Do we really need another BSG Shuttle GAL 356?

[Troy Downen]

I spent an evening goofing around with different approaches to lighting the flight deck and the engines. I settled upon a light strip up front in the flight deck and a single 900mcd 8mm LED with 360 deg viewing angle in each engine bell. I think that if I properly paint the engine bells with reflective paint (i.e. silver or such) then the bright LED will look pretty good. I might have preferred a halogen light with a highly reflective glass bell but those suckers get HOT and I’d like to be able to run these lights for hours at a time without worry of melting something on the shuttle. Everything checked out in a test setup, so it was time to “productionize” the lighting system.



The system will be powered by a 12VDC 1A “wall wart” with a 6.5mm jack. For this system 1A will be tons of current for the system and 12V is actually a bit more than I would prefer; 9V is often ideal for working with LEDs since each LED requires about 3.2V and thus three can be put in series without any resistors in the circuit. Resistors are just a waste of power (and generate heat) so I like to avoid them if I can. But I only had 12V transformers in my stash so I bit the bullet and put a resistor on each engine LED; the flight deck LED strip will be fairly content with 12V.

I located the female receptacle for the jack near the bottom attach point on the shuttle body. It should later be disguised by a greeblie that will be located in the same area (in the photos below you can see that I’ve sketched the location of the greeblie on the resin shuttle body to ensure proper location of the receptacle).



Because I can be a bit rough when plugging power into my models, I wanted to ensure that the receptacle for the jack was secure inside the shuttle body. I worked up a rather Rube Goldberg-style housing for the receptacle out of plywood and then epoxied and mechanically fastened it the inside wall of the shuttle. That’s what those two screws are doing that you see on either side of the receptacle in the previous photo.



Note that by now I’ve painted the inside of the shuttle body black to help with light blocking from the flight deck.

And speaking of which, here is the front office with LED strip installed. It’s not pretty, and with me that’s just how life is going to be. If I had to do it all over again I would cut a hole for the wire against the back wall to avoid running the wire around the front edge. Unfortunately, the wire is not totally hidden by the flight deck greeblies that will be installed in a later step; you can peek in the windows and just barely see it. So I’ve painted the wires white and pushed them out of the way as much as possible. I think it’ll work. Note the styrene scrap holder that I pieced together for the front part of the LED strip; I found that the LED strip was moving around a bit too much for my taste so that’s its punishment



A late afternoon light test. I’ve run the LEDs for only about 10 hours so far, and good practice would be to run them for a few days non-stop to root out “infant mortality” (i.e. find the suckers that are going to burn out on you; if they don’t burn out in the first 24-48 hours then they’ll last for 10,000 hours)... ish.