She's not made of paper, Captain!

. . . except when she is. Paper is, in fact, the structural material of the sturdy little Genet VT-3 Pinzgauer.

You've probably seen this in the background of some of my pictures before, which is where it's really intended to go, but it deserves at least a moment in the sun. This build largely overlaps with the MB-1377 StarLifter Rainbow Connection. I think I started the StarLifter first, but that took a long time in gestation and I wanted something faster, so I turned to paper models. This was to be an experiment. The first part of the build went quickly enough to use as a set piece in some photography in late 2017. (So far so good.) But as things are wont to go, I got distracted and turned to shinier things and this sat. Long enough, in fact, that I lost parts. (Which is no big deal when they're made of paper.) But after I finished Rainbow Connection I decided I really needed to put the tail end on the Pinzgauer and finish the last details. Before I get into the nitty gritty of how this works let me expound a little on the model.

The Pinzgauer seems a clear reference to Battlestar Galactica. The general arrangement and proportions of the ship are very close to the original series shuttle. The sigil on the side of the default paint version is quite close to the new series symbol. It's simplified for ease of construction. (More on that later.) But really, it's not too bad at all. Even the original was pretty boxy. But what of the name, you say? Well, apart from being a breed of Austrian draught horse it's also apparently the name of a line of high-mobility trucks. Absurdly boxy things, even. Altogether a good heritage for a utility cargo shuttle, I'd say. Who knew?

Now, back to the build. As I said, this was an experiment. I probably worked faster than I should have. More care and a more forgiving glue than the CA+ that I impatiently insist on using for . . . everything . . . might have helped. But you know what? It worked. And here's the neat thing about paper models: You really have to pay attention to structure. That sturdy thing at the beginning isn't really a joke. The thing is well enough engineered (with beams and braces and gusset plates) that it actually holds together. It doesn't feel like it will fold up in the first breeze. It's still paper. You can crush it. (Or dent it. Or bend it.) It will flex. Much like a real airplane. But there's real structure in there. And there are void spaces galore where real systems would actually fit. That's kind of neat, really. I don't know that I'd engineer my ship so that the entire belly of the thing would become a giant elevator to lower things to the ground, but at least then you'd know the doors were properly locked. (Would help to avoid the kinds of disasters that befell the DC-10, C-5, and 747 when the sudden depressurization from doors that only looked closed broke important parts.) Of course, it does mean I can't so easily actually put a model inside the thing and leave it there, but that's a small complaint, really. It's primary function is to LOOK like it can carry something. It's quite good enough when that something fits.

I said they're fairly sturdy because of their internal structure, but as a result they do take a little longer to build than you might guess. There's nothing especially complicated. It's all cutting, folding, and gluing. Nothing fancy. But there's a lot of it. There are fully 42 ANSI A letter sized pages of printed parts. The thing is almost a novella. That's a lot of parts to cut out. And there are some complex and persnickety folds. Nothing truly origami grade, but still plenty of it. That's what makes it hold together and look halfway neat. What's more, I suspect you could make the things quite a bit sturdier still by building them from cardstock, which you could then paint and detail. At that point it might even be a serious foreground grade model. Even as is I think it's not bad, but I'll let you judge.

Note please that the boarding ramp actually holds a small metal miniature. And the cargo elevator is staying up with yet another such miniature sitting mostly on it. (And did with the miniature fully on it as well, though I've no photographic evidence of that. It just got too dark in the bay.)

And here's some proof that a small armored vehicle really will fit. Smaller early Imperial marks just make it inside the hoist legs. (APCs, tank destroyers, light support, that sort of thing. Nothing too hefty. You're not getting a Land Raider in there.)

I do cheat and use a small piece of tape to hold the chin up. I think if my build were more precise it would probably stay up on its own, but that is one of the weak features. The pedestrian ramp doesn't stay closed well and the chin doesn't stay up. And it's a touch weak at the rear away from the folds. (Which I solved by adding in a piece of cardscock as reinforcement. Much like you might reinforce a real vehicle when you realized the manufacturer's design had a spot prone to trouble.) So the verdict: it's not quite as quick as I would have hoped, but it looks good and works better than I expected. And the price was fantastic. The plans are free, so all it costs is time and materials. Paper. Not bad! Genet Models actually has a whole line of stuff. Check them out. They have plenty of other fun and free paper things to keep you building.

