Steampunk Airship (vase mode!)

Ahoy-hoy, wonderful people!

Ah, vase mode and steampunkery, two of my favourite topics, and not the first time they've found themselves combined - maybe this airship is heading for the vase mode steampunk lighthouse!

These blimpy things are very much round shapes, and so the obvious problem is how to render such a shape within the constraint of having no angle greater than 45 degrees from vertical.

The solution, not surprisingly, is to hide the unprintably-rounded bits under other, more-printable things that still give the impression of the hidden parts being there. That nose cone sticking out the front starts at exactly the point on the elliptical airship body that things would start to get questionably shallow, extends outwards and then angles in to form a plain cone, all of which is nice and printable in vase mode.

At the other end we have fins and big engines to mask the curve, and those serve another significant purpose, too - to anchor the print securely with a reasonably large footprint on the print bed.

Of course, many of the smaller features and adornments have similar considerations - those smokestack thingies on top, for example, are double teardrop-shaped forms that incorporate texture and features to make them seem circular. Those are the fun parts of the design, really - the challenging bits that manage to achieve things that the constraints are not really conducive to doing!

Print Description

This is a vase mode print, so set your slicer accordingly! That said, this is a closed form so you could just as easily print it using regular mode as well if you really want to!

One hint that's always worth pointing out with this stuff is that you might want to increase your line width in the slicer. I printed at both 0.4mm and 0.6mm line width with the same filament and the difference in strength was remarkable.

Print Dimensions

While this one's a vase mode print and will scale happily, the default dimensions are 77mm x 110mm on the print bed and 158mm tall.

Supports Needed?

Not at all!  Designed for straightforward printing!

Scalability

As a vase mode print, this will scale happily!

Print Orientation

The Steampunk Airship prints rear-down, pointing upwards. Or should that be stern-down for an airship?

Further Thoughts

I never get tired of working with vase mode, but the main downside is that prints can be somewhat fragile, to say the least. There are some ways to mitigate that, such as the thicker line width or larger nozzle mentioned earlier, and PETG filaments are certainly stronger than PLA.

However, at 3DPrintopia recently I stole a shiny glitter TPU from Nathan and Melissa at Cookiecad and used that for vase mode prints, and it was a whole new world of strength, and of course the prints were all flexy and bendy, too. So, I think I'll have to explore those a bit more with vase mode, and see where things end up! :)

Happy printing!

xoxo

Sven.

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491 Steampunk Airship