Decided to go with the nose next instead of the wings and engines, and as predicted in my last post, it required a lot of mockup work, in two stages.

First, I did an internal frame to establish the basic proportions of the nose and give me a nice solid frame to hang the skin from.

I redid parts of the skin mockup three times, including scrapping round three for part of the sides and going back to round two’s ideas. The advantage of all of the fiddling with cardstock and masking tape, of course, is that I knew what I was doing (mostly) when I switched to 1mm sheet styrene and started the real thing.

I also cut back the outer (top/bottom) corners of the sides where they extended forward, and that was the right call, it made integrating the nose and sides easier.

The hammerhead nose was a spur of the moment idea while planning the first mockup piece and I really like how it’s come together; the hammerhead let me play with the angles and bulk of the nose area more than a more straightforward taper would have.

I really like how the whole thing is shaping up, it has a good bulky angular look to it. There’s going to be a round of detail panels over this initial skin, after the endless sanding and puttying is done – some of the seams didn’t come out quite as well fitted as I’d like, so there’s going to be some remediation before detailing can start!

Still to do, in rough order of size/complexity of the subassembly: the engine pods and wings; the roof for the cargo bay; landing gear and landing gear bay doors; skin on the belly.

I’m away this coming long weekend and have some things to get organized before we go away for the long weekend, and as mentioned, the next while is likely to be mostly sanding, so it might be ten days or so before there’s another blog-worthy update to this project!

My Build Something Contest 2025 thread on LAF is here; the rest of the contest has some very cool entries – there’s another couple of shuttles or dropships, some neat magical walking constructs, and a bunch of other cool concepts among the other contestants! Entries just closed on February 8th so everyone who’s in for this year is in!