Ore Sample Pod - Red Dwarf

An Ore Sample Pod from the BBC TV show Red Dwarf.

Despite only being in a couple of episodes for probably a minute or so of screen time, I've always thought it was a cool, distinctive craft.

I think the design for this was based on a sketch by Mike Tucker going by BTS pictures from the DVDs.

Modelled in Blender - used the in built texture paint features in Blender extensively for all the grime and bump, painted rough outlines of the decals directly on the model and then took it over to Photoshop to add text etc

Did a bit of smoke simulation for the exhaust, I would like to do more but I'm pushing my 1070.

::BORING STUFF::

While I was making the model, I was thinking "How would this thing land?" so I tried a few layouts, before deciding they're all terrible - the centre of gravity on this thing would be awkward for horizontal landing (while not adding obvious landing equipment to the model), and vertically, it's quite tall so would be pretty unstable, but I went with a Space X style propulsive landing and some probably useless little stabilisers.

Another thing is scale, in Red Dwarf, this is shown to fit a humanoid robot, so I reckon that would make the ship at least 5 metres long - but there's at least one of these in Starbug according to Terrorform, and I reckon Starbug itself is about 34m long. Hmmmmmm ;D

Reference: there are like, 3 decent pictures of this thing at a model show, so they were useful - however a lot of the decals had peeled off so I had to look at differences in roughness and residue marks and then look at DVD quality model shots - took me a few goes.

The small engines are F1 engines from a Saturn V I believe, I modelled a simplified version. There is a good 3D one on Sketchfab to look around and get some relationships.

Couple of greeblies from this pack on the under door area https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/mbvn/100-free-kitbash-parts