This is an occasional series - so I will not be posting every week, but it will be very picture heavy.
So what is it?
Try this for starters
This is
Neverwas Haul, as it appeared at the Burning Man Festival a few years ago.
Burning Man is a sort of giant art installation/music festival/thing that happens in the Black Rock desert in Nevada, the creations that people come up with for it are incredible and one year someone turned up with Neverwas Haul.
It is a kind of steampunk tour bus and as soon as I saw it, I knew I wanted to build one for the wargames table.
There are some more pictures of the real item on a Pinterest board
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/stevepickst ... rwas-haul/Steampunk and Victorian science fiction have fascinated me for a long time, so I started pulling bits together for this project - initially I called it
Neverwas Haul 2, but since it started getting built I needed a better name.
The original vehicle is quite modest, though the builders made good use of the space and the parts, but ultimately, I suppose, the biggest constraint was moving it on the roads.
Not a problem I have.
I have a friend who uses my 3D printer and he created some wheels for it. they reminded me of 19thC and early 20thC steam traction engines. To cut a long story short - I went big.
First up the hull.
Sheet styrene - plastic card, evergreen, whatever you want to call it. 60 thou thick and quite solid. Extra plating to give it that boiler maker/industrial feel. Oh and port-hole on either side.
The Cardinal was there just to scale it for the pictures.
Next I added a deck, to give myself an idea of what room I had to work with,
I used Evergreen I beams to add stiffness to the structure and keep the industrial theme.
The figure is a Strelets Boer, very steam punk with the top hat.
With the wheels
I built the pilot-house from some
Wills Scenics windows, in fact all of the windows and doors are by them, I glued them side by side in a curve and added the rest of the structure around them.
And attached to the hull.
There will be a set of wheels (and a cow-catcher) underneath the pilot house.
The figures in this shot are from the Red Box "Stalkers" sets (72039 and 72040), again very steampunk(y) figures.
Next up was the roof.
I was anticipating this to be the most difficult part. But I sat down and worked out on paper what I wanted, and it seemed to work out.
The structure in the top of the roof is a 'widow's walk' - and is a walk way accessible from the inside of the roof.
And to conclude the pictures in this update - the first of the sidewalls , the hull and the roof.
From the tabletop to the rooftop I think it's about 15cm tall.
So why is it called
The Queen-Empress Victoria?
In my head the middle of the 19thC saw the European Empires in a vigorous outwards expansion. The Americas, the Siberian Steppes, Africa, Mars and Venus. Engineers came up with all sorts of novel inventions to help the exploration and conquest of these areas. The Armstrong and Whitworth Company (of Manchester) built a series of Landcruisers, and the Queen-Empress Victoria was one of them. Long since transferred into private hands, many of these wonderful old vehicles can be found around the globe from the plains of Champagne to the Gobi desert, as scientists use them as bases in their explorations.
Thank your for reading thus far.
Pickers