Cosmic Saucer

Howdy, wonderful people!

It's a little flying saucer!  And it's (mostly) an assembly, though there is one part that's set up for multimaterial printing if you should so choose - more on that below.  Check out the saucer sitting on my hand in the photos, for scale.

Assembling models from parts is such a satisfying thing.  There's a real sense of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts with these things; somehow the parts seem cleaner and neater just by virtue of being assembled from different colours.  Well, that's what my brain seems to think, anyway :P

Okay, back to our Cosmic Saucer.  All the parts screw together, and there's a photo below of the disassembled parts oriented for printing.  The antenna attaches to the cockpit, the cockpit threads into the saucer upper, the saucer lower screws into that, and lastly the landing gear joins in from the bottom.

Technically, you could store things in this.  I do seem to gravitate towards containers even when I'm not actually trying to!  There's a void inside, under the cockpit, though it's quite small, and any aliens you put in there would need to be likewise quite tiny...

Update 12 Aug 23: Fixed geometry in Saucer Upper

Both the single- and multimaterial verions of saucer upper had a weird bit of geometry that some slicers ignored but others respected (which caused problems).  That's now fixed in both versions, which have “v2” in the filenames :)

Print Description

This is a regular mode print, though you'll want to keep things neat so that parts can thread together nicely.  If you use a brim, be sure to check that all the brim is removed from thread ends, or else things will probably jam up.

Multimaterial Rivets

There are two versions of the saucer upper supplied:

* Single file that has the rivets as features of the design

* Two files that separate the rivets out for multimaterial printing

Note that the multimaterial version is meant for systems that support multiple filaments in a print, such as Prusa MMU, Bambu AMS and Mosaic Palette. 

Print Dimensions

The Saucer Upper is 100mm x 100mm on the print bed and 18mm tall.

Supports Needed?

Not at all!  Designed for straightforward printing!

Scalability

The main issue scaling this one will be the threads, which at some point will get either too tight or too loose to work properly.  However, given that this is meant for one-time assembly, you could probably manage such things with some filing and/or gluing!  

Print Orientation

All the parts print right-way up, except for the landing gear, which prints upside-down.

Further Thoughts

There were versions of this along the way that featured retractable landing gear, but the model is really too small for it to be as robust as I wanted.  Maybe I need to scale this whole idea up, and see what could become of it...

Happy printing!

xoxo

Sven.

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563 Cosmic Saucer