Sincerely,

The Composer

The Rainbow Connection

A while back a friend gave me some very specific instructions on how to get the credit for three MB-1377s. Well . . . I think it worked.

I don't think it's any great secret that many of the games I run lately owe a debt to Joss Whedon's Sci-Fi Space Western. After all, it fits. The plots to his shows could have been rolled up in Rogue Trader and he's borrowing from the same sources as all the rest of us anyway: Star Wars, the old Battlestar Galactica, A Fistful of Dollars, Yojimbo, you name it. There's inevitably going to be some commonality between one Western in space and the next. But his Western had one significant thing mine was still lacking. No, I don't mean horses. (Though there is that too.) He had a spaceship for his ensemble cast. And that is what I most wanted.

There were a few things required of the spaceship: it had to be large enough to plausibly carry a dozen or so people and a useful payload. It had to be neat looking. It had to fit inside my budget. And I wanted what in theatre would be called a "practical" cargo bay. (A "practical" door or window actually opens. A practical faucet runs when you open the tap. You wouldn't necessarily drink it, but water comes out. It functions in some obvious way.) I'm a fan of what the Gov' General over in Sector Six calls "bathtubbing," whereby you leave out the unnecessary things and compact things for scale. But even using a fair bit of that I still wanted a larger than usual model. There's only so small you can make a thing and still fit your bathtubbed truck into the cargo hold, for instance. This one had some physical minimums if I wanted it to be "practical." I've also had a theory for a while now that spaceships and submarines have a few things in common, thus submarines would be a good source of inspiration for spacecraft art. So I set out on a quest to find appropriate children's toys and submarine models.

The orange creature below was one of several somewhat promising broken toys I found in charity shops for the purpose. It . . . seemed far fetched, but the hinged nose, low floor, and large diameter made me think it might work. Lying next to it are two halves of the hull from a model submarine I found on eBay. This is an old Revell SnapTite kit, and I loved the look of the thing and figured between the two items maybe I could get somewhere.

I knew I only wanted to use the airplane for part of the hull, so the first step was removing the end I wouldn't use. In this case I cut off the "tail," which was really too small and kidsy anyway. The "nose" would become the aft end of my ship. At this point I also added the first details to what would be the cargo bay.

This still left me in a bit of a quandry about the forward section of the ship. I'm getting to be a fan of cardstock, but I didn't want to craft the cockpit entirely from scratch. At some point, in one of the Governor General's posts, he pointed out a line of modular Matchbox rescue toys. While looking through that I discovered some large shuttles that looked really promising indeed and came across several job lots on the bay.

I feel quite certain this will provide several spaceships, some surface vehicles, and maybe even a few buildings. (It's worth noting the specific cockpit that went into the gangs starship was removed from the box before any of those pictures were taken.) In any case, with cockpit in hand it was finally a matter of finishing up the middle. Cardstock provided a solid middle. The first piece was formed over the top of the rear section, glued in place, and then fitted down to the cockpit. I marked and measured the second piece in order to cut it into a more roughly conical section and then glued it in place as well. The cardboard would cover all but the aftmost two windows of the toy jet hull. These would become doors onto a gallery level somewhat above the cargo floor. The submarine would provide the hull sections of this gallery or wing level. (And it is on this gallery level that I imagine the crew and passenger accommodations to be. I briefly toyed with detailing the interior here, but it would be nigh unto impossible to see through the tiny windows, so I abandoned the interior aside from the cargo bay.

At this point I needed propulsion. I had originally planned to use some transformer parts leftover from the TransRim MB-1210 Starshuttle project. I even went so far as pinning them in place.

