Sci-Fi & What If VII Campaign

Its looking great!

I mean its possible the gun could be the Gauss anti tank cannon!
Ive been doing some chopping and filling to the body, pictures soon.

On a side note I may not be doing the Red vs Blue Warthog, instead since Im a nutter for Halo lore I mayyy paint it as a 'hog from the Human, Covenant war. That means covered in mud, chipped paint, rust, burn marks and some stowage and empty shell casings.

1 Like

Hi guys,
Your builds are looking great. Loving all the details being included in your builds.

This is a final update on my RDA AT-99 Scorpion Gunship. I’m calling it done. Not my best work by a long shot but its done. The amber canopy was really off-putting. The rest of the kit was pretty straight forward. Good detailed panel lines and fit was hit or miss. The canopy lines were inscribed so you can get by without masking if you do good pin wash. i managed to lose the small decal sheet. I wasn’t able to find any photos on the web of the Scorpions in the movie that showed any markings. The SA-2 Samson utility copters had a two digit ID number in black on the fuselage forward of the side doors. I ran out of time for the group build so instead of a vignette I just mounted it on its stand. I mounted the stand on a small picture frame to provide better stability. I sprayed the glass with gloss black to match the stand and cut of the back leg of the frame so it would sit flat.

Here’s some photos. My lighting sux. The copter was painted OD.

p2 rear 2 p2 rf low

Thanks for letting me participate in the group build.
Good luck everybody!
John

7 Likes

Looks really good!

Some progress.
Here is the kits body.


And here is the kit body after lots of sanding, filling and Dremel work. I also sculpted a new part for the front.

If you see plastic with a pattern on it its because I ran out of strip styrene and Im using the top of a sour cream container 'till I get more on Monday

You can see the holes Im filling on the interior and rear.

Starting work on the right side.

Once that filling and sanding is done I will be going over the whole body with strip styrene doing the raised parts. (outlined red.)

4 Likes

Great work. All those improvements will be worth it.

Managed to get on all the window decals. There were not enough to do every window and porthole that are on the magazine’s plan drawings, but I think it gives the right impression. Like the original kits tool makers, I think the magazine artist was working with the old grainy footage and stills. Few good photos of the original studio model exist and according to research I did, was destroyed shortly after filming was completed.

Just needs a coat of matt clear and final parts fitting. The end is in sight!

4 Likes

Okay, I’m assuming that the deadline is March 1st so I’m calling my figure finished for the Sci-Fi Campaign.

I still need to spray Flat Clear and place it on a base in the future along with gluing the guns to the body.

I’m calling this one done. Thanks so much for the Sci-Fi Campaign! :grinning:

I camouflaged this with Vallejos after spraying OD Green from a Tamiya spray can. The decals are from spares. All the guns are Bandai spares. Figure is modified from a 120mm Verlinden “U.S. Tanker 1991 Desert Storm.”


Background story…

In the future, the proliferation of small and large unmanned systems such as drones, aerial vehicles, and unmanned ground combat units have caused infantry roles to be a very dangerous assignment due to the lack of firepower from rifles and carbines’ with small bullet size.

To combat this, Western Nations decided to use much heavier armament. This U.S. Marine Corps’ Anti-Drone Gunner Hyper-Cyber-enabled Warrior carries an Anti-drone sniper rifle with a 10-round magazine, a submachine gun with a 30-round clip, and a Anti-drone shotgun with an eight-round magazine. Only the shotgun or sniper rifle can be carried on the back U-bracket, depending on how close range the fighting will be. The rounds are usually laser or radar-guided seeker armor-piercing high explosive tracer rounds.

The Anti-Drone Gunner has a power Exoskeleton for the biceps and thighs to carry the oversized gun, ammo magazines, and a waist bracket on the back with battery supply and thermal cooling vents for the electric motors. The helmet has three frontal cameras for IFF, targeting, zoom, TV, and thermal while the visor has targeting HUD, map displays, communications, SATCOM, C5ISR, GPS, Blue Force Tracker, biometeric and medical data, and Cyber. The encrypted armored helmet is EMP and Cyber-hardened and can withstand 7.62mm AP fire all around and comes with AI voice recognition and wearer ID and will not function if placed on another user’s head without authorization. A wrist display shows maps, location, units, enemy positions, jamming codes, medical, and other data. Small black devices are carried as backup on the torso. A targeting and AESA radar (green bars, right side facing camera) is mounted on the front pouch and the front armored vest pouch has two backup IFF squares for control and jam drone antennas. The body armor is the newest soft flexible composite weave, able to stop 7.62mm AP rounds without ceramic body armor inserts.

