Perry Rhodan - Marco Polo & Sol
All the rage in
Germany, the Perry Rhodan series has been running since the
Sixties(!?), yet most folk outside Germany won't have heard
of it. The series is comic strip based. Marco
Polo Kit
Details The "Marco
Polo" makes up into a good looking and unusual model.
Although basic construction would be simple, lighting it is
easy (very simple additions required) and looks great - if
you've never lit a model before, start with this one! The
construction sequence has to be different to the
instructions for effective surface finishing and painting.
Most of the parts for the 19.5cm diameter ship are landing
struts and gun turrets, and there are 205 decals on the
decal sheet. Mouldings were clean, but the fit of some hull
plates was a bit poor. Although a quick trawl of the web
reveals an abundance of images to chose from, there are no
photographs around - only CGI shots and drawings. The Marco
Polo ship is 2.5 km across and roughly spherical, with a
forest of 24 landing struts and 32 gun turrets protruding
from the hull, three rings of windows and what looks like a
plasma reaction drive system that runs with a green
exhaust. The first
thing to warn you about is part number 5: a large hoop from
which 4 hull plates sprout. This ain't sprue: it's a
structural part that will join the two hull shells together,
so don't cut it up! Because I
wanted to light the ship I decided not to glue the hull
halves together, so I had to achieve an excellent fit of the
two hull halves. So, placing a well soaked 180 grit paper on
a smooth work top, I gently ground the rim of each hull half
to give a completely level and flat edge - that made each
half fit the other perfectly. The landing struts were going
to be tricky, so I made a circular template out of
plasticard to help. From the instruction sheet the correct
strut angle is 33š from vertical and, from the dimensions of
the kit, this places the outside of the landing pads at a
radius of 8.0cm, so that's the size of hole I cut out of a
thick card sheet with 20 lines marked at 18š steps around
the hole to help space the pads properly. When the hull with
the freshly glued struts was turned right-way-up and placed
in the centre of the card template, the struts splayed out
until they met the lip of the hole and stopped at the right
angle - and in a circle. Finishing For the
grey, I tried 6 different shades before settling on plain
automotive primer, so that was good news. For the
bluish-grey hoops, forget the Humbrol grey-blue 79
suggested: 144 mid-blue is almost perfect. For moss green 62
I used grass-green 80, and for grey-green I used olive 180.
Engine nozzles were wiped with a 50/50 mix of matt bronze
green 171 and grey-blue 79 (I'd bought it so I used it!)
diluted to about 1/3 with thinners. Landing struts were
painted Citadel Mithril silver. Weathering (applied over the
decals, of course) had to take into account the 2.5km size,
so I was looking for subtle effects. I made paper templates
with panel cut-outs along the edge, and airbrushed faint
panelling with a 2:1 mix of light earth 84 and matt black 33
well diluted with thinners, then wiped mid grey 106 diluted
to 1/5 randomly down the hull with a small stiff brush
dabbed nearly dry - made a passable imitation of dirty water
run-off on a huge structure like a building. If this thing
is 2.5km high, it'll stick up through weather and catch lots
of rain. Landing struts were wiped with Citadel armour wash.
Nothing remarkable about the decals, except that the hangar
doors were trimmed right up to the edge for fitting to the
plasticard panels as described above. The whole thing was
layered with a good skin of Humbrol MattCote. I built a
small square base with cotton-wool relief hardened with PVA
glue and textured with sand while the glue was still wet.
The base hid a twin D cell battery box, switch and 2.5mm
jack plug for the lighting. Spaceship
SOL Kit
Details "Spaceship
Sol" bears a strong family resemblance - it's basically two
Marco Polo's stuck together with a cylinder, although the
scaling factor is greater, giving a diameter of 13cm
compared to Macro Polo's of 19.5cm. The Sol is 8km long, but
the 24000:1 scale meant that a 1m2 window would need a
0.04mm bit, so I ruled out lighting. Even the box art didn't
attempt to show windows! Assembly The joining
cylinder is the most awkward, so I started there. It's made
of two 6-segment sections, and it's best to make these up in
one step, so set all the parts out in advance: as with the
Marco Polo, be careful with the order of the parts. For each
section, I glued the 6 segments together quickly, then
located (but didn't glue) the end rings in the correct ends,
and taped them in place. This adds a lot of support for the
next step, which is to wrap the cylinder up with elastic
bands, pulling the segments together against the end rings,
thereby ensuring a proper shape. When they had set, I
untaped and removed the end rings and ground the ends of the
cylinders level with 180 grit w&d paper. Sphere
assembly was straightforward, but a look ahead to painting
revealed that half of the bumps round the surface of the kit
shouldn't have been bumps at all, but holes - like the
engine exhaust nozzles of the Marco Polo. I drilled 1mm
pilot holes through the appropriate bumps using the box art
as a guide, then stuck bean-sized lumps of Milliput over the
pilot holes on the inside of each sphere part - this
provided extra thickness needed to turn the bumps into
nozzles with a counter-sinking bit after the Milliput had
hardened. The edges of the spheres were ground level again
as with the Marco Polo. The best
place for a stand was near the centre of gravity, which
meant further adapting the central ring - this was easily
done with a 2.5mm power jack socket epoxied into place from
the inside and located in one of the door
openings. Finishing I began by
spraying the whole thing with automotive grey primer, then
masking large areas off before all-over coats of red 174
then blue 25, each thinned to 50%. That's easy to say
quickly, but it took over an hour to change the masking
pattern between sprayings! Paint tests showed me that
spraying these colours directly over the grey base coat
toned them down nicely to match the box lid - red can be
difficult to get right. I couldn't see the gloss-mossy-green
area on the box lid that was specified in the instructions,
so I left it out. Greys 64 and 106, white and black used as
per the instructions finished the painting off. To make the
stand, I built a small square base with 1mm plasticard sheet
and a bit of 8mm brass rod, which is just right for the
2.5mm power socket installed in the central ring. • gallery • links
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