My First Spaceships

Believe it or not, I'm a sucker for spaceships. Thus, it was only a matter of time before I carved some. So here are some pictures. First I made up some of my own designs. There was no drawings, just shaping as I carved. Despite such a disorderly, even haphazard construction method, I think my first group turned out pretty good.

The middle one came first. I thought it looked shark-like, so I continued on, adding the 'tail' to complete the look. This would be a cruiser to heavy cruiser in the Full Thrust scale. The one on the left would be a cruiser, trying to get a similar shaping, but not the same. The one on the right started as a blob that I didn't like and carved down to make a destroyer, or maybe it's corvette-sized.
 

Then I decided I wanted to see if there were some simple designs already out there that I could try. Turned over to that trusty the-blueprints.com site to check out the Science Fiction section. I discovered some good designs for a beginner like myself to tackle in a series I had never heard of before: Space Battleship Yamato!

The title spaceship was a little much for me to start with, so I went with the Bolar cruisers and heavy cruiser (yellow ones below). Moved on to the EDF destroyers (small grey and red) and started on the Yamato (which is still not finished as I would like). The latest addition in this series is a lone Gamilon destroyer (that faded green one).

 Of course, my models are not exact replicas. I'm going for playable, not show-room, and I haven't watched anything past the 5th episode so detailing on my versions of these ships may differ greatly from the cartoons.

With a bunch of odd-sized bits of wood left over from carving these ships and some WWI fighter planes (which I'll try to get to later), I started gluing and carving to come up with a couple more ships of my own design. The larger of the two is maybe not quite battleship size, I'm thinking battle cruiser or small carrier (if I get into the game enough to warrant putting together fighter groups). The smaller I might rate a cruiser or light cruiser


When I got to painting the these ones, Jenni had bought me some minis brushes for Christmas, so I tried them out, starting with some swirling designs. After that I moved on to adding some detail touches to these and the other ships you've already seen - those touches being small black and white dots (windows? gun-ports?) and some striping, even numbers on one of the EDF destroyers (the other I had already attempted a number with the not very mini brushes).

Then I averted a couple hours of boredom one night when I went to the-blueprints and started going crazy! I downloaded drawings of more SBY designs and a bunch of Star Trek designs, re-sized them all to roughly match Full Thrust scaling. Now I've started a Miranda-Class ship from Trek, also carved all the pieces for an Enterprise (Motion Picture version), but I have lost some of them. That's OK though, the gluing wasn't going well for it, so I am trying a different tack.

The Bolar ships and the Sharky ships have both already seen battle, with each other, trying out some solo-friendly space-battle rules. But that's a post for another day: I think I recorded my thoughts on that in my private blog and they will likely find their way over to this one, eventually.

Hope you enjoyed the pictures. Here's a couple more.

 

As ugly as it is, I do like that brown one!