Moebius Models’ 2001: a Space Odyssey EVA Pod: Review

The Pod Pages

Welcome to my documents related to the iconic space pods featured in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film, 2001: a Space Odyssey. Check the sidebar to the left (or click on the three line icon) to see other related pages.

The kit

The Moebius Models EVA (extravehicular activity) pod from 2001: a Space Odyssey is the first licensed commercial kit ever produced of the iconic fictional spacecraft. Half a century after the film was released, and we finally have a nice looking model that ships with a full interior. It is cool that the Moebius production team, and 2001 researcher Adam Johnson who also contributed to the work have chosen to invest in products for such an old, albeit influential, film.

Unfortunately there are issues to consider regarding this kit. A lot of issues.

Up until now your only EVA pod choices have basically been a few garage resin kits (some okay and most pretty bad), an all-paper kit, or scratchbuild one yourself. I spent several months modelling and 3D-printing a 65mm (roughly 1:32) pod from scratch, and I have a pretty good idea how much work is involved: a lot! It’s a surprisingly complicated design to recreate, despite being made almost entirely from simple geometric primitives: spheres, cones, cubes.

Good stuff

There's definitely positive stuff about the kit.

• • It's a standard glue-together and paint styrene model kit. It's not made from hard-to-finish polyurethane resin or anything like that.

  • It's quite affordable given its size.

  • The deceptively subtle yet complex shapes, lines, and proportions of Harry Lange and Frederick Ordway’s pod design are replicated to varying degrees of accuracy.

  • The majority of the details are present (in one form or another)

  • It’s impressively large. 1:8 scale means it’s a sizeable sphere, 25cm/10 inches, in diameter. Think a basketball in size. (a bit bigger than a UK football/soccer ball)

  • It includes a fully detailed interior, which is another kit first. The pods had very complex internal geometry, so it’s great to see the control panels reproduced in model form.

  • Note that the interior set used to film the scenes of the astronauts piloting the pod were slightly bigger in scale than the interior constructed for the full-sized pod built for the pod bay scene. Of course, this model has an interior scaled to fit the model, and so the insides are scaled-down compared to the outside. If you know what I mean.

  • That said, the space scenes in the movie featured pods with reflective black windows to conceal the arm mechanisms. So the interior is optional anyway if you want screen accuracy of a space scene, rather than a pod bay view. (just spray the inside of the window black and there you go)

  • Considering the model’s capacious size there’s plenty of internal real estate to accommodate any wires, fibres, LEDs, loudspeakers, and electronics you may want to stuff in there.

  • The arms are articulable and can be placed in various harmless or astronaut-killing positions.

  • The door is movable.

  • While it’s mostly made from off-white styrene plastic, the window and a few details are clear plastic, and the headlight dishes are chrome plated.

  • Includes a detailed decal sheet, with a subset of the tiny bits of text (or representations thereof) and pinstriping lines seen on the sets.

  • Has a nicely printed assembly manual, with good quality line drawings and colour sections for painting tips.

Issues with the Moebius pod

Unfortunately, there are many many drawbacks. Of course, no kit is ever going to be 100% perfect by definition. Some of these things will bug some modelmakers, and others will seem unnoticeable and inconsequential. But overall the quality of the Moebius 2001 lineup is mediocre, and not in keeping with the quality you'd expect from today's better vehicle model kits.

It's up to you and your own personal priorities if you want to address any of them. I list them here because, as noted above, I’ve made my own model of the EVA pod from scratch and I’m pretty familiar with the design. Errors, therefore, are pretty noticeable to me even if they’re obscure to everybody else.

• • All the details are wrong or simplified. I think this issue is a combination of numerous factors. It's clear that they didn't have access to all the high-resolution photos needed to model many details accurately. Many of the mistakes arise from Moebius copying previous models and drawings that fans have made. Moebius also produced the kit to a specific cost, which meant skimping on recreating a lot of the details. And finally they clearly worked with a mediocre factory to make the moulds.

