1:107th Scale Type 'S' Scout

[peekaymac]

I'm not sure I've posted here before so bear with me. Also not sure if this is a something that countless others have tried so apologies if this is a commonly recurring thread.

I've played Traveller for ages (probably since the mid/late 80's) and I've always wanted to make some of the ships in 15mm scale. Looking around, I found this website, which lists 15mm as being equivalent to 1:107 scale so this is what I've used.

In my current game, we're flying an Empress Marava Far Trader but this is a bit tricky for a first build so I decided to try to make the Sulieman Class Scout as a first build. Firstly, it's simpler with a flat panel hull, not to mention smaller. Also - the decks don't extend all the way to the edges so I can build the hull and the decks separately and mount them afterwards.

I started by redrawing the whole plan out of Supplement 7 of the CT black books in CAD and overlaying the decks. Problem one is that the decks don't fit in the ship the way they're supposed to. I can squeeze the main (middle) deck in I think, but no way will the upper gallery or the lower cargo bay will fit. I've decided to move the lower cargo bay to the rear of the ship, below the drive room. Similarly, the gunner's position will be larger and will be above the drive room but that long gallery simply won't fit in the hull.

I had a good look at the various designs and images of the Type S and I preferred the versions with a double segmented "wing" i.e. 4 panels top + 4 panels bottom and a small flat edge. This also had the benefit of squeezing a little more deck space inside the hull without altering the ship's silhouette. With this decision made I drew up templates for the hull panels and also an assembly jig / cradle that would hold the panels at the right angles while they were being glued.

For materials, I'm lucky that there's a local recyclers near me who had a few of those styrene protectors you put on washing machines to prevent them being scuffed. They're about 1.5mm thick kit quality plastic and glue very well so I bought a couple for a very reasonable price. Last night I printed out the facet and cradle plans and glued them to the plastic with PVA. Once dried I cut them using a scalpel and set about putting them all together.

I haven't yet figured out how to load pictures so I'll take some later today and get my progress shots posted.

If anyone's interested in a copy of the facet plans I can post those too.

 

[Drakon]

If anyone's interested in a copy of the facet plans I can post those too.

Yes, please do.

 

[Vladika]

I'm not sure I've posted here before so bear with me. Also not sure if this is a something that countless others have tried so apologies if this is a commonly recurring thread.

I've played Traveller for ages (probably since the mid/late 80's) and I've always wanted to make some of the ships in 15mm scale. Looking around, I found this website, which lists 15mm as being equivalent to 1:107 scale so this is what I've used.

In my current game, we're flying an Empress Marava Far Trader but this is a bit tricky for a first build so I decided to try to make the Sulieman Class Scout as a first build. Firstly, it's simpler with a flat panel hull, not to mention smaller. Also - the decks don't extend all the way to the edges so I can build the hull and the decks separately and mount them afterwards.

I started by redrawing the whole plan out of Supplement 7 of the CT black books in CAD and overlaying the decks. Problem one is that the decks don't fit in the ship the way they're supposed to. I can squeeze the main (middle) deck in I think, but no way will the upper gallery or the lower cargo bay will fit. I've decided to move the lower cargo bay to the rear of the ship, below the drive room. Similarly, the gunner's position will be larger and will be above the drive room but that long gallery simply won't fit in the hull.

I had a good look at the various designs and images of the Type S and I preferred the versions with a double segmented "wing" i.e. 4 panels top + 4 panels bottom and a small flat edge. This also had the benefit of squeezing a little more deck space inside the hull without altering the ship's silhouette. With this decision made I drew up templates for the hull panels and also an assembly jig / cradle that would hold the panels at the right angles while they were being glued.

For materials, I'm lucky that there's a local recyclers near me who had a few of those styrene protectors you put on washing machines to prevent them being scuffed. They're about 1.5mm thick kit quality plastic and glue very well so I bought a couple for a very reasonable price. Last night I printed out the facet and cradle plans and glued them to the plastic with PVA. Once dried I cut them using a scalpel and set about putting them all together.

