So, a quick note about me making
my papercraft Star Trek models; most of them
(except The Next Generation's Enterprise-D) I made by hand, drawing the papercraft pieces on a piece of paper, then testing whether they fit and if they do, colouring them and then scanning them to make papercraft templates to print.
To do so, I just print views of the top, bottom, front, back and side views of the model I want to make in the scale that I want to make it
(for the Galileo 5, I'm aiming at a scale of 1:48, which would make the papercraft about 19 cm long) so that I can easily get 1:1 measurements of those for the papercraft. But the thing with Star Trek ships, is that more often than not, no two schematics for the same ship are the same... 😆
Sure, the overall shape is the same, but details and sizes usually have differences between sources. There are not a lot of schematics for the
Galileo 5 shuttlecraft to begin with, but I found some schematics on the
Starship Schematics Database, three views from on the
Federation Star Ship Datalink and even an Okudagram included with the
Eaglemoss Star Trek model of the Galileo 5 shuttle, and as you can see in the image above they all have small differences...
The side view and the schematic seem to be closer related than the Okudagram, and because the schematics come as a full set of views
(the coloured views are missing a bottom and a top view, and the Okudagram is only a section view) I decided to work from those.
Of course I also found lots of reference pictures, which
(as usual 😉) show some differences. On this picture of a studio model on
ST-Bilder.de the front on the nacelles is rounded instead of square, while the impulse engines on the studio model have more sharper angles than shown in the schematics for example:
Like I said, I'll be drawing the parts just by hand, so it will by no means be a perfect scale model of the studio model anyway, and with all this in mind
(I papercraft just for fun 😉) the final paper model will be more of an amalgamation of several sources and my own interpretation. 😇
So I started trying the basic shipshape, well, shipshape.
😉
With the measurements from the 1:48 scale schematics, I made a structure that I can 'skin' with paper, and those will be the 2D parts that I will draw on a piece of paper to scan later on to make digital papercraft templates. For models like this that are pretty much symmetrical, I usually also only make one side that I can then simply mirror in Photoshop to make a complete model. If I were to draw both sides separately, I would probably not be able to draw an exact mirror image, and then in the end I would probably have a lobsided shuttlecraft...😉
Stay tuned!
