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Hi guys

With the pre-release foaming at the mouth over the new Marine Storm-chibi I thought I would do a quick tutorial on the ducted vans I used on my Banshee (counts as Vulture/LS Typhoon). Maybe this is useful in the future planning of your own VTOL army!

After investigating a wide range of options, including after market bits and other real-life and sci-fi kits I found that no-one does a decent ducted fan. Not in the right scale at least.

So my search widened to anything that is about the right shape and I hit upon the following solution - Hollowed out Warmachine type bases:



With a sharp knife and some care the central portion can be hollowed out elaving a semi-circular ring. 2 of these can be glued together to give you a great fan-duct. In the examples above I've added small canards for interest, but you could do all sorts of things to gussy them up.

In terms of connecting the duct to the fuselage ther are again a range of solutions. I cut the Stormraven tail aerofoil in 2 and trimmed it to fit to give something that allows me to fix the duct to before it fits to the fuselage:



This wing allowed me to hide the fan support system (a length of plasticard tube) that runs through the fuselage:


The winglets also gave me something to attach a central rotor hub to. Another option I toyed with for this was an X of structure top and bottom, but I preferred the smoother look of what I went for. The rotor hub is simple a short length of plastic tube with a GS cap on the end. I made a GS press mould for doing fuel/flamer tanks a while back and thought it would be useful here too.

Add some mechanical gubbins on the top to make it look like its actually doing something (in this case trimmed from a Defiler arm) and a lick of paint and bob's the close relative of your choice - Ducted fan



I decided not to try and put fan blades in there, partly because I'm lazy and partly because I think this way looks a bit more like its actually flying. I thought about putting in a perspex disc to make it look like motion blur, but I never got around to sourcing the parts.

reminds me a bit of the smaller Gunships in Avatar (forgot what they are called) minus two rotors

Its a Terran Banshee.

I absolutely love this idea and will be borrowing heavily as I think about how to make the stormtalon look cool.

That's a fantastic conversion.

It also looks 100% ready to re-enact the scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Sean Connery shoots up the tail of the plane he's in.

Almost exactly... except for the fact they are Sentinel exhaust pipes

All right ! That is a great Idea.