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NathanR

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  1. NathanR
    Well, it was a busy and productive easter weekend for me. With the main structure in place, I'm focusing now on the little details as I slowly work up the tower. I think the most fun I had was putting in the access staircases for these three swing-arms. The real ones were made from metal grilles, but I went with solid walls here. There's just enough room to put a nanofigure on there! I've also added in a series of small gantries, sticking out from the side of the tower (you can see one top left of the picture). These small platforms had high-speed cameras mounted on them, to film the rocket's launch and each arm as it swung back. Lastly, you can just about see where I've started drafting the control boxes that dot each level: Around the rest of the tower, I've been adding in more pipes running up the sides of the tower. I've no idea what they all are - I think they are a mix of fuel lines, water pipes and electrical cables. The latest pipes aren't quite in system, and require the axles to be pulled apart ever so slightly. No more than 0.1mm, which is about the separation between two bricks placed next to each other, but it is a little irritating . You can also see where I've started detailing the base of the launch pad. Adding in the pin holes to support the pipes has broken the interlocking pattern, so I may need to look again at how strong it is. The model is now at 5597 pieces...
  2. NathanR
    Thanks for the suggestion. But what I mean is, the fuel pipes go up the side of the tower to some level, then get routed either from the ceiling or floor of that level to one of the umbilical arms. For example, in this CAD image of a never-released brass model kit, you can see a load of pipe work suspended from the ceilings of a few levels, and threaded around the tower to carry the fuel from the pipes on the side to the swing arms: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=36194.msg1570868#msg1570868. That's the kind of detail I'm going for... though maybe I'm overdoing it...
  3. NathanR
    I'm slowly working my way up the tower, adding in more details as I go. The model its currently on 4800 pieces. It's funny how once you pass about 4000 parts, you stop caring about what it will cost and just keep building. There will be at least another 1000... The cluster of three swing-arms has had a slight overhaul, based on a card model LUT build-up I found on a scale model forum. The most notable change is the inclusion of a white stripe on the top arm, to represent one of the larger fueling pipes. It's a bit crude, but once the arm swings into the tower there is only a half-beam width to work with. I'm also slowly working my way up the front of the tower, adding a stripe on the left-hand side. It can only be one tile thick - with a plate, the studs would get in the way of the swing arms. So it becomes a fun challenge trying to get at least two connection points for each 1x6 or 1x8 tile. And LDD allows half pins to connect to pin holes, even when the half-pin/plate connection is completely illegal. The biggest update this time round is the fuel pipes up the side of the tower. The tallest must be the equivalent of a 40L axle or something, running up the tower with only one connection point at the top. A nice detail, and one which isn't quite "in-system", is where a pipe "crosses over" about a third of the way up. It's two axle connector #1 with a 3L axle, pulled very slightly apart. There are two problems with the fuel pipes. The full set at the base is too wide, there are 7 pipes and I think I should only use 6, but I can't figure out which pipe to delete (I already got it down from 11 on the real one). I need the space to add in two silver-grey pipes on the righthand edge. The other problem is that the pipes just stop on the side of the tower without going anywhere... I've tried looking for reference photos that show where they are supposed to go, but there don't seem to be any. In fact, my google searches are starting to return more and more of the images I've posted in this thread...
  4. NathanR
    Aw, that is adorable!!!
  5. NathanR
    I'm not sure there are any "break points" in the pipes going up the tower... And the main drive axle for the swing arms is not going to come off easily. I imagine the whole tower might shatter if you tried to disassemble it. It's something I can look into once the model is finished I guess. I've spent the last few days working on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th swing-arms, which connected to the S-1C (forward), the interstage, and the S-II (aft). Trying to find strong connections is tricky enough, finding versions where the parts all exist in red has been quite frustrating. However, I've managed to capture most of the gantries and the fuel pipes/cables. The only flaw is a missing fuel pipe that runs along the side of the topmost of these three arms. Unfortunately, when the arms are swung back (rotated to 90 degrees) there is only a half-beam thickness gap between the tower and the arm. A 3.18mm bar would fit, but there is no way to attach it without the clips colliding with the tower. In other news, I've been experimenting with LDD 4.3.11 (I delayed updating from 4.3.10 because it seemed to be more intensive on the CPU), and it *seems* to handle large models a little better. Turning down the graphics settings a bit has also helped. I might be able to keep going on the main file after all. Only problem is, I'm seeing rounding errors/fractional offsets creeping in as I go up the tower. I may need to rebuild the whole file from scratch... again...
