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Gallery 01

The Orion heavy cruiser was my favorite of the Stardate 3000 line. Quite massive looking, with an air of 2001 A Space Odyssey about it. It and the other ships of that line were featured on the playing counters for the 1977 boardgame Alpha Omega, but only ancient game geeks like me have ever seen this game.

Minatures painted by the VirtualScratchbuilder.
A coat of Wal-Mart primer, a coat of Wal-Mart white, a bath of Dr. Martin's Bombay Blue India Ink, white dry-brushing with a common artist's acrylic, then the details are picked out.

On the drawback side, I have no blueprints for this, just the physical model. Since my eyesight isn't what it used to be, I'm using a 15x jeweler's loupe in an attempt to see the details. On the advantage side, the miniature masters were composed of glued-together HO gauge train parts. This means that in several spots on the miniature they re-use train bits, so once I make a mesh model of one particular bit I can re-use it as well.

Image courtesy of the VirtualScratchbuilder.
The shoulder cannon and the engines share a common part. I guess the cannon is some species of particle beam weapon, and the engines are nuclear fusion or some other sort of propulsion system that requires injecting particle beams.

Using HO train parts was apparently quite common in the 1970's. It was done by Valiant for their Stardate 3000 line, Superior Models for their Starfleet Wars line (now available as Monday Knight Productions' Galactic Knights line), and by Pewtercraft's (out of business) Galaktik Taktik line. The Valiant line was sculpted and fabricated by an artist named Rodney Carter back in the 1970's. If anybody knows the names of the artists who sculpted the originals for the other lines, please .

Entomolian warship from Monday Knight Productions and a Perseus cruiser from Valiant. It is hard to see but the part inside the two red circles is identical. Image courtesy of the VirtualScratchbuilder.
Midway through, when I got the jeweler's loupe, I realized that the engines and spine boxes were not at 120 degree angles, as I assumed. The spine was based on octogons, not hexagons, the angle was actually 135 degrees (3 x 45 degrees).