Reaver Boarder

• Inspired by the Reaver Fighter, this time I used a 1/72 C-130 kit. Main wing-roots were mostly cut-away, the nose was lopped-off, and a cylinder replaced the loading ramp. Ran a box-like slab of plasticard through the wheel wells, ending it on either side with a wing-cross-section-shaped plasticard and a portion of the C-130's horizontal stabilizer. My favorite part - Put the nose halves beneath the wings to look like VTOL engines.
• Mounted boarding hooks in the fuselage ends to give purpose to the open holes flanking the ship's chin. Now the ship looks like a boar from the side. Built some interiors and attached a Ravenstar Juno JE-12's engine (just try get any more of those). At this point the basic shape is done.
• All I need is to solve a couple of "problems" and do some surface-texturing, if all I want is a fairly boring shape. How to turn an limited-imagination boring design into something more distincitve and interesting?
• Could have taken hints from Joss Whedon's proto-Serenity, the Betty from Alien: Resurrection, and mounted the leftover C-30 tail wedge above the engine, but decided instead to put it atop the head, making it look a little like an Alien Queen. Inspired by this picture from Sean's tutorial on building Serenity in Lightwave, I built a "reaction control tower" for the engine out of a 1/144 B-52H engine (1/72 looked too big for this ship, but was perfect for this one).
• All this stuff atop the ship looked a little out-of-place; I needed some more stuff up there, so I added some 1/12 Corvette wheels to be some really beefy VTOL pre-engines. All I need now are a bunch of spikes and stuff in a few places and some texturing!
• All the shiny beefiness makes the nose claws look scrawny. Lets move those back to the wings and build something bigger to hang off the nose!
• But now the backend looks like it doesn't fit; It's too wee! Andrew Gorman to the rescue; Now I have some I-know-not-what's, the bottom halves of ancient B-25 engines, to beef-up the tail.

Dimensions: 18x11x6 inches.

Drayman II Transport

My first computer game was Wing Commander. I've built several ships inspired by it, mostly Fralthi Cruisers, this one and this one. One of my favorites, though, was the little, seldom seen, Drayman-Class freighter. I built one once, back before I took many pictures, making it look quite a bit like the original, even down to the paint scheme. Having become inured to any structural sensitivities by years of watching Star Trek, I can appreciate what makes the Drayman design so interesting.

The Drayman has contrasting shapes. It has two wing-mounted engines, Enterprise-esquely off-center, but more importantly, the wings are curved. They could have been straight, almost every other SF ship's wings are straight, but the original designers opted to make them curved. The fuselage is two blobs on either end of a boom, the front one having a part that hangs down below the engines to visually balance them. So, in this the first of a series of variations on the Drayman, I kept the curved wings.

The other thing these Drayman variants have in common is that the cargo pod of two of them is made from parts of plastic toilet paper holders, exactly like the Ion Cannon Frigate Jack Nobles. Where I got them was from the house previously owned by the donor of the kits used for the Interdictor Robert Robbins and is now owned by two more of her sisters.

The Drayman II has a boom made of the wall-mount run-through with a plastic tube. The cargo pod is the clip that goes over the toilet paper "G" loop and the wall-mount. Atop the boom is a disposable razor, at the front, the top half of a footstep-counter The engines at the ends of the trademark curved wings are plastic cones from within putty tubes, doll's eyes, and plastic bottle caps.

The paint scheme, barely started at this point, should resemble that of the K'Siegii Ship-killer, just because I've liked the overall color ever since seeing pictures of the Zaon Digital ships, particularly the Starspinner. It starts as a basecoat of sac bomber green, then will have inter-panel lines masked-off, then get a coat of soviet green because I wanted something lighter, yet still green, and not a pure green but a gray green.

Drayman III Transport

Still working through a ship-building dryspell, I thought to do what for me is the equivalent of kit-building, creating another ship pretty similar to one I just built. It has the same boom construction as the DraymanII, but this time the cargo pod is the handle of a lint roller. The nose is the same plastic candy-corn container that I used on the Freighter Texas. Under it is a small mech torso shielded by some Evergreenplastic, ala the old Colony Bus from the old Battlestar: Galactica.

Painting will be the same technique as the Drayman II but with the colors reversed. Well, nearly. Desert sand base with panesl of sac bomber green.

DraymanIV Transport Princess Natalie

The last of my Draymans. Meant to be more modern, hence sleeker, which translates into fewer details. The boom is some plastic tube that came from... Somewhere. It's cross-section is oval, a quarter inch at it's narrowest, three-eighths at the widest. The neck also has another, but different kind of, disposable razor. The cargo pod is made from two lengths of the "G" loop part of the plastic toilet paper holders. As you can see in the picture, it's not a solid cylinder. It has a deep groove through its length. So I built a box-like structure onto which to fit the pseudo-cylinders. The head is slice of a plastic measuring cup atop yet another mech torso. The engines are 1/72 B-25 engines.

Painting will not be like the other Draymans, but more like a Jem'Hadar fighter in that it will have a larger color palette, tending toward pastels, and the colors will be in larger sections.

Well, painting was not like a Jem'Hadar.

Basecoat is Floquil Jade Blue with a lot of black mixed in. I was trying to make my favorite color, ModelMaster Intermediate Blue, and got darker blue with more than a hint of green. Spent an hour or so applying 1/8"-wide drafting tape over all the undetailed surfaces. Old wisdom is to spray some more of the basecoat over the tape so that when you apply the next coat it won't seep under the tape. New wisdom is to spray Future. It is also a good surface for brushing-on ModelMaster Sac Bomber Green.

Reaver Fighter

I had a three-day weekend, a 1/72 Osprey kit, and a Mir Station kit, so I tried something different - Using as much as I could of the two kits and as little as possible of anything else.

The main structure before detailing, shows how I put these basic shapes together.

The detailed model shows how I tried to use as much of the Osprey as possible, even a couple of propeller blades.

The spikes atop the head and the up-curved neck remind me of our favorite mid-bulk transport. The chin mini-antennas make it look like a catfish. And the boom-mounted wings make our scary Reaver ship look like a Regatta entrant. Oh, well.

Guess the painting will have to go a long way towards making this thing look like a 1/48 scale armed Reaver skiff. Now, where could I find a couple of skeletons...

Of note - Not a single tank track link was used in construction. First ship of mine I could say that about in... Ever.

Dimensions: 12x7x6 inches.

unicorn

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