I haven't yet figured out how to load pictures so I'll take some later today and get my progress shots posted.

If anyone's interested in a copy of the facet plans I can post those too.

EVERYONE has the same problem with the Scout Courier. It doesn't work as drawn if full height decks are assumed. The further forward you go the lower the upper and lower deck become. Essentially they are crawl spaces forward.

I think I can speak for many of us here in that we enjoy deck plans and would enjoy seeing yours.

Also, welcome to CotI!

 

[peekaymac]

Adding Pictures

I've been looking around and I can't see how to add pictures to a post. I can see how to link to them from the image library but I can't see how to get them there in the first place. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
I put the sides on the hull yesterday and added the cargo bay and main deck. Hopefully if I can work out the picture thing it'll show how I went on.

 

[peekaymac]

Giving it a go...

In the absence of a reply I'll see if I can link to Photobucket pictures - if this post doesn't make much sense I guess it didn't work. To ease the build I started with a cradle - a pretty simple thing designed to hold all the facets together in the right place and at the right angles for gluing:

Using the pre-cut facets I added first the lower hull and soaked all the seams with Plastic Weld...

... then the rear panels (which needed to be adjusted about 4 times before I was happy they were at the right angle:

Giving me the completed lower half and rear:

The top half was assembled on the same cradle but I let the glue harden by placing on top of the lower half before it was fully set - this meant that the top half settled perfectly from the front point to the rear facets (or so I thought).

I'd also marked out the shallow side facets but I make a bit of a planning mistake here. To keep up the whole arrowhead design, I'd carried this over to the side panels. Of course this was completely impractical as the wide end of the facet (the stern) was only 7mm wide, tapering down to nothing. This was never going to be practical to make so in the end I changed this to a straight 7mm wide strip from front to back. This also had the bonus of a little more height to the already cramped interior.

All this might look like a lot of work but it in reality it took only about 2 or 3 hours and I'm not an experienced modelmaker by any stretch. I have a friend who was on hand to give advice regarding this process but it's really quite simple and if I can do it anyone can. I've done a bit more since this but I'll see if the whole image thing works first and I'll do another post later if it does.

One last thing - never underestimate the ability of these things to turn up and sit themselves right in the middle of your cutting board:

 

[peekaymac]

Well that seemed to work.

For anyone who was interested, here's the material I scragged from the reclamation place:

This explains why there's a tacky woodgrain thing going on in quite a few of the pictures. These are plastic covers used to protect the tops of kitchen appliances so they're meant to clip over standard sized UK white goods of about 600mm (2 feet) square. I bought them as part of some more stuff so the two I got probably cost about £1.50 at the most. Cheap, good quality and reclaimed. Win all round really.

Going back to how to make all these panels, I drew the facets out full size on AutoCAD and scaled them down to 1:107th scale, printed them out full size and then trimmed away any excess paper. As an example, here's the outline of the main deck plan:

This was then stuck down to the plastic sheeting using any old PVA glue. I used some I had for sizing walls during plastering but you can use the kids paper glue if you like, it really doesn't matter:

Just try to waste as little material as possible and try to keep any reasonably sized offcuts as they're always useful for things like fillets and supports. As the build progresses, the pieces you'll need tend to get smaller and smaller so these offcuts will really save you in materials. I finally got round to measuring the plastic properly and it's 1.8mm thick, which is a pretty good thickness for modelling with. I might need some thinner stuff later on for detailing. Anyway - using a steel rule and a scalpel with a decent, straight blade, simply make three of four hardish passes (luckily the Sulieman is all about straight lines). You don't need to cut right the way through the sheet and always take extra care when using sharps - I'm not the most experienced modeller and I've given myself a couple of nasty cuts by not appreciating where that blade is and where it will go. A deepish score will be enough to flex and crack the sheet along your score line. The cut part will then be able to be freed...

