As this MLEV is huge, it was a challenge to complete it, what with my changing to other jobs and moving from location to location. This project, like any others has become an ON/OFF. KIV, WIP and whatever else I can think of. Any commercial plans I had for lighting up this model is now too late. Therefore, it has now become a personal project instead and I am going more or less going to do this model up as I go along.
Wow. It’s been 5 years already and the last actual work was in 23012016. I would need to clean up this spaghetti junction which I hastily made for MMHS2019 event. Once the testing is finalised, these wiring would be cleaned up. This is also one of the advantages of using low voltage (ie 5 volts) to light up the LEDs. Any shorting would not affect the system much, just the occasional shorting or the LED just refused to light.
This is the front view of the MLEV as if you’re looking in from outside. The first thing that bugged me was the dim green light on the bottom right of the airlock ramp. This is what happens when I stupidly forgot that heatshrink sleeves heats up too. This in turn compromises and melts the plastic PMMA fibre-optic.
So after some trimming of the fibre-optic, I got lucky and managed to salvage the fibre-optic. Yeah, it is slightly brighter. The MLEV is not a clean and bright ship so, it’s going to be dirtied down through long period of use.
I am still thinking that the lights on the bunk beds are still too bright. Although I loved it, it has to be dimmed down or else it would distract the observer from other details, such as the display above the round thingy airlock on the left. But look at the detail above. That is the ceiling which, needs to be lit up. Think of this image as the ship being on off-duty shift, with most of the systems in standby mode.
And on the right here are the next highlight where the spacesuits are kept. I hope it would highlight the creases when I glue the suit onto the wall later. A little on the left would be the airlock ramp detail and I am quite happy with the red/green lighting. I would need to weather the door more and it has a lot of beautiful detail which I was hoping to keep just as a standalone model. OK, look at the chair where the silver round detail is reflecting the lights from the bunk beds which is nice.
This is some service hatch or maybe, even the front airlock. The two ceiling spotlights created the shadows on the walls from above and the mood is quite sombre and depressing. I need to add some brown rust water streak to complement the white leaks on the right, And then some decaling to make it look much more realistic.
I did not use most of the decals that came from the kit but took a few from the Internet. Yeah, this is a shot from a TNG LCARS system but I really need to find someone who can make a colour slide out of .jpeg files. A Facebook friend did gave me a link but I kinda lost that.
I am starting to like that wall’s reflection from the bunk beds. Anyway, because I printed out the image from a colour laser printer, you can see that it is quite bad. So, I put a thin pla-plate between it and the LED. The pla-plate acts as a diffuser and helped to uniformly spread the LED’s lights better.
Anyway, once I get he ceiling lights in and dimmed, I just worry that those subtle details might be lost.
