Anyway, I tried a color change so I could use the same paint I'm using for the Skywriter: [...]Looks OK, but the white lettering doesn't contrast against the Golden Sunset as well as it does against the orange.
You need either a completely different contrasting color for the lettering (red?), or reverse fading of the letters to preserve contrast: yellow letters on black background (front), fading into black letters on yellow background (aft) ?
Note that the pods are almost 100% nose and tail cone; there's only .5" of BT5 connecting them, and much of that is hidden under the ring. So any decal scheme would need to be compatible with application to the compound curves of a nose cone.
A decal on a compound curve would be EXTREMELY challenging.
You could, however, just dip the tips of the pods into trays of yellow paint. That would give them nice contrasting (Rudolph-style) noses, with minimum complexity.
Alternatively, and if you really want to go nuts, you could insert blinking LEDs into the nose-cones of the pods, and change the contrasting color hues based on the time of the day/night, your mood, or artistic preference du jour.
I'm also a bit worried about survivability of the pods on landing. The tail cones really stick way far back, and *will* take a landing impact.
Then they *will* detach ;-)
If you glue them really well to the fins, they *will* detach together with the fin that takes primary landing impact. Maybe make them detachable on purpose, via some clip-on attachment mechanism?
Alternatively, you could source FG fins, and epoxy pods to the FG main fins, and TTW fins to the body.
This will make it tail heavy, but strong enough to survive any landing (could just fly on a streamer, then ;-).
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