The backpack contains a backup supercomputer for the helmet that performs communications radio, AESA 3D overhead radar for airborne threat detection, SATCOM, jamming/Anti-Drone hacking, drone control, a rear warning AESA radar plate, IFF, and rear camera, gun mounting U-bracket, and a small Camelbak water supply. All electronics and software are secure, encrypted, Cyber-and-EMP hardened, and comes with its own Anti-virus and Anti-hack AI coding.

A pistol is carried for close-in self-defense. No knives are carried as the Gunner will use his Exoskeleton for hand-to-hand fighting.

The submachine gun and sniper rifle are equipped with EOTECH holographic scopes and AN/PEQ-15 target pointer and Illuminators. The shotgun has an ACOG 4X scope. The target pointer is useful for smart precision munitions and laser-seeking guidance and the AESA radar can literally curve the radar seeker bullet’s path onto the target—the Marines say that they cannot miss when firing at ground or slow airborne threats and the helmet and scopes help target drones tens of thousands of meters high and afar for the sniper rifle to take out. One or two shots from the sniper rifle or shotgun is enough to wreck havoc and render most unmanned drones and lightly-armored targets inoperable and a few shots from the submachine gun can take down most infantry, drone, and lightly-armored targets.

Short-range Air Defense and Anti-Tank weapons can be substituted for the guns and use the helmet and backpack for targeting sensors.

Peter

5 Likes

Very cool figure. And interesting back story behind it.

Thanks! :smiley:

You have done a great job there Stephen… All the ups and downs made it taxing… And that was just me watching lol… It’s amazing when you look at these original designs from eons ago, and say compare it with the ships you see in StarTrek NG film Nemisis…it’s like chalk and cheese. Cracking job :+1::+1:

1 Like

Looks cool Peter and nice fill in for the back story… Very realistic… And not a million miles from where technology is taking us… Very good :+1:

Not a “What If”, more a “WTF???”

It’s always confused me why at the end of film credits there is usually a notice in small print to the effect “No animals were harmed in the production of this movie”. Surely if there is the potential for members of the anticipated audience to run screaming and traumatised from the theatre at the sight of something gross appearing to happen to a small furry creature it would be wiser to display the information in a prominent manner at the start of the movie? Following this logic and to reassure those of you having a sensitive disposition I make the following statement: NO KITS WERE HARMED IN THE MAKING OF THIS… er, THING. Yes, you can relax in the knowledge that anything you see was never intended to be part of a scale model. It could be argued that they still aren’t, the scale of what was built being still undetermined (as is precisely WHAT it is…).

Since I received the kind invitation to participate in this group back at the end of January nothing much happened for a long while. Procrastination is my area of expertise: putting off making choices means one’s options will eventually eliminate themselves until one is forced into the only remaining course of action (or inaction) thereby removing the stress of making decisions. There were multiple false starts with bits of plastic which had expected to serve a useful purpose (or already had done so) suddenly encountering a savage sprue cutter or razor saw and being rent apart, only for their disjointed remains to be discarded with scant regard. Certain ideas firmed up and became an outline of a plan although the methods by which it was achieved were constantly changing. The final appearance of the, er, object, was not determined until the last moment of its creation (or at least “latest”, I’m not sure it is completed). Some limitations I placed on myself were abandoned at need (I won’t use any Tic Tac boxes/I won’t use more than one Tic Tac box/I won’t use Grey Primer as the overall colour), the need being mainly the March 1st deadline coming towards me with the apparently increasing speed of incoming tracer shot in a movie. However, I remained firm in my resolve to use no kit bits in this instance. What I did use (apart from the aforementioned Tic Tac boxes) was plastic cutlery, plastic coffee stirrers (recently extinct), disposable razor parts, hollow lolly sticks and tubes from the middle of rolls of paper such as the thermal paper used in 1980s adding machines and hoarded away over the decades. The main problem is these are usually produced from low-grade plastic and tend to be brittle. Guilt-free greebling was achieved by re-purposing items originally acquired for other purposes; in particular those self-adhesive “gems” used by crafters. Having a Steampunk project in mind (I always have a Steampunk project in mind!) I had noticed the small “pearl” hemispherical items on the left of the packet could be useful as dome-headed rivets and grabbed a pack, followed by several different sets that could serve as car indicator lights, studs in very large tyres, etc. Creating constant-sized regular shapes from sheet styrene (other than discs using a hole punch) can be a task, so I was happy that the square black shapes could be utilised for this purpose although in the end I only used a couple. From the other set a pair of the larger gold “studs” were painted with Tamiya Clear Red to form the nacelle end caps. Any bits of sheet styrene used were small offcuts left over from other projects in the distant past. One other kit-saving mercy of using only scrap was that I wasn’t upset when the glue went everywhere (a precision applicator isn’t much use when one has trouble getting it and the component into the same Post Code, let alone controlled contact). If I had been leaving sticky fingerprints over a decent kit I’d have got really irritated with myself.

