In Progress » Martian Light Hovertank

For a while now I’ve been mentioning that I had another secret project master sold to Mig Productions, but didn’t have the go-ahead to post about it publicly until now since’ it’s in production.  I present to you, the Martian Light Hovertank!

When I made my last Martian Hovertank, Mig really liked it and mentioned he’d love to have one to paint-up. That got me thinking about doing another, but much smaller than the last one which is just plain huge. This time I decided to make a smaller light tank used for raiding and fast attack. I actually finished this over a year ago and sat on it for a bit while waiting to see how my KV-X2 worked out with my original bad caster. When Mig decided to take on the KV, he bought this master as well.

This just went into production and should be available sometime before December. I should be getting my first copy in a few weeks which I’ll be painting up for the box art. Adam is very jealous as he also likes the design a lot.

To start this long overdue progress thread off however, I’ll post up my progress images. This started out with a “bean” as we called them. They were part of a trade show booth from the first company I worked for. A few years ago, while visiting my old art director for some freelance she gave me one. It’s been gathering dust, but with a slathering of Vaseline and some bondo, it made the perfect shell mold for this tank’s base.

Over the bondo I added Aves Apoxie sculpy, armor kit bits and plenty of scratchbuilt details. I wanted it to have an insect or trilobite/crustation appearance and I think I got that. Looks like a cross between War of the Worlds tripods and modern armor to me. The front landing legs have large armor plates and look crab-like while the 4 rear legs fold up under the rear armor when the tank is on the move. I imagine the tank could also walk on these legs when necessary.

The engine/fan-ducts was inspired by my friend Luca Z’s work on the Briegel internals. What’s exciting for me is that that I was able to use photo-etch for the fans and covering grilles. There will also be tubing on the positron cannon which runs to the mount and the tank hull.

Anyway, here’s pics of the tacked-up tank before I sent it off to Mig and of the progress.  I think it’ll be a lot of fun to paint and hope you guys like it as well.