Quar Airships

The Royal Phobosian Light Expeditionary Brigade is tasked with exploring Venus to assess and secure its natural resources. The backbone of the army is its infantry, but to explore, they need to be able to move around.

Therefor I decided they must have several walkers and a healthy presence of cavalry: the only real options right?

The rules the campaign uses Martian Empires from Oozlum Games & Black Hat Miniatures, and the GM modified it for 28mm and a setting on Venus. Looking through the army list I realized that it allowed for fliers.

Great Googly-Moogly! Fliers!

I was struck by Deja-Vu-Thoris: Barsoomian Airships! How can I resist?

See, I grew up on Edgar Rice Burroughs. And my hands-down favorite was Barsoom.

Easy enough to background-fluff it: Quar are from Phobos, they've had wars with Barsoom before, captured airships and modified them to fit their technology.

Reasonable. And more importantly it gets me airships!

The only question remained: how to make scout airships for Quar?

I started with a Star Wars toy:

This is the skiff that Luke & friends use to rescue Han, where Bobba Fett's agent clearly dropped the ball, because that death scene was far too weak for such a cool character.. but I digress.

The scale of the toy, judging from the size of the people that come with it, is about right for 15-18mm. Too small for 28's, but not bad for a 2 man flier! I rigged up a Quar crusader heavy shotgun team to be the gunner and pilot. I won't glue them in, so that I can potentially use the airships for other things: I'm thinking 15mm sci fi & someday I'd like to make a VSF Ottoman Empire Army... well, on to the pictures:

This is just a temporary stand to take the picture.

The first thing I wanted was some wings. A Barsoomian Airship may not need wings, but the Quar may require them, and it makes them look a bit more VSF in style.

I added a boiler exhaust for the same reason, and of course lots of rivets.

I placed a clear flying base at the back here, because I'm wondering if I should give it a propeller.

What do you think? Propeller yes, or no?

An airship doesn't really need a propeller, it uses the propulsion light ray.. but I don't know. I'm on the fence.

I still need to design a flight stand for the airships, I'm thinking I'll use double flight rods, for stability.

And of course I need to find time to paint them. It's pretty easy to find time to assemble & convert, it's relaxing after a day of commission painting.. painting after a day of painting though is a bit more problematic.

For painting I'm thinking a light grey/white painted armor plating with heavy use of the bronze & iron metal like I did with the Scout walker. What do you think?

Next stop, the skies of Venus!