A V-22 Osprey for Joe?

Today I've decided to talk about the scaling of Joe-sized vehicles. In more contemporary terms, this is a source of great controversy. Many fans of accurate military Joes have complained about vehicles sold as "1/6th scale" which are in fact a good deal smaller. Some of the more notorious are the 21st Century Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the Hasbro M8 armored car, and the 21st Century Little Bird. Most of these vehicles were 1/8th scale or smaller, and that made a lot of people unhappy.

But the fact is, most military (and civilian) vehicles are simply too large to be practical as mass-market items in true 1/6th scale. An F-22 Raptor scales over ten feet long. An M1A1 Abrams tank would be over five feet long and two feet wide. A Chinook cargo helicopter (including rotors) would be sixteen and half feet long! You aren't going to find these on the shelves at Wal-Mart any time soon. So something has to give. Either the vehicles have to be made smaller than scale, or they don't get made at all.

Fact is, shrunken vehicles are part of the great history of our hobby. Yet there's more than one way to shrink a vehicle, as we'll soon see. Other than just anal attention to scale, one of the major complaints about the not-quite 1/6th vehicles I mentioned above is that they didn't work well with figures. Pilots have to be jammed into the front of the Little Bird (which didn't even have room to include the pedals). The M8 really doesn't have room for a driver with legs attached, and troops don't fit well in the Bradley.

Fact is, near as I can tell, these vehicles are more or less scale, just not the scale people wanted. They were reduced, in all dimensions, to fit some arbitrary specification (to fit a box, or to be produced at some price point, or to fit a shelf, or to be shippable).

But that isn't the only way to do things. The other way, the better way I think, is "selective compression." Selective compression reduces dimensions individually with an eye to both the requirements and the intended use. For instance, if the goal is to make a vehicle fit in a box 48" long, the engine compartment might be reduced in size, leaving the cab area unchanged and large enough for a full-scale figure. Of the dimensions of the vehicle might all be reduced, and then the roof-height increased enough so the figure will fit.




When done well, one can hugely change the dimensions of a vehicle and still capture "look and feel" of the original. One classic example, even if it takes things to extremes, is the vintage Irwin Panther jet airplane seen below, along with the real-life Grumman Panther jet on which is it based.

Mind you, not a single dimension or line of the jet remains unchanged. In fact, a scale Panther jet would have a length and wing-span both over six feet! I don't have the dimensions of the Irwin Jet, but I'd guess it's under a third of that. Yet there is no doubt that one plane is based on the other. Irwin designers boiled the panther down to a form that preserved its essence, but that a child could pick-up and fly around the room. On top of that it would hold (just barely) a 1/6th GI Joe figure.



Let's try applying these principles to a modern military vehicle that seems very Joe-worthy, the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor. The Osprey is a cutting-edge hybrid vehicle combining some of the best features of a helicopter and a fixed-wing cargo airplane. It can fly rapidly and smoothly to a distant target, hover or land vertically to deploy or recover troops, and then fly rapidly back to base. It's an ambitious aircraft that's had it's share of problems, but if the bugs can be worked out its truly revolutionary.

Trouble is, for Joe purposes, it's just way too big. Each rotor alone would be over six-feet in diameter! The fuselage would be nearly six feet long. The span, including rotors, would be almost 14 feet! Young Hercules himself couldn't lift this monster and fly it around the room, even if he had a room big enough.

So, how to make a "kid friendly" version that would fit Joe and still be recognizable ? Well, my first move is to drop the V-22 entirely, and go to its predecessor, the experiment XV-15. Though the two vehicles look a lot alike, the XV-15 is already 20% smaller. Still not nearly small enough, but that 20% is something we don't have to cut.



Here's a 3-view drawing of the XV-15, courtesy of NASA. I used this (specifically, the top view) as the basis of my compression. My first move was to load it into my paint program and chop it into individual parts: cockpit, wings, rotors, tail-cone, tail surfaces, rotors.

Then I started eliminating anything that wasn't necessary. The straight sections of the fuselage fore and aft of the wing were cut out and discarded. The tail was still too long, so I shortened it a bit, and then shrunk the tail surfaces. The wings were made smaller as well. The engines weren't reduced quite as much, but the rotors were made much smaller. The original V-22 has a large cockpit for two flight crew sitting side by side, but I'm assuming the Joe version will have a single seat in the middle. Suddenly, things overall can be MUCH smaller.



What's left still has the recognizable flavor of the V-22, but it's a fraction of the size, I'm guessing about three-feet long. That's still big by kid-standards, but perhaps not impossibly so. (A Sigma-6 or 3 3/4" version would make a very attractive retail product.) The tail and wings would be removable for storage (or for the retail box).



