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Remora Class Shuttle

Personal hygiene is important. Especially if you like to scratchbuild model spacecraft. Today we have two old reliable bits ... the deodorant stick and the mouthwash bottle. Once the product is used up, the containers are ready to make ships.

For this project, we are making two ships, but they will be designed to really be one unit. So the small ship will be a attachable (and detachable, I guess) from the larger one. I'm calling it a remora class shuttle.

This non-standard set of bits is where the magic happens. On the right and left we have four HeroClix bases. I use these a lot to make hover pods under vehicles (often mice and deodorant sticks), by gluing two together with the dial parts facing inside. For this project, I will not glue the two bases together.

On the left, you can see I removed the dial top part. I will glue the white round spacer inside and then the black round magnet (both rounds made with the trusty old 1" hole punch) on top of that. On the right, you see one base with the dial still on. I will just glue the magnet to the top. So instead of gluing the two halves together, I will use the magnets to hold them together.

So a couple steps in, I have painted the inside of the lower half yellow and added black stripes. The magnet for the bottom gets a thin coat of silver paint and some hatch door details. The top half is just plain black, as it will go under the bottom of the remora.

I assemble the ships. I added the empty butter tub to make the nose of the big ship and the juice lid to make the thruster on the back. Various other greeblies dress the ships up a bit.

The paint scheme for the big one is metallic blue on top with white undercoat. The remora grey with white. This gives a nice shark/remora feel. Not necessary in general, but I like it for this one.

With the attachment pods connected by magnet, I put glue on the bottom and top then sandwich them between the ships. This is a much better idea than trying to glue them individually and line the magnets up.

After the glue dries, the remora can attach and detach from the main ship as needed. You can see how the docking stations look from the top with the remora detached.

While this is not the best picture to show it off, SWMBO thought the glowy green and the gearlike drive on the back of the remora looked cool, so I thought I would show it off a bit.