Personal Project: Zeus Prows
Posted by Mangozac on February 26, 2010One of my other modelling interests is Battlefleet Gothic – I just love the space ship designs (much as I love most designs 40k)! So having a decent sized Imperial fleet of my own, I of course have an Apocalypse Battleship.
The Apocalypse is an ancient design hailing from the Voss Forge World, as evidenced by its distinctively shaped prow design. What I wanted to represent in my fleet is a number of cruisers constructed at the “Zeus” shipyards, so I set about designing my own custom prow that shared many of the design elements that makes the Voss prow so awesome.
So here are a couple of pics of the Zeus prow development process. I began the project quite a while ago (before I had developed my scratchbuilding skills as far as they are today) and it started off with a styrene frame, over which the armour plating and details were sculpted in greenstuff:
The project got put on hold for a while until recently when I made a mould of the prow and cast a few copies in resin. Seeing them in grey resin I could see a lot about the design that I wasn’t too keen on, so I decided to update it and came up with this:
At this stage I decided to bite the bullet and do three versions on the one sprue (for maximum casting efficiency): two with torpedo tubes and one with a Nova cannon. It would be easier to fill in torpedo tubes not used rather than the other way around 😉
Finally I had some results I was happy with! So I produced a new mould and began casting my new prows:
The next step is to get painting! Much against the advice of Vaaish I’m thinking of doing a striped pattern…