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"...one-way elevator to Hell, goin' DOWWWWWNNN!!"

I present the legendary Aliens Dropship by Halcyon. I'm teaming this up with a resin APC by Gonzoid Models, sourced from Comet Miniatures. I'd love to get my hands on the Halcyon APC but its the wrong scale to work with the Dropship. My intention is to build a diorama of the "deploy and dust off" moment in the movie. The closes you get to see of this is screencapped here:





as the action switches from the dropship flying in over the complex to a close up of the ramp touching down and the APC deploying before switching back into the two shot shown above.


So here is the box and sprue shots:
















Starting on the APC.

This is a big block of resin, quite roughly cast in solid but brittle resin. it looks like it was cast from a scratch-built master as you can still see some of the joins from the master in the cast resin. its taken quite a bit of cleaning up and a lot of sanding to get rid of a chunky mould line that ran around the uppser sides.





The wheels to had a lot of "flash" and were quite crudely finished. I've given them a good clean up and now they look sort-of presentable.





Problem is they are not a good representation of the original!





These wheels are two skinny and the treads are totally wrong. I'll have to see if there is anything I can do to make them more accurate.


In that screencap you can also see how inaccurate the main gun is. I'm alrady planning to drillout the barrels on the front cannon as the mouldings on these were essentially just blobs. you can see how they are supposed to look here:




Stay frosty!

Thanks for your interest and enthusiasm - I'm looking forward to this built a lot. I've been digging into the background of the studio models and its really interesting, eg finding out that the APC is actually an ex-Heathrow aircraft tug in disguise one of these:



So progress is happening, but let me say I hate it when I can smell resin while sanding! Its not a good sign coz it means your mask is leaking and you could be breathing in that nasty shi**! This block of resin has needed a lot of sanding to get rid of the truly awful moulding lines. Its now been primed, filled and sanded a bit more.





There were several "gaps" and pits that needed filling - some of them appeared to be seams on the original master that didn't fit well.


The wheels got a good sanding as well. They are now much flatter than they were which makes them look more like the originals, but they are still too skinny by far. However I'm just going to live with that as I don't feel up to scratch building something this small. They've been painted up as you can see and look fine to me.


I've also painted the front turret and drilled out the cannon nozzles. As you can see from the previous pictures, these cannon seems to have some sort of star-like fitting in the muzzle, however at this scale I don't think I've got anything that can reproduce that look so it stays as it. I've added some bits to the main cannons to bulk out the barrel and add the plate on the upper surface that is visible, particularly this one which is of the RC model used in the movie





I'm about ready to give the main body its coat of Nato Green, stay tuned...