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Recently, I've had this urge to completely mechanize my Black Templars. The idea of having most of my army drop in by pods seems really awesome. The only problem is that I'm far too cheap to buy that many plastic drop pods, so I decided to construct a couple of them out of polystyrene foam (still in the design phase though).



What do you guys and girls (?) think of it? Is it too high/too wide? Keep in mind that I'm not making an exact copy of the GW miniature.

You're far better off making it out of Plasticard. Trust me. It's sturdier, you can use spray paints on it to speed up the process, and it's much easier to do small details. If you don't have a store near you that sells plasticard (It's called sheet styrene too) then you can order it on the internet

metallifan wrote:You're far better off making it out of Plasticard. Trust me. It's sturdier, you can use spray paints on it to speed up the process, and it's much easier to do small details. If you don't have a store near you that sells plasticard (It's called sheet styrene too) then you can order it on the internet

I'm sure it's sturdier, but I find foam to be easier to work with and not so brittle. One of my other hobbies is remote controlled flying. I build my planes out of depron (a brand of foam) and bring them up to speeds of around 100 km/h. I believe it's sturdy enough. I don't intend to physically drop my pods from the sky, but the fact that they could survive the impact reassures me.

Plasticard is finicky to work with.

I know a guy that made several drop pods out of foam-core, and they are absolutely fantastic. Light-weight, study, and accurate to the original design. The only problem would be it were dropped on a fin or something, but even plasticard would chip in those circumstances, and foam-core is pretty easy to repair. Maybe adding a layer of something to sturdify it would work well, I know that plasticard on top of foam-core works very well. Probably the best combination overall, but there has to be some type of spray on 'hardener' out there, for this exact purpose.

Looking forward to seeing this finished up. I am interested in what type of foam you are using specifically, and how you are going to go about shaping it (wire foam-cutters?). I'll look up depron though, sounds like a good material.

I like the design it looks slim and elongated more finessed which looks good in my opinion.

I hope you keep this thread updated with any new ideas you may think of or progression on your drop pod

[DC]R

There are templates for SM drop pods floating about, take a look at yahoo groups, bwc-archive.

Finally some progress! I've been quite busy with school lately, and most of my "modeling time" has been dedicated to my Tyranids thanks to the new realease.

After about 30 mins of work:


I opted for a slightly bulkier look than my 3D-rendering shows. This was due to:

1. I had a hard time seeing 10 marines fitting in my original design.

2. Space Marines are bulky and anything but streamlined. I wanted to keep with the theme a little better.

I've begun working with the hatches, and they're taking shape. Probably won't do much to the interior except for adding a storm bolter or whatever.

This drop pod probably won't take more than a couple of hours accumulated time to finish, but since I'm more interested in my 'Nids, it'll be at least a week or so before it's done.

Hits_the_spot wrote:There are templates for SM drop pods floating about, take a look at yahoo groups, bwc-archive.

Yes, I'm very well aware of that. There are also ready painted armies out there, but where's the fun in that? I wanted to do this from scratch.