A couple of months ago, I decided it's be pretty cool, however, to have some sci-fi memorabilia floating around my room at university, and decided to put my hand to the construction of a model of Atlantis from Stargate: Atlantis. If I could work on it day in and day out, I'd be done by now without a doubt, however with coursework, and two weeks of holidays (where I couldn't work on it as I can't travel home with the model), it is still very much under construction, a state which is common among so many of my projects.
I have no idea what scale the model is. Some estimates I have made put it at 1:12000 scale, others at 1:6000 scale, and it doesn't help that no accurate dimensions were ever provided in the series. All I have to go on is several reference images from Google (all showing different proportions and even structural inconsistencies), and the fact that I decided making the base 1.4cm thick would make it sturdy enough. For now, I am building the structure as if it were floating on the ocean, so we can't see the star-drive underneath, though if that were accurate, the thickness would be half of what it is.
Eventually, after the city is complete, I would like to build a stand for it in the form of the star-drive, and paint the engines glowing and active. I will then mount this stand on one (or three) GW Flying Stem and Base sets, keeping the city removable from the star-drive base. Of course, this is all perfect-world planning. In a perfect-er-world, I'd somehow add the city shield to it too. Maybe not.
The first two pictures are about a month old, the final four are from a couple of days ago, with Elrond (this years half finished mention from earlier) as a scale guide. Click for bigger pictures. The large (white) piers aren't attached to the main center of the building yet as that would make the building too cumbersome for the details that I am yet to add. They're just sitting looking pretty for picture purposes.
The next stage of the build will see me adding strips of banding and details to all the vertical faces of the model. It will be tedious. It will be boring. And it will go through a crap tonne of superglue. So far the cost of the build (cardboard, superglue, styrene sheets and tubes, bras rod which will eventually become lightning rods) comes to around $80NZ. I need to buy more superglue soon too - I'm down to my last 1ml of glue or so. Fortunately, the shop where I've always bought models in the past in here in town, and they give me a 10% discount on things.
I also hear tell that one of the engineering professors is into Warhammer 40K. I must track him down one day, but beyond knowing which building his office is in, I don't have a lot to go on.
Until next time!
