Digital Kit Design » Horned Beetle Hovertank

This insect inspired design started off as either a sci-fi hovertank or a steampunk walker. I posted the base armor design up on my Patreon and ran a poll to let my customers decide what they wanted more. They chose the hovertank so I continued work on the design in that direction.

I wanted to keep the armor very simple for a few reasons. First I thought it would look great if a customer decided to stipple on a cast-iron texture using decanted or jarred primer. I also wanted to keep the overall smooth armored top of the original insect coupled with all the underside detail beetles tend to have in contrast. Lastly, I made a hovertank out of many spare leftover kit parts long ago that was covered in stowage, bags, bedrolls, etc…. Some netting draped over the rear armor with all those sorts of things attached would look quite interesting.

The Horned Beetle Hovertank was designed as a digital kit using Autodesk Fusion 360. Due to the rush of constantly designing new monthly content, I have not been able to assemble or clean the one print I’ve made of it, however more than a few customers have built and painted their own. I designed and optimized this kit to be resin-printed in 1/35 scale to match my other insect and sci-fi designs. I always consider the intended scale/print-size when designing to maximize what can be done to make sure all of the details are crisp and not too thin or thick visually.

The Horned Beetle Hovertank was available to my upper-tier FichtenFoo Patreon subscribers as part of my monthly digital-kit drops during September 2021. After that month, the files were added to the Industria Mechanika shop as a retail-priced digital kit product. You can purchase the digital-kit files complete with instructions and print your own Horned Beetle Hovertank here.