This took me a while. It is intended to be a faithful rendition of a Mercury capsule. As faithfully as I can get, at least.

I was committed to do this drawing on paper, as you could guess by the pictures I posted in an earlier post. But after messing around with it for a bunch of hours I realised that such an idea lead to more work that I could easily handle… so I switched back to the computer. Still, to keep things loose I decided to leave the copy-paste feature aside so that every single screw or rivet would look a bit different. Which, again, proved to be more work that I could easily handle. But I did it anyway. 

As you may know (or may not), the Mercury capsule was the first manned spacecraft the U.S. put into orbit (soviet Vostok was first). A certain number of capsules were constructed (there were six manned flights, plus some unmanned flights), and though the original design underwent minor revisions throughout the project, all of them looked basically the same. I say this because I may have mixed up some details, but you must be quite a nerd to spot that. My reference came mainly from the Liberty Bell and Friendship 7 capsules, and I have tried my best to make this look as close as possible to the real thing. You know, I even went to the point of counting how many rivets where in every row. What’s that good for? You can bet I do not have the slightest idea.