  • The kit has old-fashioned and low-quality moulding, like a typical American model kit from the 1980s. It’s serviceable and beats resin casting, but it simply isn't anywhere near as crisp as the better styrene kits available today. The surface is kind of rough, and internal corners look pretty crappy. Look at the door panel below (click for details). Also the three button mini panel is angled wrong - its angle should match the internal surface of the recess. It takes a little skill and experience – and a bunch of time – to fix this sort of thing.

  • Not only is the mould quality rather weak, but it's clear that a lot of compromises were made to make the kit cheap to manufacture. There are no side actions in the moulds, and a lot of parts have pretty objectionable tapered draft.

• If you’re used to the incredibly sharp injection moulded products produced in Japan by Bandai, for example, then this kit produced in China will be a bit disappointing. Take the injection moulding of Bandai’s half-sized BB-8 kit, which is about the same size. It's solid, flawlessly smooth, and razor-sharp. Now, I know that's not entirely fair. Bandai have no equals when it comes to plastic moulding technology (perfect surface textures, undergated sprues, side gates, etc.). And Star Wars models sell to a huge market, which means Bandai can amortize their kit investments across a much larger sales base than a kit from a single 50 year old movie. Moebius made certain financial choices when deciding on the quality level of the kit's moulds.

• The Moebius pod is comparatively thin-walled and feels hollow and frankly a bit flimsy. Consider the Bandai BB-8 again - it has very thick and solid pieces (of course, partly because of the snap-together pegs, posts and other structures). Oh well. It's all about economics.

• Major errors in proportion. In particular, the window recess is too shallow and the door is too tall and set low. These are probably compromises they chose to fit the cockpit interior inside.

• No pilot figure is included. (which would have increased the price considerably)

• The scale they chose, 1:8, is a little odd. It doesn’t match much else out there. A shame, since 1:6 is a common scale for figurines. Of course, the reason is pragmatic – a 1:6 kit would be huge!

• Although most people will appreciate the large size, it could be too big for many people, ironically. Not everyone has shelf space for such a bulky basketball. Personally I think 1:12 is a better size for most folks. I wonder Moebius would sell more kits if it had been smaller in size, especially given the general lack of competition. Who knows?

• The black parts of the pod are not separate pieces of plastic. This is a design choice that's a total drag, because it means you'll have to laboriously mask each part when it comes to painting.

• The worst area is the innermost section, where the thin “fins” of the ridges touch the white dome. That's really fiddly and time-consuming to mask, since to approximate the film's look (the black rubber strips actually went into a shallow slot on the dome part of the earmuff, though a black line on the squashed sphere area is probably an adequate approximation) you have to mask on the curve of the spherical section of the earmuff. The windowframe is another crappy area for the inexperienced to mask well.

• It would have been so much easier and quicker for everyone had those bits been sprued separately. When I designed my own 1:32 pod model I made those separate parts, and it makes precise painting a breeze! Plus they look like separate components, as they clearly are in the film. At least the requirements of injection moulding forced Moebius into making the earmuffs' large engine cones separate pieces.

• The Moebius parts are extremely difficult to cut out neatly if you decide to cut the pieces to paint them separately. The components I’m referring to include the trapezoidal thingies on the earmuffs above (rocket jet/RCS deflectors presumably), the windowframe recess, and the door’s outer control panel.

• No lighting is included, making lights a third party add-on opportunity. I think that’s fine, since most pre-packaged lighting solutions tend to be a bit lame anyway. There are already two separate third party kits – one etched brass, one cut vinyl stickers – for masking the top panels to prevent light leaks.

• There are no lighting brackets or anything on the interior, so adding lights will require a little modelmaking skill in addition to simple electronics. There is a third party kit for this.

• The control panels are moulded from semi-opaque off-white styrene - the same as the body - rather than clear or translucent plastic. The buttons are also not separate parts. These decisions are disappointing. It’s still possible to backlight the buttons using this stuff, it’s just that the white styrene soaks up and thus wastes a lot of backlighting power. Also the internal hollows of the material cast visible shadows on the button surfaces, and you have to spend forever masking all surfaces to make it work.