... and test fitted into the hull. But first I had to see if I could fit the Cargo Bay in beneath it. As you all know, the Cargo Bay as shown on LBB 7 is impossible so I decided to make a decent sized Cargo Bay below the Engine Room. I decided to make it the same size as the Engine Room and as I didn't want to have any deckspace inaccessible I thought I'd make the Engine Room removable to expose the Cargo Bay. With so many slopes and angles it was a but tricky to work out the deck height but I got there in the end using two steel rules and some odd angles:

Leading to the Cargo Bay being sorted:

Supporting the main deck with its removeable Engine Room:

It was then just the matter of filling in all the walls. Because of the Sulieman's slopey ceilings, I had to tack-glue certain walls then mark sections to slice off before permanently putting them in place. The net result looks pretty good to me and in a lot of ways makes the main deck look a lot more technical:

I have a good friend who is a far better modelmaker than I'll ever be and he came over while I was doing all this. To annoy me he decided to give me a hand by grabbing a load of offcuts and making an Air/Raft to go with the ship. I'll get the pictures of that up soon.

 

[peekaymac]

Facet and Main Deck Plans

I'm awaiting a reply from the moderators about posting the facet plans as a .pdf file but in the meantime here they are as normal pictures as well as the plan of the main deck. The main deck is straight out of LBB 7 - I kept it identical. I changed the Cargo Bay and I'll have to change the upper deck too when I build it. It can be wider at the back but nowhere near as long and the deck heights will be significantly reduced to about 2 metres (scale), 19mm or 3/4" in build terms at the most, which should be enough for the purposes of a game table.

The two sheets above represent the entire outer hull and the cradle. I spaced them to fit on a sheet of A3 paper and a sheet of A4 (the two commonest sizes in the UK) as I have access to an A3 laser printer. I'd recommend a laser over an inkjet as even the small amount of moisture in the PVA would be enough to smudge an inkjet sheet. On the main facets and sides (10 pieces in total) I added a 5mm overhang so that the rear bulkhead would be inset - this is indicated by the dashed line on these facets. I also tentatively marked on the cockpit glass but as I haven't actually cut mine in yet I'm not 100% sure this is right.

A couple of things about the cradle - when I drew it out it looked fine for support but I didn't realise how tail-heavy the model would be. It's a pretty good launcher for the hull and it tends to slide off backwards very easily. I'll have to add a hook of some sort to mine to prevent this from happening. Also the three rectangular struts that link the cradle ends just butt up to these ends. I indicated where they should go but these dashed areas are not cut-outs. I also added a few extra supports to mine for stiffness.

The outline of the main deck was cut in one piece and the engineering floor was removed later. I had to sand off the furthest corners to make it fit snugly against the lower hull.

For all of the above sheets there is a scale block for inches and centimetres. This relates to 1:107th or the same scale as 15mm figures.

 

[savage]

Awesome.

Seriously, you put some more detail and step-by-step with this and you can sell these plans as a Drivetrurpg product. You should drop a note to MgT(Matt) or Marc for permission.

Good job.

 

[peekaymac]

Selling Plans

Thanks Savage but to be honest - the plans are pretty much a copy of the LBB ones. I've made minimal changes to them as we still play CT and I want the finished ship to be as close as practically possible to the original Type S (goofy Cargo Bay and Attic notwithstanding). As such I see the ship design as GDW (or their natural successors) property and when I finish off building the model I'll likely update all the plans, including all the pieces needed for the decks and do a step-by-step for assembly. As I don't see this as my design then I'd like it to be made available for free to anyone who wants to build it.

I've done some more since I last updated the thread - I've built the upper deck and I'm working on some kind of entry ramp and landing gear that would actually work. Regarding the access / egress the most likely place I think would be the enlarged and repositioned Cargo Bay. This is now the lowest point of the ship and there would need to be some sort of ramp there anyway to get cargo on board. I've carved a channel / walkway into the floor to make it possible (just) to stand up from the loading door to the hatch into the Engine Room. As Scouts are not the proud Navy sorts I'm sure they wouldn't think twice about using this route on and off the ship if they didn't need to use the air/raft.