Of course, by now the question that must be burning in all your brains is, "Steve, what does the Adventure Team version look like? Glad you asked...


What's the point of all this, designing a toy that will never be made for a line that no longer exists? I'm not sure, really, except that it's in the spirit of the toys I loved as a kid. Maybe I can't be ten again, and find this thing under my Christmas tree, but I can at least imagine...

Real Life AT

From time to time, I plan to post some photos of real-life Adventure Team vehicles.

This very nice gyrocopter was photographed by my wife in Tillamook, Oregon a few years back. Not only is it an interesting little aircraft, somebody (consciously or not) has already painted it AT yellow!



For those who don't know, a gyrocopter, or gyroplane as they're sometimes called, is not the same as a helicopter. A helicopter has a powered rotor (or two) that is powered to lift and propel the vehicle. (There are also "compound" helicopters which may add auxiliary propulsion from propellers or jet engines, and sometimes auxiliary lift from small wings, for better high-speed performance, but these are rare, and I don't think any have seen actual service beyond experimental programs.)

A gyrocopter has a normally unpowered rotor. It simply turns in the airflow like a windmill, and in the process generates lift in the same way a conventional wing does as wind flows over it. The propulsion usually comes from a conventional airplane motor with a propeller. To get its rotor turning fast enough for flight, a simple gyrocopter usually will simply turn into the wind and taxi until the rotor is turning fast enough.

Unlike a helicopter, a gyrocopter generally can't take off vertically (though with a good head-wind, some can come close), but they can land with minimal runway, and fly slow. And they can land almost vertically, though it's a rapid decent with no hovering.

That's another rule for gyrocopters that doesn't apply to helicopters. No hovering.

So why would anybody want one? Well, they're very simple and rugged. They cost a tiny fraction of what a helicopter does, are far easier to maintain, and can do some of the same jobs (scouting, observation, aerial photography, access to short, rugged fields) almost as well.

There's one other thing that I've saved until now, just to avoid confusing the issue. Some gyrocopters cheat a bit on the vertical take-off business. They use a power system (either a separate gasoline motor, or a drive shaft connected to the propulsion motor with a clutch) to power the rotor up to flying speed. Then the motor is disengaged, the rotors are quickly turned to "bite" the air, the throttle on the propulsion motor is gunned, and the gyrocopter uses the stored energy in the rotors (which act like a bit flywheel) and "hop" into the air. In some designs, all this stuff is coordinated through the operation of one lever. The pilot waits till the rotors hit proper speed, activates the lever, and then fly for all they're worth.

You may be asking, if there's a system to drive the rotor with a motor, why not keep it connected in the air? The answer is: torque. Real helicopters (single rotor ones, anyway) have a tail rotor that counters torque. Without it, as the helicopter tried to spin its rotor, torque would cause the rotor to try and turn the body of the helicopter, until you're quickly flying a human Cuisinart and crash. As long as the body of the helicopter (or qyrocopter with powered rotor) is sitting firmly on the ground, torque isn't much of an issue, but the instant it leaves the ground torque takes over.

Why not add a tail-rotor to the gyrocopter? Because then it becomes a bad helicopter, and by the time you add all the things it needs to become a good helicopter, it's just as expensive, complex, and hard to maintain as the real thing. In fact, it is the real thing.

One last reason that the Adventure Team should have a gyrocopter is that it has a solid place in the Adventure culture that spawned it. Gyrocopters were all over TV in the 60s. Jacques Cousteau used one on occasion in filming his TV specials, and his son Phillipe was badly injured when one crashed on Easter Island. James Bond use a rocket firing gyrocopter in You Only Live Twice. And of course, there's a late comer in the form of Mad Max's "Gyro-Pilot."

So, Joe never had his gyrocopter, but it seems reasonable that he should have. Why not? Perhaps the AT was so well financed he never had to cut corners. Perhaps AT logistics were so good that maintaining and supporting actual helicopters in isolated jungles and deserts was never a problem. So look on this little craft as a missed opportunity for the AT.

Countdown to Adventure

After considerable delay while I mixed in other things, here is the final (probably) segment on the Adventure Team Near Space Vehicle, a model rocket designed to launch a 3 3/4" GI Joe (or compatible) Astronaut in Adventure Team style. Today's installment covers launch-pad, flight, and recovery pictures.

First, one more shot of "Captain Lanard" as we prepare the night before the launch. What a go getter! Already suited up and ready to go! Note the tiny Adventure Team astronaut patches on his chest and shoulder.