  6. NathanR
    Cool, I will check that out over the weekend! In the meantime, a small update, I just finished the first service arm that linked to the middle of the S-1C. It's a little blockier than I'd have liked, but I can't come up with a better way of making it. The arm needs to be built "sideways", but the driving axle for moving the arms needs to be vertical. I could really use a version of 6536 with two axles holes, instead of an axle and pin hole. The compromise is to mount the arm on a pair of 42003, and rely on the technic half pins to stop the arm from flopping. If anyone has suggestions for an improvement, I'd be grateful to hear them.
  7. NathanR
    I'd forgotten about that one... that basically uses LDraw behind the scenes doesn't it? My MBP has 16Gb of ram, but it doesn't have a dedicated graphics card so the problem (I think) is handling the sheer number of 3D objects on screen at the same time. Have you tried Sud.io with large models?
  8. NathanR
    It's a nice idea, but the model doesn't really have too many "break points". The MLP, and Layers1-4, are already separate files, and stitching them back together for beauty shots is a nightmare. LDD stutters and freezes while trying to work out where the parts are to snap in. Details like control boxes on each level, or the individual swing arms, they can be made in separate files. But the pipes up the side... even looking at the full model I struggle to see how to connect them, and I can't even begin to figure out how they would be placed if I was working across multiple files, e.g levels 4-8, 9-12... I've spent some time looking at alternative editors, but I use a Mac and there's not really any choice. Bricksmith/LDraw works but struggles with the model and is really painful to work with. Mecabricks is fantastic, but there's no export option or (apparently) any way to get a list of pieces at the end. I will have to get the model into both, eventually, so I can create an instruction manual and fancy photo-real renders. I really want to finish this model, though, so I will try and figure something out.
  9. NathanR
    Some more updates, with good news... and sad news. I've hooked up the lowermost swing-arm to the main axle using a "Universal Joint". It's an amazingly simple linkage, but every time I see one in action I end up wondering what weird magic is happening to shift the axis of rotation. You can also see a sketch for the gantry that provides access for people to walk into the arm. One "problem" with the universal joint is that it makes the bottom swing arm stick out at a slightly different angle to all the others: However, they all line up at 90 degrees. It turns out that a universal joint is actually what's called a non-CV joint, or non-constant-veolcity. The input axle turns at a fixed speed, the output axle will speed up and slow down as it turns round. This means the bottom arm is rotated further than the others, but ill turn faster so that all arms hit the tower at the same moment. At first I was annoyed by the arm sticking out, but then I came across a reference that this bottom arm was actually the last to disengage from the rocket in the milliseconds before launch. By starting with at a greater angle, the arm will indeed "disengage" from the rocket last.. quite a nice touch really. I've also been adding additional detailing up the side of the tower. You can see here some pipes on the side of the tower (not sure what they actually did on the real one, but I guess they were important...?) and a "cable tray" on the back. I'll probably swap out the grille bricks for 1x2 "logs", the patten looks more consistent when viewed from other angles. Given how much the dark grey dominates, I'm wondering whether the 3x6 centre support column should be changed to light grey, to make it more visible. I'm also wondering if the dark grey 1x1 supports on each layer, placed to make the central column have a 6x6 footprint, could also be removed. I'm not sure if this would compromise the structure. The sad news is, that the model has passed 4600 parts (should be 5200 but I deleted all the clips and grille pieces for the railings round each deck) and become too big for my poor laptop to handle. I can't break the model into smaller chunks any more, details like the pipes running up the tower mean that I need to work on the whole thing to establish where connection points can go. The full model is making the laptop run very hot, which will either shorten the laptop's lifetime or actually damage it. To those of you who think I'm just being paranoid, my previous laptop had it's battery physically damaged and left unable to hold more than an hour of charge after thirty minutes playing a demo computer game. So the upshot is that I won't be working on this until I can either get to a more powerful computer, or find a Mac alternative to LDD that can actually handle such a huge model without burning out my laptop...
