Halcyon Aliens Dropship plus APC diorama WIP

[Guest]

Last update for a few days as I have to go away due to family circumstances.

Engine intakes have been assembled and the ramp has had its retraction mechanism attached.

Looking further forward to mounting the dropship on the diorama base I realised I need to add a counterweight as the rod that will support the dropship will enter the main body behind the APC bay and in front of the rear landing leg. This point is quite a distance behind the current centre of gravity, so the counterweight is needed to fix that. So I used some of the lead shot I bought a few weeks ago for the Hawker Hunter model

Then attention moved to the base itself. Since my idea is to capture the landing and dust off moment, I'mm have a piece of the landing pad and a bit of the landscape. As usual, my supply of old cheap picture frames comes in handy and along with the trusty claycrete, balsa wood formers for the rocks, some plastic strip for the landing pad foundation and we have this

On top of the landing pad foundation, I'll use some of my old reliable metal mesh from the Meccano spares box:

So now its just a matter of waiting for the claycrete to dry, which is likely to take several days now. That leave time for the acrylic rod and brass tube to arrive that will be used to create the stand. I forgot to order these before. I'm using 8mm clear acrylic rod and inside the dropship I'll have a length of 9mm brass tube for it to slot into. This will be sealed inside the body using araldite to give it a good strong support since the dropship does weight a not inconsequential amount!

[Guest]

looking real nice mate

mobear

[Guest]

That's looking brilliant, it's inspirational watching this come together. The base is great too, very like the planet surface.

" I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid "

Cheers

Patrick

[aaron]

Great start to the base tbh i DO like it when a base of somesort is added. I have a feeling this is going to look AWESOME.

[Guest]

That base is so simple in it's make up yet looks brill !! nice work mate

I like the idea of the rod, that way you'll have a 360 deg diorama, if you were to attach the dropship to the base from the rear with metal it'd reduce the overall acceptable viewing angle eh.

"Outstanding. Now all we need is a deck of cards."

[Guest]

Thanks guys, I'm really looking forward to seeing how this turns out as well

Anyway, after a weekend spent driving up to Scotland and back, it was great to be able to sit down at the workbench again and keep things ticking over.

First off, I sadly appear to have lost the very tiny part 88 which is supposed to represent the multi-barrel end of big gun in the nose of the dropship. THe person who I bought this kit of very kindly included a note explaining where to find this part as it is probably the smallest part in the kit. That was very useful of him but then it appears I must have removed it from the sprue at some point in the last month and a bit and subsequently lost it. Sigh...

So I'll have to scratch build a replacement!!!

It wasn't very difficult - its just a small ring cut from a scrap piece of 4mm plastic tube I've used in numerous other places on the model, with some filler in the hole and when it was partly dry I pushed a needle in 6 times to make holes for the barrels! You can also see in that photo that the front landing gear has been attached, but the doors haven't yet. I'm going to leave those off until its painted.

Next, the rear landing leg is finally assembled with the extra oleo added at the "front of the main strut

and finally in this update, the large fins have been added to the rear. I took the opportunity to reshape the leading edges to give them a more aerodynamic profile as the original mouldings were just rectangular slabs. You can see them in this test fit of all the components:

I'm now a bit stuck until the 8mm acrylic rod and 9mm brass tube arrive to fix the mounting of the dropship to the base. I can't complete assembly as I need access to the internals to fit the pieces, so I can't start painting yet. I've still got some more work to do on the base however, but I'll need to take it outside to spray it properly and sadly I lost the whole Easter weekend

[Guest]

Looks good on the dry fit mate, all seems to be coming together nicely.

Weekend in Scotland eh? you could have nipped in for a cuppa , anyway nice to see you back and getting on with it instead of lazying around

"What do you want me to do, fetch your slippers for you?"

[Guest]

Thanks for the offer Colin - will be up again this week - sadly its not a holiday however, but attending a funeral

Had some major IT issues this weekend, starting with the main PC refused to boot last night and now appears totally dead. Then my work laptop's battery upped and died. So since the old PC was about 8 years old and hadn't had a decent upgrade in the last 4 years I decided it would be as easy to go buy a brand new one than try to resurrect an 8 year old Windows XP PC, 2GB with Athlon dual core processor! So went to Novatech this afternoon, laid down 500+ notes and got a shiny new computer which a} wouldn't write the recovery disk to the DVD they gave me b} failed to reboot after I put Avast virus checker on it.... and of course the tech support line is closed on a Saturday and I'm travelling to Scotland again on Monday... oh boy ain't we got fun! The works laptop seems to have got its mojo back however...

