Ships Computer Game

Got the two laptops hooked up to display a planet on the left display and a game on the right display.

Shakedown Test

It's been some time since last posting due to the holidays and everyone in the house getting sick, recovering and then getting sick again.

Here's Joshua in the cockpit trying out a new game from the Disney web site. I've added red rope lights to the frame for night time lighting and couple of MP3 players hooked up to an old computer speakers. The laptop on his left side is old Compaq that has just barely enough horsepower to play a media player with visualization. The second laptop will be an old Dell, that willl be used as his flight simulator, attached with joystick and steering control.

Spaceship Assembly Part 1

Here's a timelapse video of assembling the spaceship. Overall time was about 40 minutes. This video shows the first 30 minutes compressed down to about 2 minutes.

Pod Bay and Exterior Back Side View

Here's an exterior view of the outer panels to the back of the spaceship. This is the view into the pod bay.

Interior Space

The interior space has a wall console and table console that cover the pod bay. Eventually, it'll have some kind of a Star Trek like LCARS display. An old used laptop could be setup to display various images here.

Here's the maintenance crew working on one of the control panel boxes.

The back wall is covered up from the outside.

Cockpit Control Panel

I've designed the cockpit to be versatile enough to allow for multiple configurations as mission profile changes. The basic layout of the cockpit is a trapezoid shaped table with a place for a insert panel the same shaped as the table with a cleat at the bottom back end to go into the back panel with space for wires.

Underneat the control panel is the access panel. I'll need to cut it and add some hinge to make it accessable from the cockpit for maintenance and upgrades to the electronics that will eventually go into the cockpit.

Hull Plating and Captain's Seat

Using quarter inch laminated MDF sheets, the side and front walls as well as top were cut and secured to the frame as hull plating. Original idea was to paint the ship red like as in the Little Einstein's red rocketship. But as an intermediate step, I wanted to see what it will look like with white walls because that's what I had available. Eventually, maybe next year, I'd like to paint it some kind of metallic silver color.


For the captain's seat, I took an unused child carseat from the garage and added a box support to hold it up.

Using some scrap 2 by 4 lumber, I constructed a rectangular box with cardboard circle as a steering wheel. This is just to see how to place the seats. There will be a pilot seat on the left side and a captain's seat on the right side of the cockpit.

Crew Door and Pod Bay Door

After some experimenting, the side doors were the weak points in the overall strength of the spaceship hull. Considerable amount of bracing was needed to firm up the side of the hull if the two doors were left in place and to maintain large usable interior space. So, I removed the doors from the sides and place them in the back. This meant that the stairs and slide concept would need to be revisited and redesigned.

I placed the crew exit door on the back left side and the pod bay door on the back right side. The crew exit door would be larger to allow for chairs, equipment, and adults to enter the spaceship. The pod bay was 30 inches deep, 24 inches high, and 18 inches wide. The pod bay was for storing the motorized ATV my son had for last year's Christmas present. He could use it as his "moon buggy" or "exploration rover" while on exploration missions on new planets.

Cockpit A-frame and Top

As mentioned in earlier post, the cockpit needed to be more aerodynamic, so I made the front window tilt up about 45 degrees from the side walls. For simplicity in design, I tried to keep every angle at about 45 degrees, so that my compound miter saw could handle the cut without having to build a jig to work around some difficult angle. Building the cockpit A-frame required multiple attempts to get the compound angles just right for the pieces to fit flat and flush with each other. There is one joint that has six pieces of wood coming together.

Side Doors and Back Wall

The idea as a play structure was to raise the play structure several feet off the ground and have two openings, one side for stairs and the other side for a slide. Since this was a spaceship, it needed doors while traveling through space so that the air would not escape into outer space while the kids were on their mission. So with some hinge, I added a small door on each side about two feet high. Then added a back wall to finish the lower part of the play structure.

Cockpit Frame

Cockpit was the first thing that I decided to work on because it was the most complicated one, and it would lay the foundation of how the rest of the spaceship play structure would be built around.

A 7/8" thick 4' x 8' plywood was placed on a workbench as the floor for the spaceship. I drew a semi-circle with a 2 foot radius at one end of the plywood. This will be the front of the spaceship.

Next, the canopy of the cockpit was sized up with card board and painters tape until I got it within the semi-circle and had enough of a slope to give it the look I wanted. In space, aerodynamics need not be considered, but as it enters the atmosphere, this would important.

Then, I added the frame for the instrumentation.

The front left and right side walls within the cockpit were built 2 feet high. Still had the cardboard canopy for getting the size right.

Cardbard Prototype

To get an idea of how big to make the spaceship play structure, I wanted to build a full scale prototype using some cardboard boxes we saved from Ikea furniture we had earlier in the year. The Ikea boxes were good to use because they don't have picture nor too much design on both the inside and outside of the boxes. After two days of working on this with utility knife and packing tape, I was able to get this prototype build for him.

Testing of the prototype was done by having my son play in it and by inviting his friends over for load capacity testing. It could fit six pre-school kids comfortably, or one adult (me sitting down) and three of them. They all loved it. Some of the older kids were taller and kept bumping their heads on the top, so I needed to take this into account. The cockpit window were too steep, like a VW van so I also needed to give it a little more aerodynamic slant.

As kids played with this, you can see their crayon marks on the back side of the prototype.

Little Einstein Rocketship

The original inspiration for starting this was the red Rocketship in the kids show Little Einstein. Here's a shot of the image from our television screen.

Initially, we'll paint it red like this. But, I'm thinking silver metallic paint, would really be more like a spaceship.