A Super Swift from a Super Print

Building another 3-D printed kit by Bill Altenburg for my Florida client.

The Superswift was seen in the only two-part episode of “Space: 1999” called The Bringers of Wonder broadcast in season two. The studio miniature for filming was built by Martin Bower and measured 50 inches long. This model measures slightly less than half that size at approximately 22” long. It was built from 3-D printed parts produced by Bill Altenburg who also produced the parts for the “Altares” which I built previously, also shown on this Small Art Works Substack page. The parts for both ships are seen in the following photo:

The first thing I did when building this model was to produce all the artwork needed for the dozens of decals that would be needed to populate it. Many many markings were created in Adobe Illustrator, using the few photos available and screen caps I grabbed from the Blu Ray release of the show, that would be printed by V-1 Decals. This is the art that was done, most of the images were duplicated so I would have extras in case I screwed some of them up:

Next was to paint most of the parts. The model was painted overall white and then sections were masked off and sprayed a very lightly contrasting gray. The side cylindrical tanks were sprayed red oxide primer, then the random panelling was masked off and heavily thinned flat black was sprayed to give them some character as was done n the original filming miniature.

I followed as closely as possible the patterns seen in the photos and screen caps I had, toggling through them on my crapto—- I mean laptop.

The spindly legs were painted and detailed separately.

The model is not perfectly accurate to the original and most proportions are off somewhat but that can be excused as there is virtually no information available on the dimensions of this model. Bill Altenburg has made the ONLY good model kit of this ship that has ever been done. Shown below are the results of the build. The engine bells were turned from aluminum by Mike Reader. The launch pad that the model is sitting on is the one I had scratch built years ago to use for the box art seen on the 22” Lab Pod Eagle kit from MPC/Round 2.

I hope you enjoyed this article. Remember that you can click on the pictures to make them bigger so you can see more detail, or you can right-click and choose “open in new tab” and see them at full size.

Questions? Queries? Posers? Do you want a model like this built for you? Please send and email to “jim@smallartworks.ca”. Let me know what you’d like me to build for you.

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