Before deciding they looked terrible and I didn't like them and pulled them right back off. At this point I undid nigh on half the build, cutting cardboard and deciding I wanted to add more detail to the bay. If I can glue cardboard in place once I can do it twice. But it's just so much easier to work on the thing with it open. No laproscopic surgery here.

And to figure out the fit of things I tacked them together with painter's tape. Which gave me an idea for later.

New details included oxygen tanks, a stowage rack, and a rail along the overhead from which a hoist could later be hung. (Made from assorted model aircraft parts.)

Having a sorted that out a little better it was back to propulsion land. Among the parts in the big toybox were a couple of rocket sections. I figured the body of a booster rocket would make a nice proxy for an external engine pod. For the actual engine section I used the cowl off a Monogram C-47, a large marble (that was a painful sacrifice, by the way) and a toothpaste tube cap. You can also see more of the craft mesh material i use for my non-slip floors.

For the nose gear I used the nose gear off a B-29 extended with some leftover tube from a detail brush and a piece of sprue. The landing gear bay doors are the flaps off an A-10 that's been slowly donating parts for years. The chain motor is jewelry supplies, paper, cardstock, styrene rod, and half the cover to a disposable shaver.

Here you can see things finally start to shape up. Connecting the hull halves left large gaps which needed filling. I was worried I wouldn't be able to fill them, but the painters tape looked fine. Just blue. Trouble is paper tape eventually decays. But electrical tape lasts decades. Huzzah! E-tape! (3M Super-88, even. The good stuff.) This may turn out to be a mistake, as the stuff lasts decades, sure, but not in places where people handle it. Well.. We'll see. If it falls apart I'll fix it later, I guess.

Next up I needed a load ramp to get into the cargo bay. Making one out of cardstock sounded simple enough. With a little standard craft grid anti-skid grating it would even look okay. I did a little quick measuring, cut the ramp to size and . . . it didn't fit. It swung up too far on its hinge. So I trimmed the front corners off and it fit better. And when I put it down it didn't lower far enough so I trimmed the back corners and angled the brace and, boom, it went up far enough and down far enough.

And it even fit the mu . . . I mean burro grande. Did I say there was some Firefly in this? Totally lying. No. The big donkey has nothing to do with the mule from Firefly. And even the bilingual Chinese and . . . Spanish . . .Well, there's so much Chinese in so much Sci-Fi at this point. And has been. And, yeah, I have actual honest to god Asian family and friends. Some of whom even speak Chinese. (Among about a dozen other languages.) But anyway . . . hat left fitting the hinge itself, closing up some gaps, fitting the engines, and painting it. The gap filling was accomplished with the usual spackle. Love that stuff. 

After adding a few grbbles to represent radar units, radio antennae, the receiver for the in-flight wifi, and so forth I opted to start the painting process. For the time being I left the the engine nacelles off. (In order to prevent the painter going on holiday between the hull and engine quite so easily.)

With a quick coat of paint I was getting close. I attached the nacelles to a couple more small half pipe pieces to give them a little more separation so they didn't interfere with the aft loading door, and enough distance back that maybe the exhaust wouldn't cook the rear bulkhead. I added a main body engine to make it a tri-rocket. (Everyone loves a tri-rocket.) More gribble would be required inside the bay door to power that engine, but some quick test fits showed the space was there.

Everything fit. It had engines. The cargo hold was practical. It even kind of looked a tiny bit like a lifting body, which was a plus. It's fantasy. You have to squint a little. But with some imagination (and appropriate small boy sound effects) . . . this bird was going to fly. I present to you the McDavies-Brickyard Corporation MB-1377 Starlifter.

And just for the record, it's even big enough to fit a small tank. Whether the load ramp would really support that thing . . . I'm not sure.

But dang, does this make me happy. This model is the purest bundle of joy I've built in a very very long time. :) And thank you so much for joining me on the flight.

