|
Scratch-Building an "Aquilla" Prow
A few years back, Games Workshop was advertising a new Imperial light cruiser model that was purportedly designed and built on the forge world of Voss, which is near the Armageddon system. As such, these ships featured a unique prow design that was referred to as the Aquilla prow. It is very distinctive from the standard Imperial Navy prow design, having a larger eagle figurehead and a concave profile. Unfortunately, during the pre-production phase it was discovered that the irregular shape of the new light cruiser would cause the molds they were cast in to wear out too quickly, and as a result Games Workshop never put the models into full production. The Apocalypse class battleship and Falchion class escort, which also feature Aquilla prows, did however make it into production. However, their prows are too large or too small, respectively, to be used on a cruiser model. Thus, except for the lucky few who managed to get their hands on a pre-production sample, gamers have been forced to scratch-build their own Aquilla prows for their Voss-pattern cruisers. This article details my attempt at making one. The first step was to do a little planning. Using a couple of articles from the BFG magazine and 2002 Annual, I began to sketch out the basic shape I wanted on a piece of paper. I endeavored to make this drawing the same size as the actual prow would be, in order to get a feel for the contours of it.
Left &
Center: These are the articles I used for inspiration. Now that I had the basic shape in my head, I looked for a materiel to use. I settled on using a small piece of 1x4, cut on a jigsaw. I picked this materiel because it was fairly light, and there was a lot of it available meaning that I had room to make mistakes. Once I had the piece of wood that I wanted to use, I transferred the top-down profile onto the top and bottom of it. I then began sanding the piece of wood down to that curve using a Dremel tool and a sanding attachment.
Left: Here
is the small hunk of 1x4. Once I had the right profile from top to bottom, I began shaping the block to have the proper side profile. This took a bit more time and was a lot more subjective. Using the Dremel again and a variety of sanding and grinding attachments, I slowly worked the block to get the look I wanted. I didn't stress too hard about keeping the exact profile that I sketched out. I basically went with what looked good to me, using the photos from the articles as a guide. Once I had the basic shape of the prow sanded down, I finished it out with some fine sandpaper and a few sanding sticks. I then went on to the detail phase, where I added various bits of trim (and that all-important Imperial eagle!) using thin pieces of sheet styrene cut to shape with a X-acto knife. I also added a couple of details from the Imperial Cruiser weapons sprue, including a lance turret and a ram spike. These parts were all attached using medium viscosity CA glue.
Left: The
block is now sanded down to its basic shape. The prow was now essentially complete. All that was left was to attach it to the model. First, I cut off the standard prow using a cutoff wheel and the Dremel. Once that was separated, I assembled the two halves of the cruiser using Testors modeling cement. Before sticking the two halves of the cruiser together, however, I used some modeling putty to fill in the cavities towards the rear of the parts. This was intended to help counter-balance the heavier weight of the Aquilla prow. Also for the sake of balance, I drilled several holes in the back of the prow to remove some excess materiel and lighten it some. I then attached the prow to the main hull of the cruiser, and assembled the rest of it as normal with a couple of exceptions. First, I replaced the standard Imperial cruiser bridge with one from a Chaos cruiser sprue in order to give the ship an aged appearance. This required trimming the top portion of the hull down a bit in order to get the longer bridge part to sit correctly. The model is intended to represent an Armageddon class battle cruiser, which means it is armed with one weapon battery and one lance deck per side. However, I swapped the normal positions of the lances and weapons batteries, putting the lances forward. I did this because I felt the wider lance batteries looked better next to the bulkier Aquilla prow than the weapons batteries. I've also come up with a bit of fluff to explain this oddity.
Left: Here
you can see how I filled the model's cavity with putty for balance. Now that the model was assembled, I painted it in my fleet's colors, which is a base coat of black dry brushed in white, with blue and steel prows, copper engines and accents, red lights, and gold on the eagle figurehead. I am pretty happy with this conversion, which only took a morning to make. I do, however, think a few things about it could use improvement. First, I feel that I made the prow a little bit too large. As you can see from the picture above it is a good two or three times the size of an average prow. Also, I think the detail I applied to the prow is a bit on the course side. If I make another one of these prows using this method, I will use thinner styrene to allow for finer bracing, etc. My prow wound up being more of an artistic interpretation rather than an exact replica. Overall though, this method yielded me a very unique ship for a reasonable amount of effort. The distinctive profile of an Aquilla prow is hard to miss!
Left: A
side view of the ship; note the position of the weapons and the Chaos
bridge. (Large
Version) By Andy Rucker |
