Earth Battleship Exelon
It was initially built years ago as a tramp freighter, with one turret atop the aft end, two-position landing gear, movable cargo door, and detailed interior. All the cones were fragile plastic disposable cups, the rear ones made slightly sturdier with an interior frame. I made the side hull pieces, glued the cones to them, then angled them so the bottom of the big cones would be a straight line. These days I would have made all the horizontal panels overhang the sides, but this was many years ago. A log of the detail parts were from a 1/24 scale truck tractor.
As a freighter, it would have been anywhere from 1/72 scale to 1/100. But, I was going to repaint this bad boy anyway, and then came along "The Torellian Stone" project and I needed a hero ship from human-space with much the same capacity as the alien ship, so the producer and I decided to refurbish this ship to be the Exelon, the potentially overscale details just making the ship more photogenic.
I added Ravenstar WP-10 turrets to the airlock doors at the end of the small cones and turned two Ravenstar ES-15 sensor arrays into main guns, gluing them on to the footpads at the ends of the big cones. In the script the Exelon aims a missile at the Fralthy and launches it. I wanted the producer to be able to show that with the model so I replaced the rear topside turret with a positionable missile rack. I'll find out in May if it ever got used. Lastly, I used the cargo ramp as a runway, permanently gluing the door open and reducing doorway height by way of reducing it's scale to something more like 1/300 or so, in keeping with that of the Fralthi. Painting should have involved aztecing or at least a whole bunch of panel lines to further help reduce the scale, but I ran out of time. Color is from a lot of stripe decals in Basic Boring Human red and blue.
Dimensions: 15x12x5 inches.
Second place, Category 602, Scalefest '06. Another picture.
After updates, before paint - 24kb
Bottom - 104KB"
Top aft - 129KB"
