Sometimes playing around with cheap rubbish can be fun. As some eagle-eyed regular readers of this Blog may have noticed, there has been precious little on the wargaming and miniatures front this month, but the enforced lay off has enabled me mis-pend the time by indulging in some definite flights of fancy!
Thoroughly enthused by the amazing work on view over at the Arbuthnot's Aeronautical League of Gentlemen Blog, I've come up with a use for a large piece of extremely cheap plastic tat in the form of a snap-together kit of the USS Eisenhower that I discovered on EvilBay for the princely sum of £2.44.
I had originally envisioned using this for some nifty spare parts for some spaceship scratch-building, but was tempted into Mad Idea No 1, namely an Aeronef Mega Carrier along the lines of the USS Langley by the Arbuthnot boys.
My chunk of plastic tops out at 24cm long, and could therefore hold a whole Air Wing of Brigade Models' tiny fighters, for example, the VAN-902 Fixed Wing Fighter as we see in their rough state here:
Now the snap-kit itself is, to be blunt, a crime against scale modelling and although from a Chinese company, interestingly the parts are marked internally as both being 'made in Italy' and 'made in Israel'......!
The WHSmith mini marker pens mentioned previously on this Blog are laid out to give an idea of what this monster might look like with Dirigible booms - should it ever see the light of day.
Some suitably VSF-style deck accoutrements should spruce her up a little, although I'm undecided as to whether to actually use the lower hull, as included in the original kit:
You'll note that the kit's maker has given the Eisenhower the interesting aircraft choice of what appears to be SU-25 Frogfoots and GR1 Harriers - or are they the naval version of the YAK-38 Forger? :-)
The Conning tower pieces should at least provide some ready made nautical-looking bits and bobs....
So how might this monster scale out against actual Aeronef?
Well, up against a VAN-2003 Turkish Muin-i-Zaffer as we see above, pretty d*rn big - it's going to need a rather large flight stand of it's own, I think.....
Of course this outrageous example of becoming side tracked away from my more mainstream projects has not progressed much beyond the mad genius cackling stage, but would be a real conversation-stopper should she ever grace an gaming table. In the meantime, though, never fear, I've managed to put a little work into the Union side for the 3mm ACW project, and have been playing around with some Fleet Scale Sci-fi, all of which should begin to appear on the Blog in the coming month.
So, apologies for the recent sparsity of posts, and see you all in August!
