Leviathans

As part of my kitbashing experiment, I ordered up a couple of Dropzone Commander Leviathan hovercrafts to customize into some wacky new additions for the Resistance faction. As fate would have it, they came in and I was able to check out Mortal Engines in theaters.  Sounds like the perfect time to start my custom rig.

The movie was a lot of fun even though it seems to be getting killed by the critics.  It gave me a few inspirations on how my own “Traction City” should work but first, I have to get the base started.

The Leviathan model is large enough that they had to split the base in two.  Because this is such a critical piece of the model, I decided to pin the base together. I always hate pinning because it never really comes out right for me.

After I drill the holes in each side of one of the base pieces, I put down some blue tac on the other side and fit them together.  This usually give you a good idea of where to drill the holes so that they match up.

After the holes are all drilled, I test fit the model. As you can see, the pins must be at slightly different angles so I have a pretty bad unbalanced base.  You can try to bend the brass but you’ll likely break the resin before they bend.  I usually just try to shave off parts of the model that are preventing the proper close and then use green stuff to fill gaps.

There was a weird issue I encounters on this Leviathan which I didn’t see in my earlier Thunderstorm model (which shares the same base): the two halves weren’t the same width.  Like one side shrunk 1/16th of an inch. This meant that not only did the model not really come together flat across the bottom, it didn’t line up along the sides either.  Eeesh, this thing was not playing nice.

I used a bit more green stuff to fill things in and ended up filing down parts of the under carriage to get the model to lie flat.  Now it doesn’t rock like a cheap restaurant table.

Given that the widths of the base weren’t matching up, it wasn’t a surprise that I’d have to rework the ramp blades. They eventually came together as well but I’ll need to do some more gap filling on the ramp holding pieces.

All together, the Leviathan would look a bit like this.  Pretty much the same as the Thunderstorm model just without the large energy cells running along the inside floor.

But we’re not building a Leviathan, we’re building a mobile building base. Testing out the paper terrain from the city tile expansion shows that a small building will fit but it won’t work as the end product.

The detail of this destroyed building makes it a little better but a crumbling and partially destroyed building isn’t worth all the effort of a commander to stack on an expensive Leviathan platform.

Even if it has its own charm.  I have a building in mind and think it will work great.  It will take some time to get here so this is about as far as I can go on this project until that critical piece arrives.  The plan will be to mount the building in and add in the engine pieces from the original model, integrating them into the building itself.