Victorian Steam Tanks

[LawOfTheGun]

Here are some shots of beautiful steam tanks by German painter Michael Immig, taken at the Hamburger Tactica 2007 painting competition.
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Enjoy!

[Skrapwelder]

Absolutely beautiful.

Is the spherical tank scratch built or from a kit?

[Johan]

It looks scratchbuilt to me. You can recognise several parts of a French (?) gun in a bigger scale - trail - weels and even the smaller wheels from the trailer joint together with a new rim. I think 1/32nd scale.

[Prof.Witchheimer]

scratchbuild for sure, as usual in Michael's projects, i dont think he'd paint not-converted stuff :-)

[Malamute]

Awesomw stuff.   I like them both very much  

[Westfalia Chris]

I hate him. He makes me feel inadequate.

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... just kidding, awesome stuff. :: Love the Zeppelin and the Beijing Embassy building of his.

[Barry S]

Inspiring stuff  

Barry

[KeyanSark]

Anybody knows how he did that incredible smoke effect??  

[Barry S]

It looks like the wadding/stuffing for pillows/teddybears available from most craft shops. I colour it using small amounts of the relevent paint colour. I tried ink but found the paint worked alot better.

I thought I'd seen the large steam tanks somewhere before

http://www.ths-wargames.de/index.htm

Superb stuff  :love:

[Admiral Benbow]

Hello everybody and thanks for the nice comments! I have been offboard for a couple of days due to much work in real life   , otherwise I would have answered some of your questions earlier.

VSF, especially steamtanks and other curious machinery, have been one of my passions for a long time. The steam-age is so full of wonders and possibilities, as usual I have much more projects under construction than ready for display and gaming.  :love:

Now for some details:

The Kaiser's Kriegsgerät is named "Rumpelstilschen", and as the adequate translation for the german "rumpeln" something like "rumble" is, you can imagine what the appearance of this machine means for friend and foe alike!  :mrgreen:

It was built using some parts from SF3D-Kits (Aaaarrgghhh, outrage, sacrilege), a Historex 1:32 scale napoleonic muzzle loader for the wheels and a brass gun from 1:96 scale shipmodeller's details. You know the holy and fundamental principle: never throw anything away!

The smoke is indeed some cotton material for stuffing teddy bears and dolls, but I'm using a pre-coloured variant from a handicraft shop and glue it to a piece of dark-painted wire to keep it in the direction I want.

The Empire's answer to this threat is "HMLS Leviathan". The inspiration came from the Major General's site, where you can see the original GI Joe toy it was built from: http://www.zeitcom.com/majgen/68miscls.html

I managed to get one on Ebay, stripped everything I won't need and started to build the outer coverings of the too modern looking wheels from scratch, using plastic sheet, rods and many parts from my scrapboxes. The secret when using parts from plastic kits is to cut them apart and use only parts of the parts which will not be recognisable immediately. A funnel was added, as was some railroad ballast stuff representing coal in the machinery section at the bottom of the funnel. Machine gun is from Redoubt as this manufacturer produces real large models, and the gunner was converted from a Redoubt and a Ral Partha figure plus some green stuff to get the hands on the gun and crank properly. The sunshade was build from stiff copper wire and thin fabric. As usual with my tanks the rather large thing was airbrushed with Tamiya colours, washed with thinned down oil paints and weathered with powdered artists chalks.

If you like, you can see the US landship "USALS Innsmouth" here:

http://www.ths-wargames.de/enter_vsf2.jpg

This one started life as a Starwars AT-AT kit from AMT/Ertl, from which I only used the main compartment and some pieces from the feet for the round turret with two six-barrel Gatling guns. The huge main front gun is again a Historex part, the fully executed if barely visible track construction came from 1/72 scale tank kits and the moveable torpedo-/bomb-arm on the right side was build completely from scratch.

Next on my agenda is a gun-tractor from a Disney-toy, and you can see the finished but unpainted piece at the "Mini-Art-Con" on 24th March as part of my small display there. http://www.mini-art-con.de/

Once I'll find some more spare time I will show my VSF vehicle collection including the Zeppelin "Walküre" on my website. I'll keep you posted.

Have fun,