The launch was held on a grass farm outside Sheridan, Oregon, about 35 miles from where I live on the coast. The launch is focused on high-power rockets, which the NSV is decidedly not, so the size of the launch area is vast, and the distances between the safety ropes and the launch pads is considerably longer than is absolutely necessary for such a rocket. Keep that in mind when you see my launch photos. My zoom only goes so far, and I was a long way from this little foot-tall rocket. Good thing it's bright yellow!

This first shot is taken at the launch pad, as the rockets are being placed and hooked up for ignition. For those not familiar with model rockets, the metal rods guide the rocket until it is going fast enough for its fins to keep it going straight. Rockets are remotely fired using an electric igniter placed in the engine nozzle. The boxes underneath the launch pads are automotive batteries, which power the whole thing. The metal plates under each pads are blast deflectors, used to direct hot rocket exhaust away from the launcher itself, and to direct it away from the ground. (Given that it's a grass farm and often dry, grass fires are a real concern).

No, that's not me in the picture. The man and his daughter are hooking up an Estes kit rocket on the pad next to mine.


Here we see the fully loaded rack, waiting to fly. As you can see, the NSV isn't very big as model rockets go. In fact, the large white and pink (nothing Freudian here!) rocket is still what is considered "mid-power." "High power" rockets fly from a separate series of pads much further from the crowd line. They're out of sight to the right of the frame.

The first flight of the NSV was made using an Estes "C6-3" rocket motor. For a little motor, that's pretty big, a maximum of 3 pounds of thrust, and a burn time of 1.7 seconds. The "3" is the number of seconds in the coasting delay, which allows the rocket to reach maximum altitude before the parachute is deployed.

The C6-3 has an 18mm case diameter. The motor mount on the NSV was modified to use 24mm diameter motors, and therefore I had to use an adapter to use the smaller diameter engine.


Here's the actual lift-off. As I said, I was a long way away from the pad, and I've pulled out a detail and magnified it so you can see what is happening.

The small, light-colored line pointing straight down from the rocket is actually flame from the motor exhaust. It doesn't look like much, but concentrated on one point, it's very intense. I've seen rockets hang up on the launch rod, and burn a hole in the sheet-steel blast deflector.

Model rocketry has an amazing safety record (you're probably in far more danger going to a Little League game, much less actually playing in one), but the potential for injury and property damage is always there. Organized launches like this follow strict safety rules.


From this point, the rocket was moving too fast and high to follow with the camera. The flight was straight and near perfect. It actually got a lot more altitude out of the C6-3 than I had expected.

I did manage to pick it up with the camera after the recovery system had been deployed, though it wasn't much more than a speck in the sky. Again, there's an inset so you can actually see the rocket.

The nose cone separates from the rocket, and remains connected through a long, elastic, shock cord. A plastic parachute is connected to the nose cone, and (hopefully) slows the rocket for a soft landing.

To be honest, at this point, I had half expected that the cockpit had been ripped open and that Captain Lanard would be lost in the grass somewhere, never to be seen again. Fortunately, I'd built the cockpit well. The canopy remained in place, and Captain Lanard lives to fly another day.

Here we see a posed, post-flight, victory wave. The parachute has already been packed back inside, and we've opened the cockpit so that Captain Lanard can take his bow.

Really, for me, this was an important part of the process. This wasn't some fake pilot head glued into a fake cockpit, as you sometimes see on model airplanes. This was a true action figure, able to be removed from his cockpit, played with and posed.

Encouraged by the success, I decided to pull out the 18mm motor adapter and fly on a more powerful 24mm motor. I chose an Estes D12-5. At a maximum of 6.4 pounds of thrust, this was a big step up from the "C" motor, and that changes a lot of things.

As I tried to explain to people over in the Sandbox recently, as they discussed the idea of building a working rocket pack for a 12" GI Joe, getting any rocket powered object to fly straight is -- well -- rocket science. Actually, for things that actually look like rockets, the rocket science doesn't have to be that hard. The general rules of thumb:

1. The longer (and to some extent, thinner) a rocket is, the more stable it is.
2. Weight in the front of the rocket (moving the center-of-gravity forward) makes a rocket more stable. Weight in the back of the rocket (moving the center-of-gravity backwards) makes a rocket less stable.
3. Fins behind the center-of-gravity make a rocket more stable. Fins in front of the center-of-gravity make it less stable. (Military guided missiles often have fins in the front because they use active, rather than passive stability systems like model rockets, and because instability makes it easy to turn on a dime when you need to, not a desirable characteristic for a model rocket).

