Willys Jeep + Test Rocket XFLR-6 (Destination Moon)

Destination Moon (French: Objectif Lune) is the sixteenth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. The story was initially serialised weekly in Belgium’s Tintin magazine from March to September 1950 before being published in a collected volume by Casterman in 1953. The plot tells of young reporter Tintin and his friend Captain Haddock who receive an invitation from Professor Calculus to come to Syldavia, where Calculus is working on a top-secret project in a secure government facility to plan a manned mission to the Moon.

 

– courtesy of Wikipedia

THE FINISHED MODEL:

THE VIDEO:

THE STORY:

As I’ve mentioned before, the two-part Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon were perhaps second only to The Blue Lotus and Cigars of the Pharaoh as my earliest favourites, and I’m pretty sure a 2-in-1 softcover was the first Tintin album I ever (personally) owned.  I won’t rehash the reasons here, except to reiterate that I think the cover was a big part of it.

For my money, seeing that glorious red and white checkerboard rocket splashed across the cover is probably the single-most iconic image Hergé ever created – only that wicked-looking shark submarine on the cover of Red Rackham’s Treasure even comes close.  Even people who haven’t otherwise got a clue about Tintin seem to recognize that rocket.  Of course a lot of that familiarity comes from a shared cultural consciousness.  Since it’s basically just a slightly modified version of the feared Nazi V-2 – still the “classic shape” in most people’s minds. He might not have created it, but he owns it now…  It’s Hergé’s version of the Superman “S”.

So you can imagine how disappointed I was not to get to include it in my Tintin build project – everyone wants to do the rocket! The problem though is my adherence to keeping everything to 1/72 scale.  After all the trouble I’ve gone through to maintain a continuity of scale, I just didn’t have it in me to toss a wrench (even an iconic one) into the plans – and a 1/72 Moon Rocket is BIG.

Instead I just resigned myself to building the not-quite-equally iconic blue jeep that’s also on the cover.  It wasn’t until I started workIng on that project and started flipping through the book that I remembered something important… there were two rockets.

The second one, is of course the proof-of-concept test rocket, the XFLR-6… which, it just so happens, is small enough to be rendered in 1/72 scale.  The question is how?

THE BUILD:

As I said, the V-2 shape is classic, partly because it’s subtle.  It’s not as simple as just a tube with on pointy end and some tiny wings on the other.  There’s a lovely bulge to  it, and that bulge is not quite the same as the V-2.  I thought about getting a V-2 kit in 1/48 scale and adapting it, I started hunting down bottle rockets, I was even looking at interesting shapes of drink bottle to see if any could be adapted.  Then I stumbled across the Paper Kosmonaut’s blog entry from a few years back and his awesome paper-based build gave me an idea… why not build a paper model, but out of plastic?  I have styrene sheets of various thicknesses, so how hard could it be?

Well, fairly, as it turns out.  The first trick was finding plans.  One of the nice/fun things about modelling in paper is that it’s usually pretty easy to get the plans for a model, all you need to bring is the paper, some skill and a bit of glue.  With the Tintin rocket though, that’s a different story. Hergé’s estate is pretty militant in guarding his copyrighted material – which they apparently feel extends to a set of plans for fans wanting to roll some red/white paper.  So the plans that PK used were no longer being distributed… but it’s the internet.  They still exist, you just have to search harder (and no I can’t help you).

The next step was cutting out the various strips of thin (I think it was 0.3mm) styrene as precisely as possible and then glueing and clamping them together.  The plans basically allow you to build the rocket in cross sections of varying diameters, so after it was all said and done and dry, I had enough small “rocket cups” to invite all my friends over for tea.  After I had them stacked up and started glueing them I noticed that there was a distinctive bulge forming along the cut seam – which I had reinforced during the glue/clamp process with a backing strip.  As the tower got higher, the seam got more and more noticeable.

To offset that I decided to just give the whole rocket a coating in 2-part epoxy putty.  This helped out it two ways.  First it added to the overall structural integrity of the rocket by forming an outer shell.  Second by carefully adding slightly more epoxy to the opposite sides from the seam I was able to balance out the bulge relatively well.  It wasn’t perfect, but I had to come to grips with the idea that a hand-cut rocket was never going to be engineered soundly enough to make the voyage to the Moon anyway, so I’d just have to live it the imperfections.

Once the epoxy was fully dry (a few days later), I basically sanded my life away.  The first few sessions got the epoxy down to the general “rocket shape” I was looking for, but there were still gouges and grooves that would’ve been noticeable – and I was worried about bursting through the skin of the rocket by over-sanding certain areas.  So instead I gave the rocket a second coating in Tamiya grey putty.  By the time I was satisfied that it wasn’t going to get any noticeably straighter or smoother, I had something that looked a lot like a rocket inspired by a two-tone holstein cow!

