"Dropship Resurrection" Topic

Its been a while, but I finally got round to doing some more work on my Dropship.

brandlin.blogspot.com

As always, comments and criticism welcomed.

Looks great so far!

For the largish windscreen, you could just make it smaller by adding thin card to most of the piece closest to the nose.

A very nice design.

You might consider doing another without the landing gear, for use over the table, as if flying, or coming in for a landing.

Top Gun – thanks for the positive comments.

I'm trying to design this to be modular, so it can be assembled either with or without the landing gear. If you read back through the blog there is some discussion on the landing gear – but i'm aware that its a number of posts to read.

Not very aerodynamic, but I like it anyways! I think the cockpit would look more authoritative if the lateral vision glass was angled to match the rear angle of that module, giving it a wider profile as though 2 pilots were within side-by-side.

Also, the missile battery doesn't look to scale with the rest of the ship, at that size it looks more like a flare and chaff dispenser.

The 6mm guns look great!

I really like the engines, they look like they can really put out a lot of thrust to keep it aloft!

Hi Darby thanks for the comments.

It is however supposed to look like it has the aerodynamics of a brick. Its a drop ship so the engines swivel to provide breaking on the descent and the big thrusters ram it back into space… no flying or gliding required ;)

I agree the rear missile turret is small… partly its what i could fit, – but think of it as a missile defence… if that's a chaff dispenser to you then that's what it is. The turret mount will take any 15mm turret from Old Crow

The base of that dropship is a mouthwash bottle or something similar, isn't it?

I have a mouthwash-bottle-based shuttlecraft sitting on top of one of my speakers, built a couple of years ago and, I now realize, never actually photographed or shown off online!

Great build, more complex than mine is!

Thanks BBurger. And yes you are right. the full process of the build is on the blog if you click on Dropship in the project list at the top and scroll down you'll see it all started from this…

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which was cast to make these…

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I'd like to see pics of what you came up with…

I'd go with adding some more framing to the windscreen like the modern helicopter gunships, or the UD4 from ALIENS.

Though, given that your flight profile would see this thing amking a surfboard-style re-entry, limited hover loiter time, and a rocket style ascent, it probably isn't that vulnerable to fire or heating. Or thena again, how about a version with a more 'eagle-ish' Cockpit? :)

Moving the windscreen up, maybe with a vertical bar to divide it, would help a lot. Something like this:

picture

Hey BillChuck – nice PaintShop skills…. can I nab that image?

I agree about raising the windscreen – I think you show that that looks cool. Not so sure about the vertical divide though… hmmm

Sure, go ahead. I just tossed it out there to show what I meant.
Maybe a horizontal or triangular frame would work instead. Figure out where the crew are sitting in there and arrange the frame around them.

Thanks BillChuck

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One of the longer term Ideas I have for this vehicle is to make some modular alternate versions like a stretch version or a super heavy etc.

I have a hankering to make a lightable model too – with interior and lit cockpit detail! (probably biting off much more than my modelling skills cab chew!)

I think there's actually three crew seats in that cockpit, two pilots facing forwards at the screen, and a third sat laterally with his back to the escape hatch behind them… So actually raising the lower sill works out well.

The raised lower portion looks good.

I too am not thrilled with the divided window effect.

How about raising the lower portion a bit further, and lowering the top portion as well, so you end up with a 1.5x – 2.0x ratio of width to height, for the windscreen (and no central, vertical divider)?