It's a Bomber!
It's a Bomber!
It's a Bomber!
Ahem, Thanks Lemmy.
Hello all.
It’s been a
while since I last stuck anything up on the Bunker. I have been doing hobby
stuff (I promise) but I've been very remiss about turning it into posts here.
So, to
prevent Charlie and others propping up the bunker on their own; I've decided to
stick some of my stuff up.
One of the
reasons that I haven’t posted for a while is because I've spent a lot of my
hobby time working on a major project that isn't yet complete. My original plan
was to post once the project was complete… However, that would be a very long post and
the project is still a long way from being finished.
So, this is
a ‘progress so far post’, done in a slightly retrospective manner.
My interest
in 40K has taken a pretty savage nose dive since the *arbitrary* new *moronic*
6th edition *inconsistent* rules came in. I hate the current 40K
rules and I may put up a whining post at some point as to why I am so out of
love with 40K.
Whilst I
have very little patience for 40K, I still have a lot of time for Orks.
I decided a long
time ago to put together a Blasta Bomma – something about the idea of a massive
plane shooting the battlefield to pieces with high calibre ordnance whilst
dropping rocket propelled maniacs out of the back just appeals to the rampant
Bad Moon in me.
The basic
idea that I wanted to work to was the A10 thunderbolt:
 |
| Thank you Wikipedia. |
Which is a
Blasta Bomma in its own right
As such, the
premise was to build a straight winged plane with a twin upright tail plane,
two dorsally mounted engines and a **** off massive rotary cannon at the front –
the deff arsenal.
Having
thought about it for a bit, I also decided to build retractable landing gear so that it looked sleeker in the air and plausible on the ground.
It would
also let me choose to use the plane either as a playing piece or as a piece of terrain / objective.
In
retrospect, deciding to go with the landing gear has made my life considerably
harder.
I had the
basic shape in mind and had an idea about construction – a skeleton made out of
rectangular profile plasticard, supported by plumbing pipe. The engines would be
attached using steel bolts and the wings by, er, something… maybe luck and
gaffer tape?
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| If you can't fix it with gaffer tape, you're not using enough. |
This brings
me onto project planning.
Whilst
making my own bomma, I have been following Red Jacks log about the construction
of his Blasta Bomma here: Red Jack's Bomma Log
(Well, not
strictly here, but on the now defunct WAAAGH! forums)
Red Jack
obviously kept his design much closer to the Forgeworld Blasta Bomma from
Aeronautica Imperialis (sorry, can’t find a decent picture of it) than I did.
He also planned the majority of his build straight from the get go.
When putting
conversions together, I tend not to do significant planning prior to beginning
work. This is partly a function of laziness but it also gives me much more
latitude to adapt what I'm doing as I go along and as the mood takes me. I
think it also helps for Ork stuff as it can give a useful cobbled together look.
I'm not
saying I'm right to do scratch building and conversion work in this manner - I
sometimes have to take very hard decisions to undo what I've previously done
because it ‘won’t work that way’ – but it is one way that it can be done.
So that was a
big wall of text wasn’t it? Onto the actual building part.
This is the
beginning of the skeleton in the vice. The fuselage ring ribs were the first
things I made (back in 2011). These were glued into pre-cut slots in the fuselage
pipe with 2 part epoxy adhesive.
The engines
are bolted into a right angled steel V inside the fuselage pipe.
At this
point I already had a flight stand for the plane and the receiving part of the
stand (a captive nut in a steel plate) was wedged into the fuselage pipe and
glued in with epoxy adhesive.
You might
say that it seems like a lot of faff to have the polyethylene plumbing pipe in
the fuselage when I’m also assembling a rigid structure around the ribs.
And you’d be
right; it is. Polyethylene is a pain to work with as the usual
glues and paint I use won’t adhere to it as well as they do to polystyrene.
However,
there is method to my incipient insanity, and the pipe is there to:
- provide a rigid
monocoque core to the plane
- hold the mounting
point for the flight stand end plate
- be a strong attachment
point for the engines
Next step
was to reinforce the fuselage with longitudinal supports. I realised quite
early on that the internals of the plane needed to be pretty damn solid. Once the
final skin of the plane went on it would be impossible for me to fix the internals without destroying the exterior – an idea I am not keen on. The
plane would also likely weigh a fair chunk so everything inside would need to
bear some of that weight.
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| Wheels! |
And speaking
of which, this is the core of the plane with the landing gear attached.
The landing
gear will have to support the entire weight of the finished plane, so all the pivots
and axle points were reinforced with 1.5mm steel rod. The pivot points inside
the plane were all bulked up for support and all abut the plumbing pipe. That
way the pipe takes the forces of the structure away from the more fragile
polystyrene skeleton.
Having
thought long and hard about how to do the landing gear, I decided that simplest
option was, well, achievable. Anything else (for me) would have been too
complex and not strong enough. So the landing gear just swings up and down
along the axis of the plane - simples.
The front
wheel was offset (just like the A10’s) to give the impression of room inside
the plane for the cannon’s firing mechanism and ammunition.
That’s it
for now. This was a big post in a seemingly random order. I hope it is at least one of interesting and useful for all those of you out there planning hefty
projects like this.
Next time, the
plane will start to look a bit more like a plane…
Always loving speculative over engineering.
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