Sincerely,
The Composer

Fort de Douaumont

I've always had a desire for accuracy and authenticity in my modeling. It might come as a surprise, but there are times when these two goals work against one another. Authenticity demands a sort of completeness that sometimes requires assumptions, which can in turn compromise accuracy. This is particularly true if you face any degree of time constraint. At some point you have to quit researching and editing and say "Okay. Enough. I'm building this thing now." Technically as amateur modelers we have no special deadline, but if you ever want to get anything done . . .

You see my point.

I began building merchant ships out of that desire for authenticity. No navy can operate without logistics. Frankly, what's the point to a navy if there is no commerce that needs protecting, if there is nothing that you wish to move across the waves to a foreign (often hostile) shore? You can move cargo and troops on warships, but it's terribly inefficient. So if you want an authentic naval wargame you sometimes need merchant bottoms. Sadly I've found it much more difficult to accurately depict merchant ships than warships. It can be nearly impossible to know what ship served as the prototype for a given model. Since the castings are fairly generic and the names often gave no real clue. "Typical British freighter" or "tramp steamer" doesn't really get you anywhere. These run of the mill ships are precisely the ones I want, but they are also the ones least documented. Single screw steamers of four to six thousand tons attracted much less attention than superliners and warships. In time I found good sources, books like Roger Jordan's The World's Merchant Fleets: 1939 or E. C. Talbot-Booth's Merchant Ships: 1942, and websites like Tokosetsukansen, or Old Ship Picture Galleries, but it took me a little while to learn how to use them. As a result, my earliest merchants gave authenticity to my games but little accuracy.

Eventually, as I blew the dust off my conversion and research skills, I was able to achieve a better compromise. My most recent careful conversion, Fort de Douaoumont, benefited from both. I discovered the ship in the pages of Jordan's Merchant Fleets and lucked into a picture on Old Ship Picture Galleries:

Then it just became a matter of turning this . . .

Into this . . .

The first step was cutting away the features I wished to replace. The original model had a very low island amidships and Fort de Douaumont a more prominent one. The model was flush decked and the prototype well decked. The model had three hatches forward and my prototype having two masts, one forward and one aft, most likely had only two. To that end I filed away the combing and capstans at the bow and cut the hatches out with an improvised chisel made by sharpening the tip of an old jewelers screwdriver. Next I cut away the after part of the original superstructure with a pair of nippers. Finally I removed the stern mount. I filed all of these down as flush to the original deck as possible. 

Once the hull was trimmed down I built up the fo'c'sle and poop with rectangular styrene stock.

This I trimmed and filed until I was satisfied with the resulting lines forward and aft. I sealed both with a liberal coating of CA+ that I later filed down to give the effect seen below.

In the process of shaping the fo'c'sle I filed away the cast on anchors, which I replaced with a little green stuff. In the past I've cut these from sheet styrene, but I decided I'd try an experiment and see if I liked sculpting them better. I also worked the bottom of the stern with a rat-tail file to give the ship a more pronounced counter-stern. I added a small deckhouse made of green stuff atop the poop, two hatches made of the same forward, a new superstructure and stack cut from styrene stock, and two ship's boats made of green stuff for an earlier project. (They'd been a little too large for the small ferry to which I'd originally affixed them, but they worked well enough for this larger ship.) Lastly I added two more small deckhouses for winches and affixed the masts to the tops of these.

Following that I added spars, mastheads, aerials, ventilators, lifeboat davits, capstans, and anchor chain all made from styrene stock of assorted sizes. For the ventilators and davits I gently bend cylindrical stock over a pair of conical jewelers pliers. To make the ventilator cowls you simply cut the rod at the resulting elbow. The davits are from much smaller stock (.01") and can be cut a little long, glued in place, and then trimmed to length after. To make anchor chain I crush .01" styrene rod in a pair of pliers. The teeth on the pliers give just enough texture to be reasonably convincing. Once all was done I affixed the thing to a painting stand and went to town with my brushes.

Here's the provisionally final model next to an identical casting waiting for a similar makeover. Included for scale is a standard small zinc ba . . . I mean a U.S. penny. After the photo below I decided the ventilator aft was a little too tall, removed it, trimmed it, and re-attached it to give the aspect seen at the beginning of the article.