• No desktop stand for people who want to show it floating on a pole or whatever. Which is fine – most supplied stands are pretty crappy, and the pod can sit on flat surfaces easily anyway.

• The sphere is in two halves, requiring a fair bit of careful putty work and sanding to eliminate the join. But that’s unavoidable given injection moulding tech. Frustratingly the top cap isn't a separate piece, and so has a messy part line running down the middle. More time-consuming work to fix.

• Because of the injection moulding process, the struts of the arms are unavoidably supplied in halves, and so assembling them will inevitably require filling and sanding to banish the toylike seams. This is a kit that does require some skill and experience to look its best. I bet some people will replace the plastic with brass tubing. That will look better and will be sturdier, though it might be harder to do the yellow and red coloured rings that way.

• The arms also have simplified and incorrect details. The finger grips in particular lack the correct pad details.

• I personally don’t mind that the body isn’t moulded in pure white since it’s going to need painting anyway. The target market is not the “snap-together with no paint” market. That said, I can see why some people would have preferred white plastic. Also note that, in my kit at least, sprues are moulded using two different grades, and thus two different colour tints, of plastic.

• The parts aren't very well cleaned – there's noticeable greasy black and brown release agent residue, especially by the ejector pin marks. You'll need to wash everything very carefully before painting, since paint doesn’t adhere to the grease. This, again, is not in keeping with a decent model kit.

• The window is moulded in transparent plastic. It therefore has the very slight waviness and unevenness that’s unavoidable with clear injection-moulded styrene. You can see in the photo below that the overhead ceiling light, which should have a sharp clean line in the reflection, is a bit fuzzy and uneven.

• The only way to fix this would be to take some clear flat acrylic sheet and bend it into a slight cylinder. Cast acrylic (Plexiglas/Perspex etc) is produced using a different process that yields a more perfectly flat and reflective surface than injection-moulded plastic. Even PETG sheet would be better.

• The only problem with this idea is that Moebius chose to mould the black “rubber strip” part of the window (where the frame joins the glass) into the clear plastic rather than into the black windowframe as it should have. As a result you've got to make up something else if you replace the "glass". And if you choose to keep the Moebius plastics, the clear window has to be carefully masked with an oval and the edge painted black. Dangit – why was that stupid decision made?

• Note that the domed headlight “glass” pieces have the same problem. But since the pieces are smaller and are installed over chrome dishes they look fine.

Accuracy

As noted, the pod is reasonably accurate in terms of its overall shape. The vehicle's design is quite complex and subtle, and Moebius got most proportions spot-on. (aside from the window and door sizes)

But details? This is where Moebius' kit suffers, and badly. Now admittedly people won't notice these mistakes unless they're sitting there, carefully comparing the Moebius model to photos of the real props and models. Most of the errors are fixable, which is good since kits with fundamentally flawed errors of proportion are the worst to deal with.

But, for the sake of completeness, and since many of the errors do lend a regrettably toylike vibe to the finished model, here we go...

• • The upper camera cone is slightly too tall and pointy. The flat bit at the top is too small in diameter compared to the original pods. They modelled the cone after the design of Scott Alexander's resin space pods, thus replicating his error.

If you want a replacement cone that's lower, I've made a 3D printed replacement part.

• The Moebius camera cylinders, including the one shown in the cone above, are too large and lack fluted sides. The movie camera tubes all had fluting (parallel grooves, running the long dimension of the cylinder). The bottom of the camera recesses, which Moebius amusingly refers to wrongly as “accessory attachment cones,” is also quite wrong - it has a deep indentation instead of a shallow dish. The Moebius version of the camera parts basically look like incomplete toys, even if you don't know exactly what the film ones were like. I've made replacement parts for the cameras.

• As noted earlier, the vent things above the exterior door opening, and the top of the door, are too low. As a result the two top rear cameras appear to be in the wrong position. This is a big pain to fix and I doubt anyone's going to do it.

