Manufacturer: 3D print, own design
Scale: 1/500
Additional parts: none
Model build: Jun -Sep 2025
Reban Moon Rocket Indawo 17
3D print, own model
1/500
1/500
For Icin
Made with Suno
Rocket to the Moon
Made with Suno
Bobo awaits
Made with Suno
The First Paw on Bobo
Year 2009 (Earth calendar) – Icin’s capital space center
The thunder of the Indawo 18 launch shook the frozen plains. Four Rebans were aboard, bound for Bobo, Icin’s nearest moon — a cold, silent sphere that had loomed in their sky since the beginning of their history.
Inside the command module, Commander Kael’dorr-Ka steadied his breathing. Across from him, Pilot Vela’ska-Rin whispered the countdown, her voice calm despite the vibrations rattling through their bones.
The rocket rose, shedding stages in bursts of fire. When the second stage faltered, Engineer Rinn’vorr-Be’s claws danced across the controls.
“Fuel regulator dropping! If we don’t reroute, we lose thrust!”
“Do it,” Kael ordered.
Rinn diverted the lines. For a terrifying second, nothing happened — then the engine roared again, just enough to carry them into transfer orbit.
Two days later, Bobo filled the viewport: a vast, cratered desert, its silence absolute. No clouds, no air, only shadow and stone.
“Prepare for descent,” Vela said, voice steady. She angled the lander’s retro-thrusters toward the barren surface. The craft jolted under sudden deceleration, vibrations crawling up their fur.
Without atmosphere, the descent was brutally direct. No drag to slow them, only engines. Vela feathered the controls, countering the lander’s drift toward a crater rim.
“Altitude 200 meters,” Rinn called out.
Dust plumes burst upward as thrusters fired, then hung unnaturally in the vacuum, falling back in eerie slow arcs. The lander’s legs flexed, metal groaning — then stillness.
They had landed.
The hatch opened with a hiss of decompression. Scientist Amara’lan-Tho was first to descend. She moved slowly, awkwardly, until her paw pressed into Bobo’s gray dust.
“For Icin,” she whispered, her voice carried home through the comms.
All across their world, Rebans watching through holo-feeds cheered. Their kind had touched another world.
For three days they worked, deploying seismic probes, mapping ridges, and collecting samples. But the moon was not without danger. On the second day, Amara’s instruments began to scream warnings.
“Seismic surge detected!” she barked. “A subsurface fracture is shifting under our landing zone.”
The ground beneath their lander trembled. In the vacuum, there was no sound, but fine regolith poured down like gray rain as cracks tore across the surface.
“Kael, the fissure’s widening — we’ll lose the lander if it slips!” Rinn shouted.
They bounded in long, low-gravity leaps across the fractured plain, dust trailing like pale comets behind them. The moon’s silence made every heartbeat thunder in their own ears.
Vela was already in the cockpit, thrusters primed. “Get aboard, now!”
The last paw slammed onto the hatch just as the ground gave way. Vela fired the engines, lifting the lander into the void while a canyon tore open below, swallowing rocks the size of buildings in a slow-motion collapse.
In orbit, silence returned. Their fur was damp with sweat, their paws trembling — but they had survived. They had left their mark on Bobo and carried its dust back with them.
When Indawo 18 finally returned home, the landing site was surrounded by millions of Rebans. The four explorers stood on the platform, their fur still dusted with Bobo’s gray regolith.
Commander Kael raised his paw skyward.
“Bobo is the first, but not the last. We walk the moons and asteroids as explorers. And one day, the stars will know our steps as well.”
The crowd erupted, their voices carrying across Icin. Above them, Bobo glowed silently, no longer unreachable.
In 2004, the Rebans took their first great step into space. The rocket Indawo 1 lifted from the forests of Icin, carrying a crew of two Rebans into orbit around their homeworld. For the first time, the Rebans gazed down on their planet from the silence of the void.
Over the following years, Reban engineers pushed their technology forward at astonishing speed. After more than a dozen flights into orbit, the next target of their program became clear: Bobo, the larger and closer of Icin’s two moons.
By 2008, the Indawo 17 mission was ready—a full test of the systems required for a moon landing, though without the additional service module needed for a descent.
The Indawo 17 rocket stood 127 meters tall. Its first two stages lifted the crew into Icin orbit, while a third stage, fitted with twin engines, carried out the transfer to Bobo and a circularization burn once there. After several orbits of Bobo, the stage reignited for the return trajectory before separating.
The crew module itself was designed as a winged glider, fitted with its own engines. On returning to Icin, it performed a deorbit burn, entered the atmosphere belly-first, then flipped upright for a controlled vertical landing.
To survive re-entry, Reban scientists turned not to metals or ceramics, but to nature. They developed the Tharnok Shield, made from the bark of the hardy Tharnok tree, native to Icin’s polar regions. Evolved to endure volcanic gases and solar flares, the bark’s fibrous layers charred in a controlled fashion under heat. Layered and treated, it dissipated energy like an ablative shield—lightweight, abundant, and perfectly suited for the new age of flight.
Indawo 17 was a complete success. Its crew of four returned safely, bringing back data that helped identify landing zones on Bobo. Still, the reentry profile had pushed the glider beyond projections, leading to refinements in its aerodynamics before the next attempt.
In 2009, Indawo 18 was launched, carrying the first Reban crew to attempt a landing on Bobo. The mission was nearly identical to its predecessor, but with a new service module for extended thrust and power, as well as the improved glider.
The crew of four were:
- Commander Kael’dorr-Ka – Veteran pilot, destined to become the first Reban to set paw on Bobo.
- Pilot Vela’ska-Rin – Navigator and landing specialist.
- Flight Engineer Rinn’vorr-Be – Responsible for systems, power, and structure.
- Science Officer Amara’lan-Tho – Geologist and atmosphere specialist, leader of surface research.
The launch was flawless. Two days later, the Indawo 18 entered orbit around Bobo, and the crew descended to the surface.
For the first time in history, Rebans stood on a celestial body beyond Icin. Across the homeworld, an estimated eighty percent of the population followed the landing through broadcasts and data relays, united in awe.
The mission lasted seven days. Samples were collected, experiments conducted, and the landing site surveyed for future expansion. The improved glider performed perfectly on reentry, and the crew returned to Icin to a hero’s welcome at the capital’s spaceport.
Indawo 18’s crew module went on to fly three more missions to Bobo before retirement. Today, it rests in the Space Museum of Icin’s capital, preserved as a national treasure. Generations of young Rebans visit it each year, inspired by the courage of those four pioneers who first left pawprints in Bobo’s dust and opened the path to the stars.
The Reban moon rocket model was entirely designed in Tinkercad and 3D-printed using a resin printer. Its design is inspirated from both real-life and science-fiction rockets, the Soviet N1 lunar rocket and the STARDUST from the Perry Rhodan series.
The rocket consists of multiple stackable stages, each made up of between 1 and 7 parts. Built at a 1/500 scale, the models reach heights of 25.5 cm (Indawo 17) and x cm (Indawo 18) respectively.
Finishing work was done with an airbrush and hand painting using Revell Aqua Colors (custom-mixed shades). The decals were entirely self-designed and produced.
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