Well back to the world of Aliens in the meantime! The various brass tubes and acrylic rods arrived over the last few days so we can finally get something done. First to arrive was the 10mm dia acrylic rod, then the 9 mm brass tube with the 8mm inner diameter. First lets sort out the brass tube which will act as the socket in the rear of the dropship like this:

I had also ordered some 8mm acrylic rod but this was taking forever to arrive (it finally turned up today!) So, fed up of waiting, I had a go at whittling down the 10mm rod to fit into the tube. Using file, sanding sticks and the trusty dremel, I was able to take enough off in an even slice so that it looked like this

This looks like progress! This morning, I got out the araldite and over an hour or two applies several layers, building it up gradually so that the heat generated by the araldite going off didn't melt or distort anything

and of course some filler around the exit hole

Next I needed to drill a hole in the base for the support rod. It was at this point I remembered why I went for an 8mm rod - the largest drill I have at the moment for the had drill is 8mm! So I then had to slim down the top of an 8mm rod to fit in the brass tube instead of the 10mm, so all the hard work I put in before was wasted

The base with the support rod looks like this:

So of course I couldn't resist checking things out:

Wow, this is finally coming together!!!

Next jobs are to finally assemble the last of the pieces for the dropship and prime and paint! The the base needs repainting - when the claycrete dried out it went much lighter than it looked when it was damp as you can see in the above photos. I shall proceed apace once I'm back form Scotland again later this week!

What do you mean, "*They* cut the power"? How could they cut the power, man? They're animals!

[Guest]

Further progress... first the base is coming together, it got a good overall spraying of Humbrol matt black from a rattle can, then the roadway had a thin layer of plaster of paris smeared over it as did the ground under the landing page to represent the colonists stabilizing the road surface for traffic. In the meantime, I sprayed silver onto the metal metsh, varying the tone with some black to give it a worn look. This was then glued onto to the formers I'd laid in the claycrete. Finally, very thin strips were laid over the top of where the formers supported the mesh to give the impression that these were all joints. I added a silver conduit under the landing pag as well, just to add a bit of interest Then with some light drybrishing on the rocks we end up with this:

The roadway has been painted then eroded to give it a worn look.

Back to the dropship itself and with the fixing of the tube for the stand yesterday, I can finally close the whole thing up...

As you can see, LOTS of filler and dissolved putty! Still a little bit of sanding down to do and then its off for priming.

In the meantime, I primed the engine intakes and the ramp and reslised the ramp has huge ejector pin lumps and bumps which I've stuck some filler in and will sand dlown later.

We are getting there!!

We gotta get inside. It's gonna be dark soon, and they mostly hunt at night. Mostly.

[tr1ckey66]

Hi Andrew

This build is looking great! The build, concept and the execution are fabulous. Keep up the great work I'll be keeping up with this thread.

cheers

Paul

[Guest]

Andrew mate this is look ing fantastic and i am glued to this thread and eager to see it finished.

scott

[Guest]

Back from my final trip to Scotland so back to work! While I was away, an amazing item appeared on eBay - a set of white metal missiles for the Halcyon Dropship!!! Sadly they were snapped up by someone else so I missed out on that one. Anyway following a hint someone sent me, I checked out the 1:72 Hobbyboss F84E which has missiles for the underside of the wings. This kit:

and inside each kit is a sprue like this:

which has 8 sets of missiles fins!!! 4 kits @ £5 each and I have my fins!!!!

Thats a bit of a relief!

[Guest]

I had the coffee on the go ready for visitors mate it's a shame about the circumstances of your trip and a detour wasn't possible ..... we could have teamed up and gone over the bridge and invaded Oles' house

Anyway .. good call on the jets mate, the fins look perfect eh? .. plus you have some missile-less 84's to build up into a little diorama in the future

[Guest]

You are not going to believe this - I had some trouble believing it myself....

THE F****** FINS ARE TOO BIG!!!

I can't fit the missiles into the pods now because the fins are too wide. The missiles are also too long now, but that is easy to fix by just trimming the front down to fit, but the worst is the fins being waaay too big to fit inside the missile pods

OMFG WTF etc etc

[Guest]

Well the above was a bit of a devastating discovery! Look at this:

You can see they are obviously too long, but there is no way that 4 missiles with those fins could stack up inside the missile pod! I'm going to have to do some trimming... omg HOW MANY FINS??? (128 to be exact.. .whimper!)

In the meantime, while I work up the enthusiasm to engage that mind-numbing exercise, the work on the rest of the model continues...

Primed up:

which showed up several bad joints and rough spots, so a bit more sanding and filling were in order. Something I did discover were the huge gaping holes behind the front edge next to the forward missile pylons. These were therefore filled with some plastic card and filler:

You'll also see at the bottom of the photo the updated landing gear doors, which got remodelled after seeming some screenshots from a blu-ray version of the movie. These will be added to the model once the main painting is complete.