch books I carry with me all the time:

And Yes, I am a Dutchy but I often provide my modeling doodles with English notes. You figure out.

More importantly, I can ponder over how the thing has to be assembled. What do i build 
first and what next? My girlfriend, surprisingly, came up with the perfect solution for one of the biggest issues I was trying to solve. (She usually shows a complete disinterest in spaceflight and only is amazed at times when she sees the size of a new model I made.) "Why not try and follow the way they build the rocket for real?" she suggested and the longer I thought about it (which was about ten seconds at most) the more this idea made sense.
Now, another point is the size. Measuring Greelt's pieces and resizing them 50% to get 1/96 turned out the parts are a little too large. 48,20% happened to be the right number to use for reducing to 1/96. I already have bought some nice pieces of paper to start with but the actual build might be some time further away in the future.
And I start to make small sketches and drawings to learn the Saturn's looks and where its doodads, thingamabobs and whatchamecallits go. (I won't bother with the real names for now…) These sketches help a lot in creating a 3D picture of the rocket in my mind and later on in paper. The building soon will start, In the meantime, after the jump you can find some more of my sketches.

--PK

The bottom tank, originally filled with RP-1, an improved variant of kerosene, had these huge pipelines running through its middle. They sprung from the Liquid Oxygen (LOX) tank above to provide the five F-1 engines with the oxidizer they needed. And I might have said in this sketch that the lowest thrust area would be closed, but perhaps there's a plumber hiding inside me after all.. Who knows.

 

The first sketches of the exploded view idea. Here's where the idea started and still I like what I see here. The S-1C, the first stage was almost spot on but i had forgotten that the S-II, the second stage, had an integrated tank system. The LOX-tank houses inside the LH2 (Liquid Hydrogen) tank, only divided by a common bulkhead dome. Here I also was reminded of the slosh barriers inside the tanks. These were there to prevent the liquids inside from sloshing and letting the rocket veer off course.

Questions, questions... What to do with this? How to build that? How can I make all stages cling together without it all falling apart? Magnets? (How do they work?) How can I open en cose the 'petals" of the LM-compartment? Should they be able to open? Should there be transparent windows in front of the holes in the fuselage? I don't know that yet. We'll see.

And here how I depict the construction to take place. That also is something to be seen later on. Anyway, this keeps me nice and busy and slowly (but surely) the Saturn V is coming into existence. First in my head, but soon out of the printer and on mu cutting mat.
I'll keep you posted!
Thanks for stopping by.
 --PK

PS. I'd like to add that the drawings you see here are in fact much smaller than shown. Most of it easily fits on one half of a post card.