Montgolfier Balloon

Intended for 3d print.

3d-printable model of the Montgolfier hot-air balloon. Built by the Montgolfiere brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne, it made the world's first manned flight in Paris in 1783.
The balloon was constructed out of cotton canvas with paper glued onto both sides. It was sky blue and decorated with golden flourishes, signs of the zodiac, and suns with Louis XVI's face in the center interlaced with the royal monogram in the central section. The first human pilot was Etienne Montgolfier, who made a tethered test flight on October 15. The first free flight was made on November 21, with physicist Pilatre de Rozier and marquis François Laurent d'Arlandes as pilots. The french king Louis XVI was in attendance, as was american envoy Benjamin Franklin who wrote an account of the flight. The balloon had an opening at the bottom, so that the balloon could be filled with hot air from a fire beneath it until ready to take off. There was also a grille inside the opening, so that the pilots could keep a fire going while in flight by feeding it onboard fuel.

The model pack includes two slightly different versions of the balloon. One has a slightly enlarged basket, so that you can place figurines inside it. The other has a smaller, solid basket so that you can print the balloon at a smaller scale without it becoming structurally unsound. Recommended printing scale for version 1 is 15mm scale and upwards. Recommended scale for version 2 is anything from 6mm and upwards. Note that proportionally, the solid-basket version is closer to most historical depictions of the Montgolfier balloon than the enlarged-basket version is.