Brothership I

It's a very special feeling when you open up your "cool trash" drawer and realize that finally, after years of collecting, you have enough for a really cool scratchbuild.

Usually there's a key piece that I'm building around, and in this case, it was this weird sunbeam thermostat thingy that I found on the side of the street three years ago. It looked up at me and screamed: "Spaceship! Make me into a spaceship!" And it has continued to yell that at me periodically ever since.

But it needed the right pieces. The worst feeling is to embark on a build and realize a little way in that you weren't patient enough, that you just needed more pieces.

I'm pretty sure I've hit that point now, with a plugin diffuser, an old car diagnostic doohickey, the end of a knackered bicycle pump, the usual odds and ends, and, of course, the pieces that give this project it's working name: parts from Brother printer cartridges.

I dub this ship-to-be THE BROTHERSHIP.

The bridge/observation deck is obvious. Fitting everything around it is more challenging. I envision this as a craft that can operate both in and out of atmo, so it needs a gigantic propulsion system for leaving the gravity well. The plug-in diffuser is perfect for that. The Ifixit can be a senor array-type thing to fill the gap in front.

I'm using chip board to build out the rest of the structure. 

The larger printer piece provides secondary propulsion and a lower structure. A piece of a six-pack provides the structure for the rear hatch.

The severed wires will be where I mount the main cannon.

I wanted to use some eva foam to make armor plate cladding, but getting the forms right is tricky. To solve this, I settled on a method of using thin paper and a pencil to make a rubbing of the area of the ship that I wanted to clad. I could then draw over this to make a template for the eva.

Flipping the template gives the mirrored piece for the opposite side of the model.

Blue tape helps to dry fit the pieces into position and ensure a reasonable approximation of symmetry.

Some scrap windowscreen for texture:

Caps for turrets and protrusions:

More eva foam plating makes the door panels for the rear hatch. The port is from what I believe to be a piece of a bicycle hub. Not sure though. Found that in an alley.

Wire from a dead USB cable makes handy piping around edges.

Rubber tank treads left over from a previous scratch-bash hide some of the more obvious lid textures:

And that's the main body done! A lot left to build though. I have fun ideas for landing gear, detailing on the main booster, and most excitingly, rotatable VTOL rockets. There will be a million details to work out, but I am really pumped with how this is looking so far. More to come.