In xcom your troops are delivered to each mission by a Skyranger. It is a sort of futuristic Osprey. Naturally I need something similar for my troops! For me though it would need to be bigger, in the game it only carries 6 soldiers, where I would like to carry closer to 12-16.
An Osprey preparing to land.
I searched the Internet to try and find something existing that was appropriate and at the right scale. There was lots of stuff at 28mm but little at 20mm. So looks like I would have to build it myself.
I’m not the best model converter, so I didn’t really consider the option of altering a modern 20mm military vehicle. This I felt would require a lot of effort and crafting of detailed parts for the new pieces to look consistent with the underlying model. Wandering around one day I came across one of those diy wooden planes at a market, it looked a little too big but I thought it would be easy to add parts to and I was confident I could convert it while keeping it consistent looking.
If you squint real hard it might look right...
After some searching I found them very cheap on a hobby shop website, along with a similar helicopter from which I could make parts. My core idea was to have the two back propellers in the wings to make it a kind of vtol plane. Then some extra pieces here and there and some shaping of the plane to look more military, simple stuff!
A wooden plane, and 2 helicopters to make the vtol engines
So with the pieces in hand I started with a paper mock up based on photocopies of the pieces. Doesn’t look half bad even at this stage if I do say so my self! Perhaps the propellers could be where the wing joins the plane body but that would be a serious job to build and make stable and I dismissed it at the time to keep things simple. Stay tuned as I start to put the real pieces together!
A positive start I think!