The painting was also a bit of a challenge because of the curved surface.  Achieving the nice checkerboard pattern wasn’t as simple as just wrapping some masking tape around it.  Part of the problem was that, the pattern is precise, but the rocket surface is not.  The calculations were starting to get in the way, so in the end I decided it was more art than science and it just had to “look right”.  I’m not sure if I completely succeeded, but it’ll have to do.

Finally, in order to make sure there was a clear distinction that this wasn’t the moon rocket (as if the fin stands weren’t enough!) I decided the scratch build the conning tower and launch tube as well.  The tower was a simple matter of fitting together styrene tubes of various diameters and then using a bit of stiff wire for the supports/fence.  The launch tube was harder.  In the comic album, the horizontal supports wrap around on the outside of the vertical posts.  However trying to get it to both stand and retain its circular shape was very frustrating.  In the end I conceded defeat and just cut out some styrene “doughnuts”, drilled some holes and was done with it.  I was so frustrated that I didn’t even bother with the maintenance ladder, I just used a strip off a patterned styrene sheet to take the lazy way out.

All’s well that ends well, right?

Well, not quite.  Once I started using a unified template for my project bases, I realized that the rocket would never fit.  So instead of just leaving it at that, I decided to up my game considerably and add a countdown clock and timer to the display stand.  Of course it sounds very simple, but was in fact incredibly difficult.

Using an Arduino nano controller chip, I needed to connect every individual red LED in the seven-segment (i.e. digital number) display, and then write a code to have them turn on in sequence to display the numbers.  I also added some blinkers for the top of the launch tube, a spotlight and a “big red button” to make it all happen.

I wasn’t able to take a lot of “in progress” pictures of that build because it was mainly me banging my head against a computer screen, but I think you can get the picture.  Check out the bottom of the page for a video showing it in action as it was originally.

THE UPDATE:

After having this build on display for a while, I felt the need for an upgrade. There were three main reasons for this:

1. The D-I-Y Clock kit I used was very basic and didn’t keep time very well. It was constantly running later and later, so I’d have to keep resetting it, which was quite annoying.
2. It needed to remain plugged in at all times for the clock to function, which was inconvenient on the shelf, and also meant that every time it came unplugged I’d have to re-set the time.
3. I got a resin printer, and the shape of the XFLR-6 rocket started to nag at me that it could be more accurate.

So, to solve these main three issues, I took it off the shelf, disassembled it, and started the upgrade. Of course, why stop at just those three things? While I was at it, I decided to incorporate something I’d been wanting to do originally – include some sound!

So, after I quick trip to the local thrift store, I picked up an old clock radio for a whopping $5 and tore it apart to use the guts. I also really liked the pitted surface covering the speaker, so I set about incorporating it into the design. I also pulled out my arduino SD card reader and wired it up.

The first challenge was to re-work the arduino code to incorporate two separate sound files – the first one was to play the theme song from the Tintin animated series after the button was first pressed, and then play a verbal countdown/rocket launch after the button was pressed again.  It was a bit of a challenge, mainly because the songs kept repeating through the loop too fast and generating feedback.  However, I was able to figure out the issue and come up with code to keep that from happening.  One downside was the amount of pins needed to run the audio – I eventually had to make a tough decision and decided to lose one of the LEDs (the white spotlight) and incorporate the red launch button into the overall light show.

If you want, you can download my arduino files (including the code, the theme song and countdown .wav files) here!

During the wiring of the base, something went wrong with the clock radio and I lost the ability to turn the radio on, so, instead of worrying about how to fix it, I just subbed in the seven-segment LED display from a $1 clock I got from the local discount store. It was one of the ones that only displays the time when you press the button, but the addition of a little switch added the functionality of being able to turn it on or off at will. So with the addition of a separate battery pack – reasons 1 & 2 for my update were solved.

I also decided to print off a new version of the XFLR-6 test rocket on my Longer Orange 10 resin printer. Not all that hard to do actually. The trick was making sure that the shape was correct. There are a lot of “Tintin Rocket” .stl files available on the internet, but most of them are for the moon rocket itself, not the smaller test rocket. By following some of the more technical drawings I had for reference, I was able to build a 3-part .stl file.

If you’d like to use it, feel free to download the STL files here!

After that it was a matter of painting and making a few adjustments (including making the jeep’s tires grey as per the inside pages of the album instead of the cover).  I think the end result was well worth the revisit to this project, but feel free to let me know what you think in the comments section below.

It might be a bit hard to see, so allow me to explain;

• The clock is set for 24-hours, so the current time is 10 minutes past midnight (yes, I should be in bed!)
• On the first press the spotlight comes on and the green lights at the top of the launch tower start flashing.
• On the second press the counter is armed. The countdown is set to 10 seconds and the button turns red.
• On the third press the countdown begins. When it reaches zero, the counter flashes “XX”, and the engine ignition sequence begins.  The lights on top of the tower flash red.
• On the fourth press the whole thing is reset back to the beginning.