I must admit that i really like the film 'Space Truckers.' Okay, so it's shoddy, hoakey and corny, but are these not the elements of a great film? What i liked most in the film was the way the space trucks really looked like trucks, with recognizable cabs and trailers. Now, there is not much reference out there on the good ol' Pachyderm 2000 (The hero truck), and i don;t think I'd be up for that kind of scratch building anyway. So i decided to build my own Space Truck from anything that came to hand., The result is the Rynocore Goliath Type-S.
The cab unit is based around a cheap toy truck cab. I lengthened it with plasticard, and fitted large drive nacelles. The rockets themselves where salvaged from a Star Fury i never finished. I repositioned the air deflector to the back of the new structure for a more streamlined look, and added some plasticard plating to cover the gap. The jet intake looking thing (no, i don't know what a jet intake is doing on a space truck either – but it looked right!) is made from PVC pipe, with a hub cap from a 1937 Ford truck kit, plasticard, and an LED. I made the bull bar assembly from wire and yet more plasticard. The fins come from a pair of very cheap and very dodgy SR-71 kits, and the radar is from a AH-64 of the same manufacture.
The trailer is made almost entirely from Plasticard. The small boxes on the ends of the trailer and the back of the cab are the electro-magnets which hold the whole thing together while in flight. Actually, they are Citadel Miniatures 20mm square bases stuffed with magnets scavenged from fridge magnets. They don't exactly hold the ship together, as they are to weak, but they hold the pieces in the right positions for display,which is all i wanted.
The Cab was painted using Model Master Acryl and my trusty Aztec airbrush. I used Insignia blue for the base coat, and then drybrushed it with Citadel colors in lighter shades. The bonnet and side stripes where painted in gold, again using the airbrush. I'm a bit of an airbrush neophyte, so i didn' want to try anything to difficult.
The trailer is painted grey, with red striping. The first time i did this, the masks pulled a lot of paint off with them, so i had to do it again. unfortunately, the same thing happened again on a smaller scale. This time, i couldn't be bothered repainting, so i just painted up the bare patches to look like hand painted repair work. The lettering is Letraset.
I'm intending to build some more trailers at some stage, probably for different purposes. This one is a basic version, i might try things like live-stock transports, maybe even passengers!