Nice to see some interest in this insane venture
To begin: Bag #1 contains the parts for the rear portion including the engines. Since its resin, first thing first, give it a good wash in soapy water...
Next is assembling the main box. This went together without too much trouble - well apart from the usual lots of cleaning up the resin joint surfaces. There seems to be a lot of "bobbling" in the castings, but there aren't that many bubbles - well in these components at least. This is the inside and the back plate which will hold the exhaust tubes and other sundry gear. Its a bit of a poor fit, but it will be fixable with careful use of dissolved putty when it need to be joined.
Engine exhausts: These did have quite a few bubbles. You can see the filler on some of these that will be sanded off when dry.
I drilled them out a bit deeper:
I did contemplate lighting this thing, and that would have included the exhausts, but frankly I think for ONCE I'm going to build something "out of the box", and that includes motorising the rotating mid section. I did spend some time thinking about how this could be done, but then I realised the basic construction of this is going to be challenging enough... there comes a time when even I have to say ENOUGH!!!
No bar-armour either!!!
More engine detail - these pieces site between each vertical stack of exhausts. The castings on these were a bit ropey - there is lots of small detail in the casting but much of it was obscured by blobs of resin. I may return to these later to add some extra details.
By the way, this is what the engines should look like when built:
Auxiliary thrusters - again I drilled out the holes deeper than the castings:
So that the main components of the engine section. There are some PE parts to add when its all assembled. I'm now thinking about painting this before it all goes together. The exhausts should be reddish at the base blending to blue towards the end so at least these will need painting before assembly. I'll need to think about it...
...and now I have to stop modelling as I have to go to Marseilles tomorrow for a business meeting on Monday - hope the weather is better in the South of France than it is in Blighty!!!