ATHENA - Steampunk Airship (20)

Wow, the 20th post for the ATHENA allready :)

I continued with the nose of the airship. As you can see I had to use a lot of putty

as even with the .25mm plasticard it is hard the get the curves I wanted.

While the putty cured, I created the first bomb.

It is a 500 lbs bomb with a multi-purpose warhead

I've created it from two large Chimera roadwheels, the fins of a standard hunter-killer missile, and the nozzle of a plastic bottle

I'm pretty satisfied with the result, and will now see to reproducing it (I think I'll need about 8 of them)

Once the putty was cured I continued with the next strips of plasticard for the nose.

Since some more putty was applied and that needed curing, I began to build a gun turret.

The idea was to have a Hydra turret mounted downwards on the nose.

Here you can see the sketch, as well as the first pieces.

These are the "roots" for the barrels

The turret body

Turret front

The basic gun mount fully depressed

and fully elevated

Then I closed the front and mounted it on the ATHENA

YUK!

Aaaaargh!

This looks so....not good....:(

I quickly removed it and set it aside.

Maybe I can use it for something else later, but for right now I don't like it at all.

So, a change of plans was required.

I decided to use two twin-linked (synchronized) Las-Cannons for the turret :)

So there will be quite some firepower coming down to the ground.

The first two LC basically done

and mounted

details added

a first test mount

yeah, that looks more like what I wanted

So I built the other two guns

detailed and mounted them

Then I did the detials to the turret itself

And mounted it on the ATHENA

That's some nice Anti-Armor capability

With a great field of fire

Then I continued with the nose and spent about 3 hours sanding the putty down (forgot to take images).
And created some ornaments for the nose

An Imperial eagle is definately needed for such a nice ship

And with the new turret, it looks even better.

As you can see here I added some extra plates, simulating previous damage patched-up. I will also leave some of the putty dents and scratches and use them as battle damage.

So this is how she looks as of today:

I'm quite pleased with this weekends work.

Cheers

Klaus