It's been many moons since I last posted to SFM, I haven't been doing much that you could call "sci-fi" for a while. Anyway...
These "reimagining" things aren't exactly original any more, but this has been on my back burner for probably the best part of a few years. So, my idea is to try my hand at the Thunderbirds, hopefully aiming to do as many as possible but starting with Thunderbird 2! I'm keeping the basic idea, but deviating quite widely in many of the details. The outline below is what the plan is.
Keeping
The pods (of course!)
Forward sweeping wings - definitely one of the more iconic parts
Engine inlets at the side
Joined tail
Adding/changing
Increasing the size, I know Thunderbirds was never totally consistent with this in the first place
Larger wings so it doesn't just drop out of the sky
Better undercarriage
Larger VTOL thrusters
Open at the back, the pod can be accessed from the back
Dropping (the blasphemy!)
The "stilts" - the pod can now deploy from the back, it seems wasteful to lift all that bulk
Green paint scheme, although I will give it some hints of green I'm going for a mostly grey look
The rounded appearance, otherwise I don't think it can be changed enough
I've got the basic shape I want outlined and will work on adding details later. There are still a few places that need altered and tinkered with.
Posts
your shape looks good and functional cant wait to see the updates will be watching this thread
keep it up
I'm gonna keep an eye on this thread, Thunderbirds re-imaginations are always fun to watch
You can see the start of some engines. I kind of like the square ones from the movie as the round ones seem just a little cheap - the end product should be an unholy hybrid between the two. What you can't really see is that the pod is on tank-tracks so it can move out the back of the TB and drive off. I will probably modify them to turn out similar to the landing gear on the Hercules so they're a bit more visible and adapted for flying. The driving pod does bang off the engines, however, so I'll probably need to do a minor amount of reshaping there - or handwave it, I don't know.
Hmmm, I might take those three into account when thinking of vehicles for the inside. So long as they work out style wise. Redoing one of the classics like The Mole or Firefly definitely has to be on the To Do list! I'd definitely welcome any ideas for these.
But to answer Melak's question (you are from Earth, right?) it's Thunderbird 2, International Rescue's heavy duty transport vehicle.
But i love how you've done this...
Interesting idea. I will try that out. Although it's polygon soup around that part, it will probably be worth it.
I kept scaling up the engines because they always looked too small. Perhaps I've gone overboard, but the original TB2 engines were hardly modest to begin with!
Thanks very much. I properly quit doing any modelling remotely to do with Star Trek a long time ago. Yes, it's popular but at the same time, it's very, very limiting - and if you're doing canon things there's hardly any point.
Very nice model
Anyway, the new tail:
The camera work needs a little refinement but this is only a test run at the moment.
But cool concept launch so far
Sacrilege, I know, but I'll find somewhere else to shoehorn them in! My reasoning is that the raised take-off ramp is cool. BUT, far too short to be practical. A ramp inside the mountain lets me keep the launch ramp but keeps it both practical and hidden. However, because it's inside there can't be any palm trees dropping back. However, I could add them to a runway outside; as in the "reboot" concept I'm working on, all the Thunderbirds land on an external airstrip (sorry, but the vertical rocket landings are stupid) before taxiing into a hanger and back through a hidden door into the launch complex. Therefore the palm trees either side of this airstrip can fold back during landing!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTfYJxFcl9I
And a render of the hanger bay with a few bits of lighting:
With the drill. Of course, real tunnel boring machines look nothing like this or the original Mole, so I've based it on an oil drill head instead.
And to Melak, perhaps this may enlighten you - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMEuEF9-UbU&fmt=35
The Mole is more or less finished now. Although I'll have to go through and break the parts up to animate it - it's going to be a complicated one.
Anyway, eagle-eyed B-movie buffs may spot that the rear end is taken almost completely from 1970s steampunk-ish film At The Earth's Core (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6wOJn3hk3Q), as the tunnelling machine from this film does share a lot of similarities with The Mole.
This might be controversial too, but I had a brainwave based on a combination of practicality and laziness; I'm going to base some, but not all, of the pod vehicles on the same chasis. This makes sense, right? You have a rugged, powerful platform, you want to use it and mass produce it. So I've done three in total, The Mole, Firefly (which bears a passing resemblance to Shunt from Robot Wars) and an all-purpose flat bed truck, which will eventually form the base for the transmitter truck that appeared in Sun Probe.