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.

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.

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