• The control panel buttons are moulded as long rectangular blocks or strips. They should actually be separated – the buttons on the real set didn't touch – but Moebius simply moulded in a shallow groove between each "button". This is a shame, since you can't cut notches between the buttons with a razor saw, as there's a hollow recess on the underside of each button strip.

• The silver-ringed recesses in the earmuffs (presumably low-power/RCS manoeuvring rockets - the ones in sort of rounded teardrop shapes) are a bit shallow. The larger of the holes, which had tapered sides, were a bit deeper on the prototypes. The Moebius parts also have these weird deep radial grooves, and have no obvious separation between the outer silver ring and the inner black hole.

• Also, on the real sets the smaller rings stuck out further and had a kind of knurled cogwheel outer section. The larger rings had no knurling and were lower in profile. I've made 3D-printed replacement rings for the teardrops if you want to correct these problems.

• The recessed cone on the underside, ostensibly part of the propulsion system, has the wrong number of grooves and has a shallow circle in the middle that doesn't look like anything in particular.

• The movie cone has around 12 grooves, not 20 like the Moebius. Of course the underside is barely visible in the film, so probably nobody will notice this. And this is kind of like rivet counting. However, the way Moebius moulded it – as a kind of shallow dish – doesn't look resemble a rocket engine at all. Also, the original underside had a step running around the entire edge, whereas the Moebius part doesn't. This looks like another incorrect aspect of the kit copied from Scott Anderson’s products.

• The model’s underside also lacks the greeblies that can just be seen in the film. This is actually not an unreasonable decision because the greeblies only appear once, and are missing in another scene in the film. And besides, what were these greeblies for? Especially since the pod bay pads have no obvious recesses to accommodate protruding objects. Who knows? Retractable lockdown mechanisms for docking?

• The interior's starboard back control panel, the one mounted vertically on the rear wall, has the wrong proportions - it's too tall and narrow. (owing to the problem of fitting the inner set to the pod) It also has some incorrect details, especially the safety cover over the door release. This panel is shown in detail in the film since it's the one that Bowman uses to turn off the internal microphones in the pod, and later to fire up the emergency explosive bolt sequence. It's also one of the few sections of the model interior that's quite visible when you peer in through the front window. If you're interested in a more accurate panel, I've made a replacement 3D printed version.

• The interior's port back control panel, mounted on the other side of the rear wall, has an arrangement of lights which corresponds to the full-size exterior (pod bay) set, but not the slightly larger full-size interior set. Which is inconsistent, since the Moebius interior is clearly modelled after the full-size interior set used for filming the piloting scenes.

• The front exterior panel beneath the window has entirely simplified and incorrect greeblies, which look toylike and fake. In particular the tube shape on the starboard side (left looking from the front) is sort of distorted to make it easy to pull the front part from the injection mould (tool drafting), and the trellis-like structure on the port side doesn't look like the trellis in either the pod bay pods, or the detailed attack pod. In fact, it’s clear that they modelled this trellis after the Simon Atkinson drawing, not photos from the film.

• Speaking of compromises for manufacturing, the rectangular black and red thingie to the left of the round recessed door handle on the back of the pod is angled incorrectly. The boxlike thing should project equidistant from the surface of the sphere. Instead Moebius designed it for ease of removal from the mould at the factory. As a result it's distorted, twisted to the right, and has curved sides rather than parallel ones. It's actually quite bad.

• I've made a 3D printed piece with the correct dimensions, shown (painted in a screen-accurate colour scheme) below. The Moebius part is shown by comparison to the left. Note another error in the kit – they made the whole strip containing the red box and handle raised, where it was actually the same height as the sphere, with two engraved panel lines top and bottom.

• The doors had projecting pieces along the inside edges. They're often not seen, because they're black and the interior is dimly lit, but they're definitely there in the pod bay scene. These projections fit into matching slots or recesses on the inside doorframe on the port (left) side; presumably as interlocks. The actual pod doors were also much thicker than the Moebius model's doors, which do not include the projecting sections.

• This image has been over-brightened to show the thickness of the door and the protruding sections.

