January 2014. The original Marauder models from GW are as it is usual for their planes to small. Forgeworld had some Marauder, which look very nice and are in scale, but they are out of print and you have to pay through the nose for them. 

So I took this as inducement to do some bombers. As I will use them with my Space Marine army, it wouldn't hurt if they looked a bit more Space Marine than the original Marauders.

The Space Marine flying machine is the Thunderhawk, so I settled for a design mix of Thunderhawk and Marauder.

In fact printing proofed to be more difficult than designing. Because of the size I had to print the hull at an angle.

The first of 5 versions of the hull.

Up to the printing of the first set of wings, everything went as planned. And than one Friday disaster struck. Whatever I printed would misprint in some way or the other. So I decided to stop printing and salvaged whatever parts I could and painted them for an first impression. When I took up printing on Saturday nearly all problems were gone.

Side view.

I was rather satisfied with this version. The main issue was the cockpit that didn't give the right impression of scale. The Saracen looks more like an attack craft than a bomber.

This was remedied in the final version.

One of the Friday problems that remained was that the turbine blades didn't print correctly every time. Two out of three had smudged or filled out blades.

Itried a lot of different orientations when printing the wings with no success. Finally I split the front of the turbine from the wing and printed both parts separately. But even this didn't help. Up to than I always placed the turbine blades wherever there was space available on a print job. In my desperation I did a job with only blades in different orientations - and all came out perfect. 

As it turns out the blades need unhindered flow of resin. Giving them enough space will have them print correctly.  One space saving way of giving them space is to put them at de edge of the print area facing outside.

This picture shows the placement of the turbine blades together with 2 sets of hulls. In the latest design the hull is printed in two parts. The highlighted pieces are splints used to align the halves.