The NSV has rule 1 working against it. It isn't long and thin, it's short and thick. Rule 2 is fairly good though, as the astronaut ads some weight to the front. Unfortunately, nose weight works better on long rockets, where it's way out in front and has lots of leverage. Not possible with the NSV. Rule 3 can be a problem too. It's easy to let the center of gravity slip so far back that part of the rear fins is actually on the wrong side of the CG.


So, why are we talking about this when the NSV flew perfectly on it's first flight? Well, as I said, that big motor changes things. For one thing, it's much heavier. It shifts the center of gravity backwards, and on a short rocket, a little shift can make a big difference.

Now on a simple rocket like the others you see in most of these shots, a rocket is pretty much either stable, or it isn't. But the NSV isn't a simple rocket. It's asymmetrical, what with the cockpit bubble, the fin-tip pods, the horizontal tail, the aerodynamics are suddenly dozens, maybe thousands of times more complicated. It's possible to have a rocket that's stable along one axis of rotation, and not along another. It's possible for stability to change under under other circumstances too, such as depending on the "angle-of-attack" at which it hits the oncoming air. Now we're getting into serious rocket science.

Mind you, the NSV did get tested before flight. I slung it around on a string. Seriously, that's an accepted test. You put a loop of string around the rocket, sling it in a circle around your head, and if it flies nose forward, it's theoretically stable. Along that one axis of rotation anyway. On a rocket like this, you rotate the rocket to multiple positions and retest each time. The test seemed to show was stable, even with the D motor. So off to the launch pad it went...

Now, here's some irony for you. The NSV project was inspired by the "Mercury Joe" program, an ongoing effort to launch high-power rockets with 12" GI Joe space capsules and astronauts on top. The launch vehicles are made to look like Redstone boosters, and the capsules are equipped with escape towers and multiple on-board video cameras. Wonderful stuff. If you haven't already, go visit the Vidroc site and watch their Mercury Joe videos. The Gumby rocket videos are also entertaining.

So anyway, it was interesting that I ended up on the pad next to a very nice scale model of a Mercury Redstone rocket.
Here's a closer short of the NSV on the pad. You can see the astronaut and cockpit in launch position. One of my concerns in designing the rocket was that the acceleration is actually pushing the astronaut back into the canopy, and that this might pop it off from inside. I actually considered giving the astronaut his own, small, emergency chute in case he accidently "ejected," but I didn't have time. Fortunately, it was never an issue.

But here we have yet more stability issues. Joe's off-center position throws the CG of the rocket off to one side, and as the rocket moves, he has enough room to shift around the cockpit, shifting the center of gravity on the fly. Now we need one of NASA's super-computers to know quite what is going on. Some things, you just have to try.


So here's what happened. Fortunately, the NSV wasn't completely unstable. If it had have been it could have looped and become a "cruise missile" headed for spectators, launch officials, or other rockets. Dangerous and embarrassing.

But it wasn't entirely stable either. Like I said, I think it had one "lobe" of insufficient stability. This cause the rocket to cork-screw its way into the air, wasting most of the increased thrust. In fact, I'd guess this D motor flight only went about 2/3s as high as the C motor flight, despite the increased thrust.

Fortunately, all ended well. As the motor burned, it became lighter. The rocket straightened out, and flew high enough to safely deploy its parachute and come to a safe landing (well, I think maybe we broke a fin, but it was an easy fix).


So, that was the end of that series of flights. The NSV returned the next year, repaired and improved, with a new Adventure Team astronaut (see previous posts) at the controls. Unfortunately, I was too busy flying to take many pictures that time, but the AT astronaut racked up several successful flights (though minor fin damage on landing continued to be a problem).

The NSV is in sad shape at the moment. It suffered some accidental damage here in my office, and needs major fin repairs. I'll do that eventually, but I'm thinking about retiring the rocket to static display. It's the fate of all rockets, it seems, that if you fly them long enough, either you lose them, or something eventually goes wrong. I'd like the NSV to survive long enough to serve as a reminder of its own glory days.

Now, that doesn't mean that we won't eventually build another Joe rocket...

Rocket Joe

First of all, some housekeeping. Thanks to those who have asked about our sick Cat, Banzai. He's still in a bad way, not obviously worse, but not obviously better either. We had an emergency run to the vets yesterday afternoon. I was afraid he had a bladder blockage (which can be quickly fatal in cats) but it turned out to be a false alarm. He got some more IV fluids and is back home again. Still struggling to get food into him, and hoping his other problems will correct themselves. We shall see.

