6mm Radio Telescope - Hexed and Hexless by RainingFire

Last crawled date: 2 years, 10 months ago

[INCOMING TRANSMISSION] --- New radio telescopes have been constructed to survey the stars, track for jumpship signatures, and track in-system dropships by their engine emissions. They may be refitted for hyperspace transmission. --- [END TRANSMISSION]
This is a snap-together model designed to be 3D printed as terrain for 6mm tabletop gaming. It's perfect for an open field, spaceport, or any tabletop map you want to play. It can be used as a receiving radio telescope to survey space or track spaceships, or you can use it in your games as some sort of "hyperspace pulse generator." When pointing straight up, the rim of the dish is 4 levels tall if you're playing a specific mecha tabletop game.
There are four files. One of each of the base both with and without hexes so that you can print the one that fits your playstyle. One shoulder piece that slots into the base. And one dish half. In the future I may update this page with a couple additional dish designs.
Instructions:
-See below for more print settings.
-Print a base, shoulder, and two dish halves. Everything prints supportless as oriented. The base and shoulder print perfectly, and the only tricky part is the dish halves. Test prints by multiple people indicate that depending on your settings, the angled overhangs on the antenna struts sometimes fail, but it seems to be nearly random whether they do or don't. I have thickened them to reduce the odds of failure. If you have a resin printer and resin with a little flex, then you may wish to print the dish in resin - it will also give you a super smooth finish.
-Print the base and dish without any brim. In particular, adding brims to the dish will make cleanup a pain.
-Print the shoulder with a brim. The pictured models were test printed with an 8-line brim to keep them adhered and steady.
-After printing all the pieces, apply super-glue to one half of the dish before carefully pressing the second half to it. After a few seconds, I recommend pushing the clip onto the shoulder piece which will hold the bottom of the dish together. Then you can take a moment to ensure the dish is aligned before pressing and holding the antenna tip together while the glue dries.
As always, tipping is appreciated at: paypal.me/rainingfire416
Notable features:
-Rotating dish and separately rotating shoulder pieces allow the dish to point in any direction in the sky.
-Detailed design including entrance door and supported walkway.
The model units are in mm and it is scaled such that the hexes are 33mm from flat-to-flat, which is perfect for modern hex maps using 33mm hexes. You can always resize it if your hexes are slightly smaller/larger.
Please post pictures and leave feedback if you make this yourself! I'd love to see prints and use the feedback to adjust overhangs, detail levels, etc. on this model and future ones as well.