I’m calling the thingy complete (at least for now) as although there were supposed to be more coloured bits my hand was shaking too much for that; what little paint that was applied went everywhere in the neighbourhood of where it was intended to go, I was lucky to be able to wipe off the worst of the runs without leaving too much residue. I’d also intended for it to have a “natural metal” finish but for once the local cheapo shop didn’t have any in when I went looking yesterday. A wash might have helped, but I messed up my previous build by trying to do that at the last minute and I wasn’t going to try dry-brushing either.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to supply in the way of photos as I can’t get the link to the old site to work and that’s where the requirements are…

So what is it? I’m only claiming “Military Spacecraft”, nothing else specific. Given it’s just shy of a foot long overall I think the scale is probably in the 1:600th -1:720th range but there’s nothing to determine that! It must be military as there is a SoopaDoopaShoota sticking out the front. These weapons (also known as “FOAD Cannons” in less polite circles) are a staple of Sci-fi warships, and are generally fixed on the vessel’s long axis (even the Enterprise D gets one in “All Good Things”). They also tend to take time to reload/recharge, the duration determined by the amount of dialogue that needs to be accommodated. It also looks the part, there being echoes of Battlestars, Y-Wings and even the Good Old 1701 (“Nae bluddy A, B, C or D”) herself. So with the usual warning to have a brown paper bag or suitable receptacle handy, here are the piccies…

[url=[Wotsit Bits — Postimages]/url]

[url=[Wotsit01 — Postimages]/url]

[url=[Wotsit02 — Postimages]/url]

[url=[Wotsit03 — Postimages]/url]

[url=[Wotsit04 — Postimages]/url]

[url=[Wotsit05 — Postimages]/url]

Regards,

M

6 Likes

Pretty cool Tom @MoramarthT! One man’s trash is another man’s Galactic Cruiser right?

Cajun :crocodile:

1 Like

Very cool build Tom! Amazing what you can do with odd bits.

Well, I’m just making the deadline. The Bird of Prey is complete and clear of spacedock. The bussard caps are just tacked on at the moment. I want to back them with something to reflect light better from them.
Apologies that the photos aren’t the best quality. The light wasn’t great and it’s not the easiest to position given the wingspan. Will have to try and get some better ones in the week.




It’s been a really enjoyable build. A nice break from building something from the real world and getting bogged down in references and details. I’m looking forward to building one of my other Trek ships in the near future.

Thanks for hosting the campaign. Been great watching so many cool and different projects come together.

7 Likes

Thanks John.
The sci-fi designs from the 50’s and 60’s are very cool and clean looking compared to later shows and films. I do like the look of this one. Very retro.

1 Like

Looks cool on the stand in flight. The underside really jumps out with the BoP coming at you with talons ready… Great build and loving the retro :+1::+1:

1 Like

It’s quite intimidating isn’t it!

I might pull out the K7 Space Station soon. I have a 1/2500 Enterprise, Klingon D7 and clear moulded ‘cloaked’ Defiant I want to build into a display with it. I’m pretty sure the kit also came with a plush Tribble.

1 Like

That Warbird really came out looking great. Well done!

1 Like

Looks great Stephen!

1 Like

Thanks John.

Cheers buddy.