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Buck Rogers - 1980s Stylee


Mike

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There's even a Quad! :o Wider hull and four canopy "sections".  Every time this thread pops back up, I get the urge to spend money I haven't got :crying:

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The Buck Rogers Thunderfighter is one of my favorite designs- compact and advanced, but still hunkered down and mean looking. It stared off as a sketch for Star Wars (appears in the Chronicles Book)-

l75m232.jpg

Then almost became the Battlestar Galactica Viper before finding a home on Buck Rogers.

Edited by Richard Baker
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It's amazing that over 30 years later I'm still learning stuff about shows I used to watch. How did it make the transition from Star Wars to Duck Dodgers?

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5 hours ago, Mike said:

It's amazing that over 30 years later I'm still learning stuff about shows I used to watch. How did it make the transition from Star Wars to Duck Dodgers?

 

 

That's easy! John Dykstra and  Ralph McQuarrie worked on all three projects.  There was alot of recycling before the invention of the internet and home video. Like I posted earlier,  the name Viper came from the Rogers  fighter because the twin lasers looked like fangs.

 

Btw, the Thunder almost made it back in to Star Wars again.  There where talks about putting the Howlrunner into one of the new movies or TV shows. It's a Imperial fighter that was built by Incom to give the Empire an X-Wing type fighter in the EU.  

 

latest?cb=20170411031923

 

No doubting its relationship to the older design. 

 

 

Edited by Thud4444
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There are some slightly better pictures on Ken Larson's site here:

 

http://www.universalhartland.com/code/buck101s.shtml

 

Apparently built (or detailed?) by Illianna Lowry from a design by David Jones. It's a super-cool design, I'd like to make one too.

 

Edit: Found a couple of bigger pics of the original prop:

 

http://www.smallartworks.ca/Battlebuck/Rogers/Misc/Scorpion.jpg

 

You can see what looks like the Cobra upper fuselage cut in half and mounted on the underside. I wonder if it's the 1/32 Revell Cobra, plus a 1/48 Tomcat?

 

Cheers,

 

Will

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Looks like I was right, at least this build on the internet uses those bits and looks about right, proportionally:

 

https://public.fotki.com/am73grand/science-fiction/buck-rogers-scorpio/

 

The nice thing is that 48/32 = 72/48, so you can do a more practical ~48th scale version with the same recipe.

 

Cheers,

 

Will

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That's it Will ^_^ I didn't know it was called a Scorpion, but it looks like I was right on the nail with the Tomcat base :smartass:

 

Wonder if anyone does a kit of that? :hmmm:

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Kit bashing in general did a lot of sci-fi duty... pore over any of the miniatures for nearly every sci-fi film/series and you'll find Tiger engine decks, ship gun barrels & such ^_^ Them woz the days. It must have been weird for the SW:TFA guys to create shapes that were model kits in their own right beforehand.

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1 hour ago, Mike said:

Kit bashing in general did a lot of sci-fi duty... pore over any of the miniatures for nearly every sci-fi film/series and you'll find Tiger engine decks, ship gun barrels & such ^_^ Them woz the days. It must have been weird for the SW:TFA guys to create shapes that were model kits in their own right beforehand.

Or Bandai recreating original donor kits in scale for their 1:72 Falcon greebly? 

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4 hours ago, Mike said:

That's it Will ^_^ I didn't know it was called a Scorpion, but it looks like I was right on the nail with the Tomcat base :smartass:

 

Wonder if anyone does a kit of that? :hmmm:

 

If you balked at thunder prices....

 

The cheapest I've found was $385. For an old Alfred Wong kit in 1/48.

 

 

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8 hours ago, Mike said:

Kit bashing in general did a lot of sci-fi duty... pore over any of the miniatures for nearly every sci-fi film/series and you'll find Tiger engine decks, ship gun barrels & such ^_^ 

Oh absolutely, but perhaps more as detail parts over custom armatures or resin castings. There aren't soo many things where a recognisable part of the overall shaping comes from a kit, and they tend to be at the low budget end of the spectrum. The A-Wing is pretty unusual.

 

8 hours ago, Mike said:

It must have been weird for the SW:TFA guys to create shapes that were model kits in their own right beforehand.

 

Aye. Although the ultimate full circle must be that some of the X-Wing shots in Empire or RotJ used MPC (or AMT?) X-Wing kits :)

 

Cheers,

 

Will

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