ISD Kraken - The Trench IDEA and Designs
IDEA:
- Light the horizontal trench with fiber optic strands
- Make the greeble plates interchangable so we can swap them out for battle damage or just updated versions.
- Use a led strip instead of seperate leds with fiber coupling
For all the greebles and structures we have planned in the side horizontal part of the ship (called the trench) i had to design a holder for the ledstrips and ledfoam. This helps in dispursing the light and provides a clean way to fix the PMMA fiber strands that pass the light through the greeble plate.
It also doubles as the resting place for the top hull that needs to be removable to access the hardware and hard tubing.
The led-trench holder is fixated with screws and epoxy for it to be tough enough to withstand numerous opeing and closing of the tophull.
It features three indentations on each trench side. Two Ion Cannons are in the outer and inner most indentations with a hangar bay between them in the middle of the ship. The trench indent parts have been designed so it can host a coverplate with all the greebles and structures needed for the ion cannon to rotate (manually) and the hangar bay to close (servo driven)
Here is the led foam and a test part of the greeble plates I have printed in Titan ABS from FormFutura. Being a sustainable living expert (solarpanels, heatpumps, insulation) I will not be using the normal Titan ABS but ReForm - rTitan which consists of high quality runoffs in the factory that normally would get thrown away but is now reformed into a new filament! I expect to use a lot of ABS as it is much better heat resistant then PLA, I will add a post later explaining exactly how I selected the materials and printed them.
The trench-Greeble plate needs to be pefectly level with the ship and it consists of several layers that are screwed together (not glued) as to be able to zwap it out later for updated/different parts.
I created a rim cover that will be 3D printed to cover up the ugly cuts and provide a clear demarcation point where the hull styrene skin starts.
Below is a quick (and not representative for the final quality parts) print to show the whole assembly.
Here are some quality prints of the greeble plate to test out the designs.
Also you can see how the supersized turret would be crazy large compared to the ship. I will create a functional one, but this has to be reduced to 1/3rd of its scale.
What is correct to scale is this laptop and a test print of one of the main engines. Its massive, weighs 413 grams and took 38 hours to print! Again PLA will not be possible to use as it could face a constant stream of 50 to 60c warm air that would destroy the print over a few months time.
That was it for last weeks work. Catch you all next week!
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