  10. NathanR
    There was a guy whose doctor said he should quit drinking and get a hobby. He took half the doc's advice... He started putting ships in bottles... After a break and coming to the model fresh, I looked again at the rocket. The adaptor from S-II to S-IVb is actually correctly - there are two studs between the grille tiles and the slope bricks on the S-II, this is part of the conical adaptor. The only error I can find is that the LES is two bricks two tall, probably due to including the height of the BPC (the cover over the command module) n the height of the escape rocket tower. Shrinking the LES by two bricks puts the rocket back to 1:112 scale almost perfectly. Firstly, this means that the entire MLP is about two studs too big in each direction... For the sake of my sanity, I'm leaving it as it currently is. Secondly, I can accept a tower height that is 1:112 scale, so I've adjusted the heights of a few levels to get the swing arms at the right heights. Everything is now looking pretty good: I'm expecting a few problems from the position of the swing-arm axle, I'm not sure how easy it will be to link it up to a gear box in the top deck, but that's a problem for another day. Over the weekend while eurobricks has been offline, I've focused on adding in the fuel pipes that ran up the side of the tower (see above). The transition from light grey to white is done using universal joints - not an ideal hinge, but the angle is about 10 degrees and click hinges won't fit. I did consider using the "toggle joint", part 32126, but this isn't available in light grey (after appearing in the 10179 UCS Millennium Falcon, the part costs ~2 EUR each). The final hinge in white is done using 32126 in white, which is mercifully available in two sets at the moment, but still expensive. I guess the next problem is working out which level each pipe finishes on (and where it runs to after that), In haven't seen too many reference images and it's made worse by the fact that the real LUT had 11 pipes running up the side of the tower and I have only got room for 7. But onwards and upwards... literally...
  11. NathanR
    I'm in the UK, I order from UK/EU with a major project about once a year. I try and get domestic shipping whenever possible, even within the EU the postage is a nightmare. I guess the problem is that with everyone always buying the cheapest bricks, only the expensive ones get left. And prices keep going up everywhere in general One possible solution, I have heard vague rumours that if you're in a Lego User Group (LUG) you can place bulk orders and get special discount prices. Not sure how true that is or how hard it would be to get into such a scheme, Given the number of parts you're ordering, it might be worth looking into.
  12. NathanR
    Well, she's starting to look like a launch tower: Unfortunately... Houston we have a problem. The swing arms are correctly placed on the tower, but they don't touch the right bits of the rocket. The bottom four arms are basically fine (this is Lego after all...) but the topmost arm, which is the one the crew used to get into the Command Module, is placed just over three bricks too high. This is like having the astronauts unable to simply step into the spacecraft, but jump down 3-4 metres into the open hatch. Some giant leap for mankind! Worse, the tower is already a bit shorter than it should be. The column of yellow bricks shows the height of a 380ft tall tower, at 1:110 scale. So where have I gone wrong? After much head scratching and number crunching, it turns out the rocket itself is the problem! Firstly, I checked the scale of the rocket. The width of the first stage (ignoring fins) is 10m in real life, 28 plates in Lego, so is to a scale of 1:110.6. The height of the rocket was 110.64m, the Lego model is 313 plates tall - a scale of 1:110.5. So, it's not actually 1:110 as everyone says, but this just means the tower should be two plates short than it currently is. I still have another 7-8 plates to explain. So I decided to check each stage. The first stage was 42m, excluding the interstage ring, and is about 40 bricks tall in Lego, which works out at 1:110 or 1:111 scale. So far so good. I can't find heights for the S-II or the S-IVb on the assembled rocket. Official statistics always include the height of the engines, which don't count here because they are hidden inside the rocket (and I know have been changed because of limitations in the choice of Lego parts available). The Luinar Module housing is the right height. Then I looked at the Launch Escape Tower (LES). Including the white cover over the Command Module, the entires LES was 12.02m tall. At 1:110 scale, this is 11.3 bricks high. The Lego model has it as 13.3 bricks tall. So the rocket has the right overall height... but somewhere on the S-II and S-IVb, the rocket is two bricks too short, and they recover this height by making the LES a bit longer. I suspect it's the black and white cone linking the S-II to the S-IVb, but as I can't get any proper height data I can't be sure. So now I'm faced with a really fun problem... over 12 identical levels (ignoring the first three, I don't want to mess with the triangles at the bottom of the tower any more), how can I lose 9 plates of height? Edit: Just confirmed, it is indeed the adaptor linking the S-II to the S-IVb. I thought the S-II had been made taller to compensate, but I was wrong. So, I either compress one layer in the middle to be half the height (which will look odd), shrink the whole tower one plate per layer (which leaves enough space to fit an extra deck on top to make top the correct height), or just place the crew access arm at an incorrect height (which will mess up the detailing later. What should I do?
