The Centrifugal section now has a maze of channels and opened-up spaces to contain the electric and fiberoptic. I tried drilling all of these out with my dremmel, but in the end it was faster to redesign the piece and print it out again.
There was also some surface detail that was needed on this piece as well as some of the command section pieces... Soooo, I decided to upgrade most of the pieces to version 3. Incorporated into that, I changed (yet again) the attachment method to free up some space inside of the model. With the new design, the pieces are solid, allowing me to hollow out the inside automatically in my slicing program before printing. This reduces the wall thickness to 1.7mm and thus makes it easier for drilling holes for FO. I also used the opportunity to tear apart the tinkercad design "block for block" to correct misalignments and delete unneeded building-blocks, in order to reduce the overall complexity. After the corrections I then put everything more efficiently back together again. I did this, because I am slowly reaching the boundaries of what Tinkercad has to offer.
The most detail was needed on the bridge section and the top of the habitat pods. I did not realize it when I first started, but the bridge has sections where the hull is missing and a view into the internal structure and piping is seen (the areas above in red). I indented these deeply so that I can add the internal structure, piping, and greebles later.
The top of the Habitat-pod also received a makeover and some relief detailing (again something that had missed my scrutiny in the beginning). I also added some depressions to help with aligning the fiberoptic strands for windows.
While assembling the last printed version, I also had some difficulties where the rings close with the rest of the ship. In that version, I had cut the unseen parts out of the rings themselves. One of my updates was to reverse this so that the rings are continuous and the cut-out is done on the ship's hull pieces instead. This helps a lot with the alignment and actually makes it look more realistic. I also made the docking collars more massive. Now they actually insert into the hull instead of being glued to the surface, makeing them easier to print and allowing the ring to curve into the slot.
Regardless of the cleaning-up that I did, this will only prolong the inevitable, Tinkercad is a great tool to get started in, but there are limitations in the amount of polygons (complexity) a model can have, and even if you stay within that by splitting pieces up, it can be a pain to download large STLs. I looked into Blender a couple years ago, but even the experts out there will tell you that the learning curve is really difficult. At any rate, I decided it is time to try a second attempt at blender, especially because I would like to do some things with texturing that are just not possible in Tinkercad. For example, the "space shuttle-like" tiling on the hull, should be possible to apply to the entire surface as a texture.
