RogerBW's Blog

Hovertruck in a hurry 07 December 2017

Someone was lamenting the lack of current hovertruck miniatures in Ogre, now that SJGames is producing the iconic shapes again, so I thought I'd make one.

Being lazy, I did it with OpenSCAD. My inspiration was a model which seems to be spottily available but not well-illustrated on line; here is a version on Pinterest.

Step one was the skirt, for which I used rows of toroidal segments, aiming for about 25mm total length (for 1:285 scale).

I filled in the centre since there's no point having a hollow base, and it holds the top together.

Then I paused for the night, because I didn't feel like designing a truck body. But fortunately, a kind Thingiverse user had already made a suitably slightly-sci-fi tractor and cargo module that I could borrow, because they're cc-licenced.

So then it was just a matter of importing them into OpenSCAD, scaling them, and moving them around (I ended up using two instances of the cargo box because I didn't like the way the side panels looked when I stretched a single one to fit), and presto:

Total time taken by me: about an hour. This model is also on Thingiverse, and also cc-licenced.

Note that there are still a couple of really huge problems with my model, which it shares with the original… where are the air intakes, and how is it propelled? A cargo hover really ought to look more like an AP1-88.

See also:
OpenSCAD as a non-linear editor


  1. Posted by Ashley R Pollard at 12:51pm on 07 December 2017

    CinC do a version (http://www.pfc-cinc.com/catalog/item/312935/7941537.htm) and their model has the fans underneath which, while a nice detail, shows no engineering practicality at all. But there again, the Ogreverse engineering plausibility is rather moot.

    While slinging tac-nukes around the battlefield is cool, and rule of cool is all, IMNSHO it's no longer even vaguely plausible, because it's much more cost effective to destroy your enemy by other means than a nuke.

  2. Posted by RogerBW at 01:52pm on 07 December 2017

    Thanks, Ashley - I think that may be the one people were originally talking about, though it appears still to be available.

    I've seen vehicles for 25mm figure scale which were two-part mix-and-match casts: a 6×6, tracked, hover or grav chassis in the bottom half, and an APC, armoured car, mortar carrier or light tank in the top half. Sadly, although this looks good, it raises objections from annoying engineering types.

  3. Posted by John Dallman at 10:55pm on 07 December 2017

    Putting a lot of small air intakes along the top edge of the skirt could look OK, although it probably isn't actually practical.

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