Asp Contest Rules    |    Entries    |    Home by Andrew Macdonald Scale: Not stated The Asp was an experimental long-range bomber of Sagitaran design. Intended for long-duration autonomous missions, she boasted basic accommodations, life support, and provisions for several months, as well as mission-dedicated systems - experimental detection, screens, and deliverable payload bay. Still in development when The Attack occurred, she was consequently never put into production. However, one of the prototypes was on flight-test at the time of the attack, and the crew - Warrant Officer 4th Olen Serrano and Systems Specialist 2nd Janell Nelson - managed to escape detection. Returning to the ruins of Sagitara after The Attack, they were able to scrounge fuel and supplies, but no weaponry - the Asp's deliverable payloads were also still in development, and that facility had been destroyed to the foundations, limiting her armament to the twin turbo-lasers. Hearing radio-chatter of the "rag-tag fleet" was one thing - locating it quite another. The Asp had only short-ranged communications equipment fitted - contacting anyone out of line-of-sight was impossible - her experimental long-range communications systems were still lab-headaches at the time of The Attack. The crew persevered and eventually did contact Galactica and join the fleet - but that's a story for another time. I had in mind a look reminiscent of the small craft in Battlestar Galactica, so I decided that this would be a Viper-type craft, but larger - a bomber, perhaps? I picked the name "Asp" mostly because of the cheesy jokes enabled by the name choice - "Asp Not (what your bomber can do for you …)"; "Pain in the Asp", "Casting Asp-ersions", and so on. The engines and girder-work of the Apollo's design had to go. I used two of the Apollo's engines, re-sited onto the wing trailing edges, close to the fuselage. The added wings are forward-swept, similar in general shape to the new Cylon ships, just not as pointy. A third engine of the Viper-ish three-thruster-cluster was made from a toy laser pistol; it was situated just behind the new tandem cockpit. The cockpit of the original is just abysmal - seriously, look at it - the 'Blank Hole of Calcutta'. It'd have been better served with a ship's wheel and standing helmsman. It had to go, and it did. The new tandem cockpit was carved into the Asp. The Guy-In-Back's position was dropped down along the lines of the GIB position in a Canberra. This allowed the cockpit to be almost inside the "intake". The nose extension also came from the laser pistol. I kept the rear main thruster of the Apollo - I didn't really have any ideas for anything else to put back there. The wings were made from plexiglass and hand cut to a home-made master. Getting both wings to be the same shape was probably the most time-consuming part of the build. Attaching the wings was the most difficult part of the build - I really needed to think it through a lot more than I did. I don't do well with white paint, so I went with Duck Egg Blue (almost as bad as white), with darker blue accents. Decals were gleaned from several sources, including the host kit. Image: Front view Image: Climbing Image: Left side Image: Right side detail Image: Left/rear Image: Left side detail Contest Rules    |    Entries    Go back up | Starship Modeler Home | Site Map | Feedback This page was last updated 28 January 2012. © 2012 Starship Modeler