Some gorgeous stuff on there, but well out of my price range I'm afraid.
Mind you, it has got me thinking about those charming flying "boats" of Ian McQue's and wondering what could be done with say, the Revell 1/108th Harbour Tug kit.....
I've been watching and drooling over the Remora kit and now this smaller on. I keep trying to imagine what to use as a hull. If I could find something suitable I'm sure I could scratch the rest. The resin kits are wonderful but as you say, out of my price range too.
Depends on how faithfully you want to follow McQue. If you study his craft, they're not really the same shape as real boats at all: most of the volume tends to be well aft and the cross section is often just a pure half-circle or half-oval with none of the subtle shaping you get on real ships. Of course, this is entirely correct: they're boat-shaped fairings around anti-gravity engines, not actual floating hulls.
As far as I know, there's no published backstory to them, but I tend to see them as originally floating "platforms" that were then given a little thrust to move them along, and a casing around the vulnerable grav drive so that it wasn't the first thing to hit the ground when you screwed up. In this case, the "hull" is more of an "armoured cover" than a structure, heavily built to withstand imacts and smoothly rounded to avoid snagging on trees, cables and the like (of course, the ventral fins kind of contradict that, but it's art not science so you shouldn't pick it apart too rigorously).
You should therefore be able to make a "McQue-ish Hull" by folding flat sheets of plasticard into half-drums and cones with "found objects" providing the difficult double-curvature bits.
Of course, if you want to stray further from the original but in the same spirit, you can take a ready-made boat kit and make it fly. There is simply LOADS of precendent for this: do a Google image search on "flying ship" and you'll find every possible variation has been drawn by somebody, from hybrid galleon/airships in full sail to ironclads with hundreds of vertical propellers. Ian McQue's vision is particularly well-realised and attractive, but by no means the only one out there.
My original idea was to use Revell's 1/125th Not-Cousteau's-Calypso model but when I did a search for it, I also discovered the Revell 1/108th Harbour Tug. This has just the kind of "quaint" working-boat lines that would suite the McQueniverse and what's more, it's cheap: around £12 new from online sellers. You could scaleorama it to anything from 1/72nd to 28mm to 1/35th too: 1/72nd makes it a decent size, but then 28mm is attractive for the range of "ideosyncratic" figures you can get.
Rewview with sprue pics:
http://www.cybermodeler.com/hobby/kits/rm/kit_rg_5207.shtmlStraight build:
http://airfixtributeforum.myfastforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=331&t=25252&start=30Sale listing with instruction sheet scans:
http://www.super-hobby.co.uk/products/Harbour-Tug.htmlMy thoughts are to lose the 01 deckhouse and turn the main deck cutout beneath it into a cargo well, with the wheelhouse re-sited right at the back.
