Yo, the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing has passed, and I wasn't even there - neither in Titusville nor here in the blog.
No, this year's holiday trip lead me from Germany, Denmark and Sweden to France, and on that occasion also to Billund, where - as addicts of course know - is the birthplace of the Lego bricks.
But since I can't distract you with holiday fun, I admit that the 40,000 parts are not yet completely in CorelDRAW. On the one hand, this is due to the sheer mass that takes on Herculean dimensions to cope with and organize. I confess that I sometimes lose track of what has already been done and what is still missing. To keep print costs down, all repetitive parts are printed on sheets that then appear multiple times in the kit - that saves immense costs without gnawing at quality. The problem is to keep the overview - this only works with huge Excel spreadsheets and lots of coffee.
Secondly, of course, small changes and improvements are also made during the implementation phase, which then have to be incorporated back into the 3D model. The biggest change that will warm the hearts of future LUT modelers is the surfaces of the lift housings. In original, it is corrugated, which was reflected in the model with 166 0.5mm wide paper strips per floor. Yes, it was. I cancelled and replaced them with textures, which in total reduces the number of parts to around 40,000.
Sheet of the LUT kit
Here you see a small sample (200% or 400%) of the sheet. Since the elevator is deep in the center of the LUT, the optics of the model won't suffer noticeably.
Standard Equipment
Here you can see standard equipment as it occurs in almost every level - cameras, TV distributors, the Cable Tray Terminal. I put a soft aging texture over the surfaces, the LUT 1 was a bit dusty at the time of the Apollo 11 launch. The pipelines have a 3D texture, but the gourmets among you will make them from other materials anyway - peeling 0.7mm wide paper strips meter by meter out of the sheet certainly is a borderline experience. The unzoomed version here in the blog should be about the original size.
Surface of the horizontal cable trays
The upper surface of the horizontal cable trays - they were not closed, and led the cables to their final destination. CorelDRAW - sufferers know that a curved texture in Corel is actually not possible - but an expert in a Corel forum told me a (rather complicated) trick to get it right. The upper side of the trays is hardly visible on the model, so I'll leave it at textures. The madmen among you can put cables in it. Do it and die.
vertical cable trays
The trays did not have a rectangular cross-section, but at the side of each edge a lamella as shown below right. This is also indicated by the texture. This sheet here is printed on medium grey, therefore no colour. The vertical trays were closed all around, and had removable panels on the east side, like here quite well visible:
East side of the LUT. Courtesy of NASA
The second thing that burns under my nails at the moment is my web presence, which has been completely unchanged for +4 years. This is due to NetObject Fusion, with which the page was created - the program crashed one day and destroyed the source, and I couldn't even change a line in the page anymore without destroying it. The recent EU laws have made the whole thing virulent, and I'm currently converting the page to Joomla in a tour de force. Look & Feel will change a bit, but will make it much easier to write new articles and put them online.
I would also like to have a comment function instead of the old spam-plagued guestbook, maybe there is a Joomla - experienced among you, who has some advice, how to realize this best. I don't want a platform like Disqus, where people first have to register on another platform to comment on mine, but a simple solution with recaptcha to prevent spammers halfway.