  13. NathanR
    I think the bricklink prices have enormous variation, from dirt cheap to (occasionally) downright ridiculous. I don't usually see common parts going above the Bricks and Pieces price. However, if you are very careful in choosing which stores to use, and if you know how to work the system, you can get very reasonable prices out of bricklink. Firstly, you should check what brick variants you are trying to buy. I uploaded an LDD file to bricklink, and the 1x1x5 bricks turned into 1x1x5 brick undetermined stud type. The auto buy picked out a seller who had loads... for 9.00 EUR each. After swapping to the more common version with solid stud, the price dropped to 0.06 EUR each. Secondly, the auto-buy feature tries to minimise the number of orders - you save on postage, but finding one or two sellers with everything you need means you'll likely pay a fortune per brick. I typically set the "maximum price" field in the bricklink wanted lists to the Bricks and Pieces price for each part - not always for every part, it can be enough to set one or two of the more expensive parts. The auto buy will then be forced to pick more than three stores, and this will drive the price down. For example, I uploaded a 4000 part WIP MOC to bricklink to guess the price, auto buy told me that it would be ~900 EUR done in three orders. I tweaked the maximum price (e.g. 1x12 bricks to ~0.25EUR, 16x16 plates ~2.00 EUR), and then auto buy told me it would be 250EUR over about 12 orders. Of course then you can play about further, pay a tiny bit more for a brick at a different one of the selected stores, so you end up with fewer orders overall and then save on the postage. Any bricks in the order which are the same price from "Bricks and Pieces", you of course order direct from lego (they have far cheaper global shipping than any bricklink seller I've seen, even in my home country). And then you may be able to reduce the number of orders to bricklink still further.
  14. NathanR
    Wow! Now that's a hulkbuster I'd want to buy...
  15. NathanR
    The building looks fantastic! For me, the trick is to pick out a key feature and figure out what Lego brick could best represent it. That brick then become the seed of the model. Even if it is the last brick you will add to the model, it defines the scale, shape, and proportions. For example, the shield generators on the bridge of a star destroyer must be a 2x2 or 4x4 dome brick, nothing else could possibly work, and that immediately sets the size of the final build. Looking at your new building, I see the blue-tinted glass walls on the upper stories as transparent 1x2 bricks, while the corrugated walls (windows?) between them could be represented by 1x2 bricks with grilles. Something like this (sorry the image hasn't come out too well): The grey pillars between the top and bottom halves of the building are already separated in a Lego-style 1x2 grid, so the proportions are a good match. And the final size is about right for a larger architecture-set. Hope this helps!
  16. NathanR
    Four copies of that tower can't sit next to each other, unless you remove some of the 1x1 bricks with stud on the side and swap them for regular bricks. Something like this would be better though: This uses a 4x4 baseplate, then 1x2 bricks with 2 studs on the side. There are loads of bricks like this - 1x2x1 2/3 with four studs on the side, 1x2 with four stud (2 per side), 1x1 bricks with 1 or two studs on the side. The possibilities are practically endless
  17. NathanR
    Nope, not a prototype. That's a genuine Lego piece from around 2000: https://www.bricklink.com/catalogItemIn.asp?P=32137&colorID=14&in=A
  18. NathanR
    Yep. As long as the sides are in multiples of 2, it shouldn't be a problem how big you go. Also, there are other bricks you could use, like Brick, Modified 1 x 2 x 1 2/3 with Studs on 1 Side, they work better at a larger scale.
  19. NathanR
    Hi simpso, welcome to eurobricks! I can think of a few ways that the tower might be put together, this is one of the simplest: Five plates = 2 studs, so you can use the 1x1 bricks with a stud on the side to build outwards. Two plates between each brick keep the sideways studs lined up properly. You can use either the 1x1 with a single stud on the side, or there are new bricks which have 2 studs on adjacent corners. Of course, you don't have to start the central core with two plates on the bottom, you can start with the 1x1 bricks... this can give a nice vertical offset.
