Friday, 24 May 2024

Air/Rafts

 

I found an STL for a 1977 Traveller version of an Air/Raft on Thingiverse, so I re-scaled it to more or less 15mm to fit with my elderly RAFM Traveller minis and printed a couple. The one on the left is resin from my Mars Pro, the barely distinguishable black one on the right is FDM from my Ender 3.

The blue one at the back is one that I clobbered together ages ago from a Hot Wheels toy.

The resin version took about 50% longer to print than the FDM one, but comes out smoother. The FDM print is fine, but the supports in under the dashboard are a bit of a nightmare to remove, and if I was going to do it again I'd probably fill in that space since it's not really necessary for a gaming model.

When Marc Millar invented this thing back in '77, I assume that either (a) he was envisaging some kind of force field to protect the passengers, or (b) he had never sat in an open-topped vehicle traveling at 250 kp/h.

Also, why the slash in Air/Raft? I've always found that incomprehensibly dumb, and if the slash character was closer to the hyphen on the keyboard I'd assume it was just a typo.

1 comment:

  1. I wondered about that, too. A hyphen makes far more sense. Air-raft. It's still an odd name, though.

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