• The panel lines on the rear starboard side are slightly wrong. The actual pods had more space between the rectangular outline (labelled “ELECT MOD INSP ACC”, presumably for “Electrical Module Inspection Access”) and the horizontal line below it. There was a vertical line joining the rectangle and the horizontal line, and the horizontal line did not extend all the way to the doorframe. Finally the engraved rectangle had a T-shaped handle (actually a part of an Airfix hovercraft kit). The short arm of the T terminated in a square, and the intersection of the two arms was covered by a flat disc. Moebius approximate this detail with a raised rectangle and a black T-shaped decal, which all looks pretty lame, frankly.

• I've crudely outlined the correct panel lines in red in this photo to illustrate where the outline actually was.

• The panel lines engraved into the door are also wrong. The top panel line on the actual props, as seen in the photo above, lined up with the red squares of the explosive bolts. The Moebius door top panel line is located way above the squares for some reason.

• Here's another obscure one... Moebius made the narrow forward-facing slot thingies on the front of each earmuff slightly different – the port side one is missing one of the protruding rectangles. In actuality both slot openings were the same shape, even though the internal details were different. Each earmuff should thus be identical, just rotated 180° for the port and starboard sides. The slots also contained sprue details, which were mostly grey. Not red like the Moebius decals. (again, they copied the Atkinson drawings rather than photos of the real pods)

• As a side note, construction of the pod bay set required the creation of six "earmuffs". Since they were identical (the left and right earmuffs were rotated 180°) it suggests that they were moulded from fibreglass-reinforced plastic (FRP) or something similar, like a boat. I don't have any evidence that this technique and material were used, but I did find photographs of the sphere section under construction in the Stanley Kubrick Archives, showing that fibreglass was used. So it seems a reasonable theory that the earmuffs were made the same way.

• Speaking of the earmuffs, a detail that Moebius got partly right is that one of the 8 wedge-shaped pieces, on all the pods, is flat with a square detail, not ridged. (This design decision on the part of the filmmakers is a bit strange since you'd think that the whole point of the ridges is to direct or deflect the hot gases from the RCS engines, so why have a flat one? Anyway.) Sadly, while including this detail Moebius made the square horizontal and not vertical, and omitted all the finer details. The full-sized pods actually used components from an Airfix OO gauge travelling crane here. I've made correct details for this part.

• The recessed handgrips have handles that are, on the sphere part of the pod, too flat. They should be slightly curved.

• There are two very small flat discs projecting from the side of the triangular front wedges, just in front of the earmuff details. These are missing from the Moebius kit since the projecting parts would interfere with pulling the part out of the mould. Luckily it's easy to fix - just glue a small styrene disc on each side.

• The projecting horizontal groove thingies (heat radiators?) underneath the step beneath the door aren't correct. Moebius made them parallel to the bottom of the pod, so the back half of the sphere could be pulled easily from its injection mould.

• However, the actual groove thingies were radial to the centre of the pod, not parallel to the bottom. Also, the real pods had more grooves. It looks like there were 12 on the original full-sized pods, (see photo below) whereas the Moebius kit has 9. Three may not sound like much, but it looks significantly different. There was also a shallow slot, or possibly just a black-painted rectangle, in the vertical panel immediately below the grooves. The Moebius kit is blank in that area (it's the blank wide strip to the top of the photo below, which is upside-down).
  Trivia note: the idea behind the roller door was to store space probes. This is specifically called out on the full-sized pod blueprints, which describe this door as a "probe locker". Indeed, one of the starboard control panels on the interior also has a group of pushbuttons labelled "PROBE JETTISON".
  This is in keeping with the idea that the EVA pod wasn't just meant for repair missions around the Discovery, but was supposed to travel great distances down to the surface of Jupiter's moons for scientific research trips. This idea also explains why there's a mighty big rocket bell on the bottom of the craft - they need to land and take off from moons.

• The two cylindrical thingies on either side of the step, just beneath the back door, aren't screen-accurate. In the film they're parallel-sided cylinders with two slots cut into the flat inner surface. The slots are horizontal in the pod bay scenes, and vertical in at least one outer space scene.