  20. NathanR
    Thanks for the kind words! It's nice to know other people are interested in the build. Thanks to @DugaldIC, @JonathanM, @Saberwing40k and especially @Didumos69 over in the technic forum, I think I have figured out the new triangular struts. Took a lot of work with meccabricks, a spreadsheet and even a short python script to give me suitable triangles. Here you can see the old (left) and the new (right) designs for the tower's first three layers: The new design has lost some of the simple elegance of the originalism but it's the right height! (well... just about...). The second deck is 0.3mm too high to fully connect with the central support column, but the separation between bricks is typically 0.2mm so I'm not too concerned. In any case, this will translate to a slight strain on the angled support beam. The third deck is even closer, but I need to rebuild the model to remove rotational distortions and then redo all my calculations to make sure. Updating the truss-structure on each side has also been a bit of a pain. For the sides facing the rocket, the struts between decks 1 and 2 reach a little too low while the struts between decks 2 and 3 reach a little too high. Unfortunately those are the only connections really available. For the other sides, it's been a challenge disguising the fact that 3-4-5 triangles are too short, or don't quite fit: The junctions at corners are really tight, the rotation of the beams means that some key pin holes just can't be used. Still, it all looks like it's going to work. Now it's just swing arms, then more triangles to get the fuel pipes running up the side of the tower...
  21. NathanR
    Having only been able to read episode summaries and watch a few youtube clips so far, I am incredibly upset with the ending. The space whales I can accept, and frankly expected - the "filler" episode with the pergil, Hera talking about them dragging ships away into hyperspace where they would never be seen again - what better way to allow the Rebels to defeat Thrawn without actually killing him? He gets flung away into the unexplored portion of the galaxy, takes five years or so to come back, and then starts waging war against the New Republic exactly as in the original books. The rest of the finale... is just a disaster. I know that Kanaan and Ezra had to die to fit in with the accepted canon, what with Luke being the last Jedi in Episode 6, but is it too much to ask for a series to finish on a high in the spirit of the original Star Wars? I know after Rogue one we're in an era where heros cannot achieve anything without some personal sacrifice, but that isn't what "classic" Star Wars is about. The original was a simple fight between good and evil, with the heroes emerging in triumph to celebrate their victory. Kaanan's death right after Hera admitting she loved him, is like having Return of the Jedi finish with Leia getting killed right after telling Han she loves him. Or Luke's X-Wing getting shot down just after he fires the shot that blows up the Death Star. You just don't do something like that. Also, I'm assuming Hera's child is a clone of Kaanan or something? As he was killed about thirty seconds after she admitted she loved him. There literally wasn't time for anything to happen (and if there was, then there ought to have been time to get Kaanan out of there without killing him). Sabine going off in search of Ezra is also a joke. After 5 years? If Thrawn's star destroyer survived at all, Ezra will have been either immediately executed or held prisoner and tortured for Thrawn's sadistic pleasure. Ahsoka's return is irritating, her apparent death in a fight that practically crippled Darth Vader was a brilliantly dramatic finish to Series 2. Her story arc had closed, now she has returned and it simply opens the question of what she's been doing all this time. A force wielder like her would have been handy on Hoth - remember the lightsabers being able to effortlessly slice through the legs of imperial walkers? The show has always had some strange sense of morality. In the early episodes at least, the rebels don't hurt people, they just knock them out or stun them. They they quite cheerfully blow up the entire spaceship... which seems to be quite different from explicitly killing people. Somehow. Up until now the show has managed to tread a fine line, showing the rebels as rebels while still keeping them as the heroes. This goes too far. The Empire had to be kicked off Lothal, but killing every last one of them on the station, with no chance of escape or evacuation? At least when Luke destroyed the Death Star, he had no choice because it was necessary to save the Rebellion. The rebels here are now no better than the Empire they were fighting, and kind of belong with Saw Gerrera. And that is not a compliment... So all in all, a very disappointing ending to a series that with a brilliant and fun beginning. I will always look back fondly on Series 1, which was made in the true spirit of the original movie. Series 2 was still fun, even when things got darker in an ESB kind of way. But this series really needed an ROTJ ending, and that is sorely lacking here.
  22. NathanR
    Small question, when building triangles that "just about work", do you have any idea what the tolerance actually is? I have a triangle that may work, 5M beam base, 11M beam hypotenuse, 8 brick+2plate vertical height, angle about 22.7 degrees. Mecabricks quotes the pin hole separation as 8 units (LDU?), and on this scale the pin holes nearly line up, with a 0.257 unit offset. Do you think this close enough to work without problems?
  23. NathanR
    Yep. The corner of the triangle is the centre of one pin hole, the distance between two pin holes is one "unit". So 5 "units" = 6 pin holes making up the hypotenuse of the 3-4-5 triangle. @Didumos69 Snap!
  24. NathanR
    Ooh wow! I tell you, there is no way the upcoming Ideas set can match up to this one....
  25. NathanR
    Woohoo! Many thanks for the LDD file! Now I have to go rummaging through my parts collection...
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