If you know what you're looking for you can probably tell that this is the same casting, but it's different enough that I'm satisfied. For comparison you can see her below with two further renditions of the same. I think the three, though obviously similar, are different enough to be credible.

That about does it for today. May your merchant bottoms reach their destinations with a full hold of vital cargoes and may you have as much fun with your own modeling and wargaming as I with mine. As always, thank you for reading along.

Sincerely,
The Composer

Merchant Ships of the United Nations

The latest arrivals at the fleet review are the several allied merchant ships depicted below. First, we have King Edwin:

King Edwin is a Dodd motor ship built by Harland and Wolf in 1927 with a gross registered tonnage of 4536. I've depicted her using C in C's Doxford. This particular casting is perhaps a touch plain but with a little work it comes out nicely. And it's size and style were fairly common. Further, in some ways a simpler casting affords more opportunity for conversion. I haven't really done that yet, but more might come later. I regret that I didn't add ship's boats, but perhaps I can rectify that.

Next we have a pair of takes on a casting sadly no longer in production: the original C in C "tramp steamer." 

Why C in C replaced this model I'm not certain, but this is the older version, which differs quite a bit from the current casting. Leading the column is the Harrison steamer Daytonian: built by Henderson in 1922 and registered at 6434 tons. Trailing her is Fort de Douaumont: a Doxford ship of 1918 built as War Deer, purchased by Chargeurs Reunis, and registered at 5266 tons. In spite of the difference in tonnage, the two ships are nearly the same length and beam. Likely the newer ship gained cargo capacity through improved engineering, reflected also in a higher cruising speed, and slightly increased draft. Both are single screw reciprocating steamers, but if the newer ship has higher pressure boilers (which she doubtless does) then she should be able to achieve the same results with less boiler capacity and less fuel.

Next up, let's move back across the channel and convert a Panzerschiffe casting:

I've used this typical large freighter to depict an Ellerman liner built by Cammel Laird in 1935: City of Manchester. She was a twin screw turbine with a registered capacity of 8917 tons and even some passenger accommodations. (Though I'm guessing not many.) Panzerschiffe castings are, of course, a little simpler, but that leaves a lot of room for customization, and the resin material is in many ways easier to work with. It doesn't bend as badly as white metal and it's easier to cut and file. All in all I really love these guys, particularly for merchant ships, where customization adds so much to the dizzying variety out there.

Another interesting conversion is this small sidewheel ferry:

This is yet another casting whose provenance isn't quite known to me. I picked her up second hand. From earlier research I'd surmised it to be a 1/3000 Navwar "A/B Standard" merchant, but I can no longer find my reasoning for that. In any case, it's quite small. Above you can see an unmodified casting next to the one I rebuilt as a paddle wheeler. I'm using mine to depict a P&A Campbell ferry built by McKnight in 1891. Campbell operated across the Bristol Channel and Ravenswood continued in service with the company until 1955, when she was scrapped. I probably wouldn't have set out  to depict a small channel steamer, but given the yeoman service all variety of small ships and boats gave, and the commonality of such vessels in coastal service she seems a nice addition. (Ravenswood remained in civilian service until the suspension of the ferry in 1940, after which she was eventually taken over as an AA vessel.)

Next we have another coaster, this time converted for military duties. This is the French "landing ship" Golo as depicted by Seabattles and sold in the U.S. by Viking Forge:

In terms of sheer casting and sculpting quality, this was one of the nicest ships I've had the pleasure of modeling in the scale. I added masts, as you can see. There are small pinholes that lead me to believe the Seabattles castings might come with such fanciness, but the domestically produced Viking Forge copy omit them. Even so, this is a nice little ship, and it's no great thing to make some masts out of rod.

Finally, we have the whole gang mustering at an unnamed tropical port on the way to the fleet review. Looks like a little bit of paradise.

As always, thank you for joining me. If you like what you see here check back soon. I plan to post on converting Fort de Douaumont soonish, and there will eventually be more footage of the fleet review.

Sincerely,
The Composer