Brothership II: The Leggggs

 

It has been slow going on the Brothership project. One of the most infuriating and also satisfying things about scratch-building is that it is really, really hard to 1) make the pieces you have match the vision of the finished project and 2) make the vision of the finished project match the pieces you have. 

You can't exactly iterate on an idea, as once you start committing with glue/drilling/cutting it's hard to turn back, so the vision has to be pretty well-formed. However, the vision must be formed in a conceptual space rather than a physical one. Sure, you can sketch (and I did), but in my experience, progress tends to come as a burst of inspiration after several idle hours of holding different pieces of trash next to each other and going: "hmmmmmm." 

It's therefore a fine art deciding when to commit to actually building a build (or part thereof). But once you do, and the vision and the pieces converge on one another, there are few rewards in the entire hobby to rival that feeling of satisfaction

This wasn't really the case with the main cannon. That was just a frustrating challenge of making a rotatable element out of something very heavy (the head of a bicycle pump). It's not the most elegant, but I got there in the end.

It emphatically is the case for the legs of this beast. These each on their own are possibly the most intricate things I've ever scratch-built.

They are pinned eight ways to Sunday, with external stabilizing pins disquised as pistons using small sections of coffee straw.

Symmetry, as ever with trash bashing, is a real challenge. But I'm pretty happy with this result even if it's a bit wonky.

Luckily, the legs don't need to be strong enough to hold the entire weight of the ship. (This fucker's heavy and I'm not looking forward to devising the flight stand system). The main cannon acts as the third leg and bears most of the weight of the model, and the legs provide balance.

And with cannon and legs out of the way at last, I am free to finally address the third most technically challenging part of this build, the rotatable VTOL rockets. They look like this right now:

I've already had a few skirmishes with them and ultimately discovered that magnets alone are not sufficient to keep them from rotating out of position from their own weight. This means that I will need to build a way to stabilize the magnet attachment point in a couple of different fixed positions.

After that, all that is left to do, in order of difficulty:

• Detail the main thruster
• Devise a sturdy enough flight stand
• Add a million wires, cables, guitar strings, etc.
• Add additional plating and greebles to cover mistakes
• Paint
• Get it on the table

Hopefully I will be able to report more progress soon.

Until then, feel free to let me know what you think by assembling a comment out of whatever you have lying around and lots of glue.