• Moebius moulded the thingies as very slightly tapered cylinders, for ease of moulding. (true parallel sides are difficult to extract from injection moulds) And they made the inner surface flat with projecting ridges, rather than recessed slots. The model has the slots in the horizontal orientation – the appear both ways in the movie. I've made 3D-printed replacement cylinders if you'd rather use those.

• The text on the Moebius decals above the cylinders (“VERN THRUSTERS”) does not match the text on the full-sized props. I can't read what the text says, but the letter sizes and spaces don't correspond to the Moebius text. Anyway the cylinders clearly were not meant to be vernier thrusters, since they're on the lower edge of the pod and there are no matching thrusters at the top. Any rocket engines placed down there would cause the EVA pod to spin crazily!

• In fact, most of the decal text from the labels on the outside of the ship isn’t right anyway.

• Another obscure one... the Moebius interior front display panels are moulded with raised frames, which is correct. The display frames are also angled inwards to the middle, which is also correct. However, the actual movie set also had the screen frames raised at the front and angled down towards the bottom. Moebius didn't model them this way, but I don't blame them. The only photo I've seen that was taken at the necessary angle to make this tilting of the front display frames really obvious is an unpublished contact print in the Kubrick Archives.

• And now, for a really insanely obscure observation... the port control panel on the full-sized set, just below the two display screens, had a small and nearly flat plaque bearing the name and logo of long-defunct British aerospace manufacturer Hawker Siddeley Dynamics. The company consulted on the film, and this was a nod to their contribution.

This nameplate is moulded as a pushbutton on the Moebius panel, which isn't quite correct. The dimensions are the same, but the plate was actually much lower profile than the button.

Painting

• The Moebius instructions say the interior should be matte red. This means the ceiling and the door, but not the control panel surfaces, which were satin black. However all the photos I've examined, including those in the Archives, show that the ceiling and door were actually a very dark red, almost brick red or oxblood. More maroon than brown. The paint also had a satin finish. The reason the interior looks scarlet red, and not dark brick red, in the movie is because the internal lighting is mostly red, like a submarine.

• Red oxide primer, such as Tamiya, is a reasonable colour choice.

• Two details most people have never seen... there are two photos in the Archives showing the vertical panel under the front dash, to which the two manipulator arm controls and a sort of greebly box are mounted. This panel is also brick red.

• The “floor” was not flat grey. Both the ridged rubber material and the seating pad were simply black.

• The rectangular lights on the bottom of the padded areas glow red in the movie, so people tend to paint them red. Moebius says they were translucent red. In actuality they were opal (translucent) white acrylic panels, with red light bulbs inside. (ie: red when on; white when off)

• The same photos show that the outer cylindrical section of the manipulator arm controllers was actually a yellow-gold colour, not silver like the angled section or the round perforated disc at the end. The angular box at the top of the cylinder, with a square blue pushbutton, was black and not silver. Unfortunately I can't distribute these images, so you just have to take my word for it. Still, the screen shot below does show the pale gold look to the controller's cylinder, compared to the neutral silver colour of the neck ring on the spacesuit. Unfortunately this shot does not show the end of the controller, where you could have seen the contrast between the gold cylinder and the flat silver disc on the front.

• The instructions say that the "raised details" inside the two “slots” at the front of each earmuff should be painted red. These raised lines were actually medium dark grey in colour. Only the interior of the large low cylinder on the port-side slot was red.

• The instructions say to paint each "metal ring" part on the earmuffs (the teardrops) silver. The actual movie prop ones were white with raised (ie: separate) chrome rings and black recesses.

• The handwheel to the left of the door was either pale grey or flat silver, and the dish interior was probably grey and not white.

• The raised lines inside the recessed sections on the front of the earmuffs were not red - they were medium dark grey. Only the recessed cylinder interior in that detail (port side) was red.

• The HAL 9000 eye wasn't "red" per se. If you look closely at the photos only the very centre of the lens produced light - the rest was black. An entirely red lens looks very wrong.

Modifications and Upgrades

A kit like this has a lot of opportunities for modifications and upgrades. Here are a few to think about.

