Time to show you the work on the turrets so far.
I made several designs , some more compact, some more battleship style but all still pretty basic as i needed to figure out first how to make it all move!
The ship will have a grand total of 24 Laser turrets meaning 48 servo's !
Lets start with the work i did a few years ago. The main idea was to have the turrets use actual lasers. But a few complications arose ... offcourse ...
The main issue was the size. Cheap lasers from china were just too large to fit into the scaled down turrets. The actual laser turrets were more of a proof of concept to see if i could get it working but when I had to design turrets that would actually fit the ship I had to scale down about 300%. There just arent any afforable lasers at that size. And we needed 48 of them!
So back to the drawing board and do some box modelling to see what and how.
The turret uses 2 servo's controlled by a arduino microprocessor. To run all 48 of them we need more then one arduino but thats for a later post.
The first servos controls the rotational movement. The servo is connected to a ballbearing to prevent friction and keeps the angle perfect. The second servo controls the barrels and uses a custom connector block to hold the POM gear , LEDS and Turrets barrels. Its connected at both sides to a small 10mm ballbearing to again prevent friction.
The support pylons are used to screw the turret to the hull.
I am using small brass pipes inside a carbon fiber tube for now. These will be resin printed when its time to design the exterior.
This is the final part without its cover to make it look pretty.
A full description on what i used to print this will come in a later post as there are quite some deliberations on what material filament to use.
I could run RGB leds in the turrets .. but should I ... *Raises one eyebrow*
Ans there you have it, the turret in a very simple program firing its lasers (yes i know its the wrong colour 😉 )
The programming will be controlled by capacitive touch sensors allowing it them to all point forward when touching the nose of the ship for example. I think that will be a dramatic sight, having 24 turrets abruptly point towards you and shoot their guns!
What do you think?
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