One of the great things about the 3D printing revolution is that, other than time and a small amount of hard disk space, the Artists commit very little by way of investment into whatever project captures their imagination.

This allows, in pure financial terms, for "risky" projects to be made available that don't have to sell in large numbers in order to make a return.

My first printed resin kit was printed on my behalf by Stuart Good. The way it works is that you buy a STL file directly from the artist, and this contains all the data needed by the printer to create a three-dimensional copy of the digital model. There's an honour system in place that presumes you are printing only one of these files for your own personal use, but like all honour-based systems, it is abused to the nth degree, and the WWW and STL files can be bought from unscrupulous "pirates" at significantly lower prices.

Anyhoo, I placed my order with Stuart, and a few weeks later, a box of bits arrived that, with some care and attention, ending up looking like what you see in the photos.

In an increasingly not-so-rare moment of insanity, I decided to add some flickering LEDs to the build run by a small 9-volt battery pack that sits out of sight behind the body of the ship. The lights were supposed to represent "idling" engines, but to be perfectly honest, the results were far more subtle than I intended.

The design is based in equal parts upon a sketch by William Creber for Beneath the Planet of the Apes, the wreckage of Brent's ship seen in that same movie, and some 3D digital artwork that can be seen on the website Sci-Fi Airshow.

All of the flags and stripes were printed onto some DIY waterslide decal paper.

For the photographs, I set up a simple stage. The mirror was to reflect the light from the LEDs back up onto the ship, and for a little extra drama, I added some Chinese-produced smoke pellets.

Like most Chinese produced tat purchased via ebay, they didn't work as expected, and there was an alarming moment where instead of smouldering, the pellets went off like a flare. It was all over in a couple of seconds, and I feared I might have scorched my model, but by a lucky accident, the image that captured that accidental flare was the best of all, and the model was unharmed.