N1 1/96 [8] - Blok D - and beyond

Hi. Here I am again. Now where were we?
Oh yes: the Blok D stage of the N1 lunar train. Now here's a bit of a problem: I was in a flow. I didn't take any photos of the assembly of the Blok D stage. Shame on me. I can only show you how it looks now. The toroidal tank and the oval tank were joined with the addition of a protective skirt around the oval tank and a latticework made from thin strips of doubled card.
On top I again made a latticework to add a ring. This ring will hold yet another latticework on which the LK, the Soviet Lunar Lander is placed. And that is up next. Further below a lot of photos of the progress in the build.

The Blok D stage. Almost all of it is paper, just the plumbing isn't.

Here's the top ring. This one needs to be able to sit tightly in the upper part of the inner fairing. I have to make a couple of compromises with this construction; Normally these fairings would part lengthwise in two halves but that would leave me with a very hard to shape bunch of fairing pieces. So I just make them in their cylindrical shapes and hopefully the end result is just as nice to look at...

The business end of Blok D. I rolled card into a tight cylinder and added some greeblies to make an engine block. The engine bell was made from silvery card with metallic paper on the inside. On top of it I added a brass tube that goes into the oval oxygen tank. A smaller tube goes sideways into the torus to provide the engine with its fuel. Together they place the engine exactly in the middle of the torus.

Blok D slides into this bit; the lower part of the inner fairing. A ring in the bottom keeps the torus part where it should be, just so that the top part of the Blok D skirt is peeping out over the rim of the fairing.

The distance between the engine bell and the tank dome of Blok G is a couple of millimetres. The smaller grey ring fits very tightly into the tapered interstage section between the two stages.

This is the part that goes into Blok V, the last big part of the actual N1. On top of it I added this slightly tapered cylinder that will hold Blok G in place, with its engine bell again a couple of millimetres above the tank dome of Blok V. I added three service doors to get a little more vividness into this grey wall...

So as you can see below, the Blok G stage fits very nicely on top of the, well, let's call it the fairing base. Also, the height of the lunar train is as good as perfect. The top part of the inner fairing, holding the LK lander, is inside the tapering part of the outer fairing and the LOK soyuz begins in the smallest part of shown fairing and would stick out the fairing with its capsule and orbital module at this photo.

So, up next is Lars Folmann's LK lander, reduced in size to 1/96. Let's see what I can make of that. The coming days will be a lot more job-orientated, this friday I'll start with the first shots for an upcoming documentary. Preparations for it might take up some extra time. But of course, I'll be back with more stuff later. See you and thanks for stopping by!
 
PS. Oh yeah: a little W00t is appropriate here, because apparently I just went past 100.000 pageviews. I know some of it is by eastern European and Chinese MF's that just come here to increase their own chance of hits but a lot of it comes from you, dear interested visitors. So therefore, w00t. 100K is a milestone.