Just a small sitrep:
Yesterday I had to recharge the accus of my camera, so I was unable to take as many pictures as I wanted. I assembled the high engine parts and noticed that an additional plate was necessary. I added it on-the-fly and revised the assembly of the intakes (a flap got in the way and was tranferred to another part). The greeblie tube right behind the intakes looked a bit too small. I have added another ring element to increase the diameter. I'm now checking out the effect. Basically I have all major components of the plane at the ready for the final installation.
I found a major flaw in the undercarriage of the plane. The bottom part was way too long which must have been caused by an accidental stretching on the page. I spent the whole afternoon to fix it. In addition, the rear end of the part seemed to be too wide. I checked the CG model and found out that this was a rounding error that occured when I was tweaking the blueprints to match the filming miniature. The shape of the stern of the ship differs on both models which gave me a deviation of 1mm on both sides. I already reduced the width of the bottom of the Y-piece but apparently that wasn't enough. I don't want to alter the shape too much at this point, so I added a small step to the bottom which will compensate for the deviation. I'm curious to see how it looks on the finished plane.
Next I refined the landing bay doors. The inside is still untextured. Each door has two panels which look to be separated from one another but which in fact aren't. In the first draft I forgot this fact and left the second panel closed; now both open up as they should do.
Last but not least I got a nifty idea for the engines. This idea is so fresh that even Chris doesn't know about it yet. :Grin:Again it will be exciting to see if it works. Stay tuned!