AREA 88 : "The Desert Aircraft Carrier”

Gary Kitchen
Hi Greg. This is such a cool concept. I've never read Area 88 but this kind of innovation as source material must be a modellers dream. Reminds me of a story In a British comic (Forget which)I read in 70s where the German WW1 bi/triplanes we're flying off a runway held up by zeppelins! I guess the Marvel Shield Heli Carriers are also vaguely reminiscent. Anyway as always pulling up a chair here.

Greg Baker
This one should be a lot of fun Gary. I'm going to take the deck from the 1/800 Carl Vinson and lay it down over the treads from 9(!) AS-90s. I've had this one rolling around in my head for a while, but after running across a store with a large overstock of AS-90s priced to sell (about $5 each) I simply could resist.

Imma gonna have a lotta howizters leftover... but, then again, I'm going to use the hull of the Vinson and turn it into a 1/700 AFRAMAX Oil Tanker... that I'm gonna blow up. So stay tuned... but maybe stand back a bit. 🙂

Nils Steyaert
Now thats a project to look forward to, good luck 👍

Greg Baker
I've selected this one to bring with me on the plane to Canada... I figure it should keep me busy while I wait for my shipment to arrive.😉

Gary Kitchen
Blowing up stuff, I know is not everyone's cup of tea but is an art form in itself. Tin Hat at the ready👍

Łukasz Gliński
Wow, that looks like the last Homeworld (Deserts of Kharak) 😮

Choppa Nutta
Stand back everyone !!.... the Baker is in the kitchen cooking up something Manga !! 😄 😄 😄
I do love these kind of projects ! 🙂

Greg Baker
Hehe... we'll see if I survive nine pairs of tank treads or not. I had thought of skimping out and either going with a monstrous single set (maybe off a 1/35 scale tank), or trying to hide a few missing ones, but I decided that this one needed to be done the right way, and I'm not likely to stand in front of a stack of 20-25 $5 tank boxes anytime soon again. I'm already thinking what else I can do with the leftover parts from these kits, but let me know if you need the top half of nine SPGs for a project, Choppa...😉

Łukasz Gliński
What if you use 2 full track sets and 4 sets of front&back only?

Greg Baker
Not sure I follow... there are three sets of three (so nines tracks on either side. Which ones front and back?

Martin von Schreckenstein
wow. looking forward to this

Łukasz Gliński
Thought you can skip the mid part of the internal tracks, no-one will ever see it anyway...
Not sure that cuts the expenses, but the workload maybe.

Choppa Nutta
haha, well I did actually go and look at a review of those AS-90 tanks and I did find myself thinking -
"mmm, a fine collection of left over greeblies" 😄

The kit bashing thoughts that went through my mind went something like...

make the turret as per and use the upper hull and sprues to carve up into four legs for a squad of spider tanks or.....

use two turrets back to back for the basis of a mech suit Ma.K. style ish or .....

use four turrets and barrels as four shoulders and legs, take two upper hulls back to back for the basis of the body and greeblie up and use those spare decals to decorate etc. or ....

make a space freighter in the esque of Chris Foss and cut up everything for some interesting surface detail .....

I can see some speeder bike potential in there too 🙂

I think I might need more kits for all the ideas floating through my head !! haha 😄

Choppa Nutta
Another idea that springs to mind is that this made make one very cool coffee table if you were to scale it up to 1/144 scale 😄 😄 😄

Greg Baker
I had a feeling it was going to look like that... I had some similar thoughts... a walking four gun barrel monster... a Star Wars Death Star dio for my 1/144 collection of Bandai kits? Who knows?

After studying the images of the carrier a bit more, I think he tank treads will have a sort of tray fit over them, so none of the tops of treads will be visible. That will likely mean I can repurpose their unseen treads elsewhere. If I really want to push it, I could probably use the same tank kits for the middle front and back. If I do that, I'd need 5 kits total - 3 three for all the outside edges, and two for the inside front/back. That might work. One of the reasons I chose this kit to work with is that the tank treads are plastic and separate pieces (not a rubber strip), so I have total control over their placement. Or at least that's what I tell myself.😉

Choppa Nutta
Well you do have a gift for solving those kind of problems 🙂

Slavo Hazucha
Got to keep my eyes on this! 👍