Awtoe Ship-killer

IRL a capital ship design starts with a list of the guns and other features you want. Push a button and some mythical software program designs the ship, adding all the ancillary equipment your features requires. That's how a battleship starts with "three turrets of three-each really big guns" and becomes a huge monster of a ship after you add all the support equipment it needs, and the stuff the support equipment needs. So, what if you could build, say, just the guns, constructing an independent ship around each barrel? Would the expense of 9 of these small ships be less than that of a nine-barrel battleship? Would each one be more maneuveral and easier to staff and supply?

The Awtoes built just such a ship - A large capital-ship gun with a fighter-sized ship built around it. It was the cheapest and most maneuverable way to field a weapon of this size, and was quite effective against capital ships. But it lacked the maneuverability required to evade smaller ships, and so needed a supporting squadron of fighters.

I was pawing through one of my boxes of parts, looking for inspiration for my next kitbash, when I found a Lamborghini Countach buildup I'd been gifted. As always when dealing with a car, I think of slicing it mid-body and flipping one end over so that the wheel wells can grip a car-wide cylinder that housed the black hyperdrive generators. But this time the nose and the tail of the car both wanted to go the same direction. Worse, they were both pretty distinctive and needed to be covered-up a bit, so that became the tail. The roof fell off, so now I had a huge gap on the bottom (or top, depending) as well as in the front. Fortunately, a huge cylinder fit [kinda-sorta] perfectly! Unfortunately, all my ships so far this year are freighters, so I really needed a fighter, not a tanker. Hey - What if the honkin' huge cylinder was actually a honkin' huge gun?

I remembered that Alfred Wong had played with this idea in the Star Wars universe, building the TIE/Obliterator. It looked ungainly and ugly as you'd expect, and I loved it.

Once I'd decided the ship's mission it was all "cover-up the holes" with mostly car parts. When I finished it, even the painting and decals, I added a turret to the top just to re-inforce the militant look.