• There are a lot of minor inaccuracies when it comes to certain details, as I’ve listed above. I've been making 3D printed replacement components to fix these problems, and they're also on the list of add-ons.

• Improved lighting. Although the panels are moulded from semi-opaque plastic they can still be lit if bright enough LEDs are stuck behind them. However, they don't look great as-is, and you'll have a ton of light leaks if you simply use the supplied decals.

• There are third party products available from Paragrafix and Yay Monsters! for masking the panel surfaces to avoid the problem - check the link of add-on products.

• If you're not comfortable with wiring up your own LEDs there are kits coming on the market that give you the necessary parts to do it yourself.

• For extra-exciting realism, there's enough room for colour LCDs to be installed behind the control panels where the display screens are supposed to go. Animated screens are much more fun than static displays!

The side display openings are about 16.5 x 17.3mm in size, with a 1.6mm separator bar between them. A single 1.8" diagonal LCD could be used to cover both, with some unused area top and bottom. A 1.54" diagonal LCD is too small to cover both. The front display openings are not on the same plane - they're angled to each other. They're about 13.5 x 14.5mm in size each, and so are ideally driven by separate small displays, such as the TinyScreen+ mentioned below.

Note that the Adafruit LCDs are a popular option for hobbyist displays, and can be driven by a variety of affordable and compact microcontrollers. However, I sadly don't recommend them. The current Adafruit code is quite slow at loading images – bitmaps appear with a kind of unintended windowblind animation as the data chugs across the SPI bus. This doesn't look anything like the movie, where the display screens updated instantly as they were displayed on 16mm film loops.

Accordingly you need something like the rapid-display Teensy drivers, which were used for the Adafruit Teensy creepy blinking eye project. These are capable of loading bitmaps with a more reasonable response time.

Another alternative is actual video loops. The TinyScreen+ OLED display is ideal for the latter. However, its display area is indeed tiny - just 20 x 13mm in size. That's fine for the two front displays, but the side displays are larger - you'd need to mask off the edges of those screens to conceal the smaller working area of the LCD. This masking would, however, allow for the edge problem by the separator bars. You'd also need six of the devices, which would obviously add up in cost.

In any of these cases you'd have to create your own video slideshows or loops of appropriate EVA pod displays. Note that many of the displays used on the Discovery's screens aren't appropriate for the EVA pod, even though they're easier to repurpose since many of them appear in the movie square-on. The Discovery displays show various bits of information (eg: HIB for the hibernation sarcophagi) that make no sense for the EVA pod interior.

• • What else could you add? Audio loops of pod ambient noise? WiFi remote control over different video loops on the LCDs? Remote control over the headlights and other lights?

  • I'm sure a really talented model maker could fit some small stepping motors inside the pod to motorize the arms, though whether it'd be possible to do this while retaining the interior cockpit, I don't know.

  • For bonus points: add the smooth-turning door motor mechanism that Richard Stiers designed!

Other info

I've made a publicly editable list of third party modification kits. (lighting kits, etc)

Tested.com preview of prototype kit.

Ken Spriggs: kit unboxing.

Scale Model Kit Review unboxing.

Lou Dalmaso's five-part assembly video, including information on paint masks and LCD screens.

Should the underside have greeblies? Or not?

Moebius Models have a website, but it doesn't actually list their current product lineup. Who knows what's up with that.

CultTVMan's blog has a bunch of CGI renderings of the Moebius pod.

Monsters in Motion product listing for the pod.

CultTVMan product listing for the pod.

Summary

So judging by Internet posts, this kit is pretty popular with fans of 2001: a Space Odyssey.

Now, is it screen-accurate? No. I think it's clear that Moebius made a lot of cost-saving decisions, on the grounds that a large yet affordable kit would be a better product than an expensive and more accurate kit. These choices mean that it's not at all accurate.

Most buyers of the kit seem pretty happy with it, so I guess they feel that's fine. But if you want something fully screen-accurate this kit will take quite a bit of work to get right.

Contact

contact@theageofplastic.info