Similarly I've had a think and the LBB position of the two rear landing legs is right on the balance point of the model. The thing might wheelie or rear up if I put them where they're supposed to be unless I packed the bow with lead shot. There is no practical place to site a front landing leg either as the main deck leaves zero room for it. I liked the idea someone posted in the image library about using fold out sections of hull as legs - that would take no interior space at all and would be very neat. That person (I'll find the picture and link it / credit them properly in my next post) also put an access ramp up into the corridor near the cabins but I didn't think that would be practical. The pilot would need to jump down quite a way to get to this ramp from the bridge after landing and there'd be no way to get back to the bridge from ground level. The Cargo Bay ramp solves all this but I really liked his idea for the landing legs so I'm going to do that.

 

[peekaymac]

The Potential Landing Gear

This is the image from the library that looks like the best option for the front landing gear.

It's by a member here called nyrath and it ticks all the boxes for me. I think I'll have to alter the rear landing gear as I've used the double facetted hull quadrant. I'll likely just rotate the legs so they're in line with the direction of flight rather than perpendicular to the ship's centreline as nyrath did but the principle will be very similar so thank you to nyrath for all your work - it solved a big headache for me.

 

[Patron Zero]

That is wickedly cool, I've been mulling over a 1/72 or an 1/87 (HO) scale Scout Courier for sometime, seeing your model might be the nudge needed to make room on my workbench for such a project.

 

[Supplement Four]

How freakin' cool is that?

Crowd says, "Very cool, sir."

 

[peekaymac]

New plans are in the making

Thanks Supplement Four.

Patron Zero - I've been revising the plans I drew a little in light of making the model. I'm hoping to iron out a couple of wrinkles and make it simpler to put together. I'll also add the deck parts in their entirety to make it easy for anyone to do the same.

Mainly I need to figure out how to upload PDF files to the site.

 

[FreeTrav]

If you send me this series of articles and pics, perhaps with a bit more detail as to process and plans, to editor@freelancetraveller.com, I can GUARANTEE, in all caps, bolded and italicised, that it will appear in Freelance Traveller as a featured article! Especially if you also finish it, and include discussion and pics of finishing and painting it!

Even if I do have to invent a whole new section of the magazine to classify it!

 

[peekaymac]

Kinda speechless

Umm... Gosh

To be honest I didn't think anyone was really taking much interest in this project.

OK - let me know the sort of thing you need.

Phil

 

[HiverLord]

To be honest I didn't think anyone was really taking much interest in this project.

Oh, yes! Fantastic work. Makes me wish I had an area for a workshop.

 

[aramis]

This is the image from the library that looks like the best option for the front landing gear.

It's by a member here called nyrath and it ticks all the boxes for me. I think I'll have to alter the rear landing gear as I've used the double facetted hull quadrant. I'll likely just rotate the legs so they're in line with the direction of flight rather than perpendicular to the ship's centreline as nyrath did but the principle will be very similar so thank you to nyrath for all your work - it solved a big headache for me.

If you're going to steal, steal from the best. :smirk: Nyrath happens to be known in the industry as Winchell Chung, professional game artist.

 

[leo knight]

I will chime in and say, "Awesome work, Sir!" Please keep letting us know how this is going.

 

[Nightwind1]

If you're going to steal, steal from the best. :smirk: Nyrath happens to be known in the industry as Winchell Chung, professional game artist.

And the original artist of the ANNIC NOVA, and a "little" something created by Steve Jackson called the OGRE.

 

[whulorigan]

If you're going to steal, steal from the best. :file_22: Nyrath happens to be known in the industry as Winchell Chung, professional game artist.

And the original artist of the ANNIC NOVA, and a "little" something created by Steve Jackson called the OGRE.

And also the artwork in the old Metagaming Microgame "Warp War".