Halcyon Aliens Dropship plus APC diorama WIP

[Guest]

And so dear reader, we come to the end of Act 1: The APC.

Wheels on and set turning. This vehicle is 4 wheel steering, so I've set both sets of wheels in a turn. These are packed with milliput to give support to the axle joints.

You can see the spotlight and guard on the top of the APC - turned out quite well I'm pleased to say.

Its been given a black wash, but no further weathering for now. There will need to be more later, but I'll hold off until I can see it in context with the rest of the diorama before getting heavy on the weathering.

Well thats the easy bit done. Next: the Dropship. First task is goign to be opening up the bottom of the fuselage to create the bay for the APC. In the first picture above you can see the landing ramp behind the APC. I'm going to use this to mark up the hole that needs cutting.

"How do I get out of this chicken-shit outfit?"

[Guest]

Very cool Andrew,that is a beefy looking unit!

[Guest]

You secure that s**t Hudson .... errr Andrew

Coming together nicely, always good to do a few scratch bits on a model .... if you think about it ....it's strange how some obvious bits on sci-fi vehicles and figures are missed off or dimensionaly wrong on the models.

[Guest]

After a couple of days away from the modelling table as a break, I'm back with the dropship. Just as an experiment, I tried a bit of a dry fitting to see how things went together. Its an odd shape and I didn't fully understand where the main component went until I did this:

and here is the missile pylon

and the inserts that are supposed to represent the tip and tail of the missiles

In comparison this is what its supposed to look like:

One of the first things that is immediately obvious is the number of missiles is wrong. In the movie, it 4x4 but the inserts have 5x4!

So lets move on to look at the three main areas of interest (aka scratch building) in this model:

1) APC Bay

2) Cockpit

3) Missile pylons

For the APC bay, as you've already seen in previous photos, the base of the dropship is solid, even though there is a ramp, there is no opening to the bay. So we are going to have to cut a hole and build a bay! Here we see the ramp placed against the base of the dropship where it would have folded up.

As you can see its too long and will overlap the front part, so we move it backwards a bit and it will fit:

I'll have to scratch build and interior of the bay but fortunately, there are a couple of shots in the movie that give you an idea of whats inside:

So its going to be out with the plasticard and some scratch building!.

For the cockpit, I have some US chopper pilots from CMK I can use and to detail the cockpit (which OOB is empty apart from a couple of bucket seats, I've got an order in for some cheap resin ejector seats and some PE consoles. I basically chose the cheapest sets I could find from Hannants! I think the resin seats are Aries seats for a Tomcat and the PE is for a Phantom. Here are the pilots:

Sadly one is not female so Cpl. Ferro may need some surgery! Pvt. Spunkmeyer will be okay as is I think!

Thats all for now... Remember: short, controlled bursts.

[Guest]

Nice work so far andy, so your building the drop ship bay....... very niccceee. What about ripley and newt?

scott

[Guest]

Heh Andy wouldn't it be nice if some one decided to build one in 1/48 or 1/32 scale including the APC.

scott

[Guest]

Well a 1:35 Dropship to match the Halcyon APC would be superb, however the APC kits are so rare and expensive now that its very unlikely! I would have thought it would be worth someone out there who owns the moulds for these kits to have a go at repopping them - there is still plenty of demand for the kits it seems!

Only progress to report from last night is the hole has been cut. The cut-out is being saved to make the roof of the APC bay. There is some complex bodging required at the front where other pieces will intrude into the APC bay, so a bit more cutting to come I think. No photos, more later I suspect

[Guest]

Small update but a lot of building!

As I reported Thursday, cut open the base of the dropship for the APC bay. YesterdayI did a lot of measuring up to get the right sizes for the internal panels and cut these from a pasticard sheet I got from Evergreen labelled as "Metal Roofing" It has ridges cut into the sheet and comes with thin plastic ribs to slot into the ridges. It was frankly a bit of a rip off, much more expensive than I anticipated because it was only when I got it home I realised there was only ONE sheet in the packet! Anyway this was cut up and the ribs added along with some bits of old Spitfire from the spares box and voila...

It is of course upside down!

Here is anotehr vidcap of that view into the bay when they are getting ready early on in the movie

You will probably only be able to see the back wall of the dropship once its in the diaorama so concentrated on that area. The front bit will need trimming so that it fits under the forward body curves. Also had another look at the section of the movie where the alien gets into the dropship. You see Spunkmeyer blimb back into the APC bay and see the ribs and funnily enough it loosk like the internal colour of the bay is green, either olive drap/olive green or possibly even cockpit green considering how dark it is...

[Guest]

jeepers that is an amazing model,cool so far m8

mobear

[Guest]

Yeah that looks good, nice piece of scratch building there.

Played this part of the film over a few times the other night and i think it'll all come together well mate.

I'm of a mind about the green too being honest, though in secrtions of the film it looks grey/green with a further green cast from the lighting.

[michaelm]

Just caught this thread, really great stuff interesting build and great work, watching this one

[yak face]

Ive only just caught this one too, superb work andrew . One of my all time favourite films, this is going to look awesome , cheers tony

[aaron]

Wicked and a good read.

[Guest]

and so it continues with the progress from yesterday.

Because of the APC bay, I've had to cut a hole in the piece that represents the forward slope of the dropship

so that it fits over the APC bay

Note how the front of the bay slopes down to try to fit. Sadly this still wasn't enough and I had to trim several mm off the bay to get it to fit comfortably

While sorting this out, I've been thinking ahead to fixing the missile pod arms and to this end I've added some reinforcing to the inside of the attachment point with some milliput

This will give me something to drill into to to make a solid anchor when the time comes.

Once this was settled I realised I'd missed off the walkways that run down either side of the APC bay. These are visible in the scenes with Spunkmeyer coming back into the dropship and discovering the alien slime. So its back to the trusty Meccano spares box for some more steel mesh:

You'll notice I've also give the internals a coat of primer.

I then began looking at what to do with the missile pods. I think I'm going to have to scratch build the internals of the pods and add missiles made form cocktail sticks as these seem to be the right diameter. So to this end I started cutting up plastic card to line the inside of the slot to take the missiles. I also removed the larger missiles for the forward pylons off the sprues, cleaned them up and drilled out the rear to represent the exhaust port.

The last thing I did last night was to glue the front section to the main body. This is the bit that contains the slot for the lower part of the cockpit and (take note) the headlights. So I glued that on and added some filler to the bottom seam and left it overnight.

This morning, I realised I had not done anything with the holes for the headlamps!!! Dammit! So the scalpel had to come out and undo the gluing that was done last night. Thankfully no damage was done to the pieces, but its bloody annoying all the same! Today will be sorting out something to put behind the headlights - I won't be lighting the model, so it will me something reflective only.

[Guest]

Well this was a turn up for the books! I went out to the garage this afternoon to get the lawnmower out to cut the grass (in March - jeeze!!!!) and next to the house connecting the house to the garage we've got a shed/lean-to thingy and when I opened the door I almost tripped over a stack of boxes that the postman must have delivered a couple of days ago and never bothered telling me. Most of these were things my GF had ordered for the upcoming birthday party for the little one, but one package was the ejection seats and cockpit PE I had ordered last week:

I've put the crew figures there as well. This is why I don't usually do 1:72 stuff - its all frigging tiny!!! Definitely not going to be able to show Cpl Ferro in all her glory! Well maybe it won't be noticed - those fatigues are very baggy!!

"Spunkmeyer? Goddammit! Well where the fu..."