Jason,
Also check out light sheet... You can sometimes find it at a general hobby store ( I believe Walthers offers it in their catalog - you can use it to make neon-like signs for train layouts).
Basically, it is a thin sheet of plastic with a material sandwiched in it. There are a number of leads connected to it, and it usually comes with the power supply (4 AA batteries in the ones I have). What you do is cut the sheeet to the shape you want, so long as you leave one set of leads intact. Connect to the power source, switch on and voila, the sheet glows a soft white color. Add a gel or transparency for other colors.
Works great for control panels - just print with an inkjet onto a transparency, and when you light the panel the glow will filter through. because you can cut it to shape, you can also have animated sequences by sequencing the leads to different cut-outs (a few model train companies make pre-cut neon signs that use this effect), so for landing lights, you could conceivably run a few thin lines of light that animate toward the center of a pad or some such.
It also works great for engine glow on a model or a reactor.
If you want some great reactor lighting, the folks over at Krill Lights (or Krill Lamps) make use of lightsheet as well - it comes rolled into a tube about the size of a cyalume lightstick, but you put 2 AAA up the middle of the tube. Depending on the light output you bbuy, you can get 100 hrs or so of operation. I built a Necron monolith with one lighting the portal, and it worked great. I also have used a blue one inside a warp core from the Star Trek: Generations Enterprise engineering set toy - hollowed out a space for it, and now I have a glowing blue warp core to lay into my layout for a reactor.
Lightsheet is great stuff.
Mike Webb