Moving on to more pleasant matters, there's been some discussion over on the Sandbox about the idea of building a Joe launcher to loft parachute Joes to high altitudes. All sorts of systems have been proposed, but a lot of bandwidth has gone to the idea of strapping rockets to a Joe in some fashion.

I've tried to caution folks that this isn't nearly as easy as it might seem to the casual observer. First, Joe is a heavy (as model rockets go) and draggy object. You've got to come up with some way to make him fly straight, and come up with some way to deploy the parachute and you've got to do it while keeping it all light enough to fly (and to avoid the legal complications that going over 16 ounces of total weight will cause, Google "FAR 101" and "rocket" for details).

But this is a very attractive idea. I long ago decided that flying a 12" Joe was beyond both my current technical abilities and budget, so a couple years ago I decided to try my hand at launching something in the 3 3/4" Joe format. This is the result, the Adventure Team Near Space Vehicle (NSV-1).



This is modification of the Estes "Fat Boy" rocket kit. I chose it because it had sufficient diameter to put a small Joe inside in a seated position, and frankly, because you could get them cheaply at Wal-Mart at the time.

The original rocket had three identical fins. To these I added the tip extensions, pods (empty tubes) and horizontal stabilizers to increase the fin area (at it turned out, I didn't increase it quite enough, but more on that in a later post) and make it look more "X-Plane" like.


The cockpit was created by cutting a hole in the existing nose cone (blow-molded plastic) and attaching half of a plastic Easter-egg as a canopy. The seat is made from scrap foam, and the control panel from sheet plastic. Making the canopy latch securely (I had to hold the astronaut inside during boost, parachute deployment, and landing) while still being easily removable was actually a lot harder than it sounded. I ended up with a long tab in the back, and a short one in the front. Squeezing the nose side-to-side elongates the hold JUST enough to carefully snap the forward tab out and remove the canopy.

The other major modification was to the engine mount. The stock Fat Boy is designed for 18mm (A-C designation) motors. I changed the mount at accept the more powerful 24mm (D) motors. This was my main reason for the larger fins. The larger, heavier, motor would shift the center-of-gravity to the rear, making the rocket less stable. The astronaut in the front would counter-balance that somewhat, but I was still concerned (justifiably, as it happens). The 18mm motors could still be used with an adapter, and I always intended to use a smaller motor for the initial test flights.

The figure in the cockpit isn't actually a Joe, it's a Lanard "Star Corps" figure, a Joe knock-off. These figures were sold by the gazillions at Wal-Mart a while back, are easy to find in thrift stores, and not worth much to collectors. But I like the looks of them, and that made one an idea "cannon fodder" test pilot. I even super-glued tiny Adventure Team symbols to his space-suit.



The guy in the yellow space-suit was initially supposed to be my pilot. I found him in a thrift store too, but he's "Payload," the version packed only with the monster "Defiant Space Shuttle" GI Joe playset, and worth, as I discovered, a fair-chunk of change. I decided not to risk him on early flights (and at is turns out, that big helmet is too large to fit in my cockpit anyway!).

Yes, it did fly, and I have photos to prove it. I also later replaced my Star Corps pilot with a "real" Joe astronaut, as I'll show in a future post. Stay tuned.

Bomber Jacket Mystery Art

I just stumbled across an unopened Hasbro "B-17 Bomber Mission" carded set at Goodwill today. A nice and unusual find there, and this
version jacket I didn't get when it was out in stores. I think there were two or three different jacket paintings sold in this set. The others were
authentic WWII (in fact, I've seen the actual jacket one of them is based on in the Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson), but this one
looks wrong. The style of the art doesn't seem WWII, but much later.

It looks to me like 70's vintage comic book art. The style of clothing on the "bomber girl" also looks 70s.

The art features a blonde woman with long hair, standing with feet apart. She has a mini-skirt, tight mid-calf boots, "cow-girl" cuff gloves, and a shirt tied under her breasts "Daisy Duke" style. She's holding the end of a bomb in her right hand, which is balanced on its
fins next to her. The bomb says "Texas Queen." A couple of WWII-looking single-engine fighters (they look vaguely like Mustangs, but no belly scoops, and they have "Flying Tiger" type teeth painted on the noses) are flying over her shoulders dropping bombs.

A curved banner behind her legs and the bomb is partially obscured and either
says 381st Bomber Group (which is a real WWII bomber group) or maybe 387th Bomber Group (which doesn't turn up any hits on Google).

Given that the art on the rest of this series was authentic, it seems strange if Hasbro just had an artist make this jacket art up. I consider it more likely that it's based on a real jacket, though
possibly not one from WWII. Of maybe my eye for art is just failing me, and this is just ahead of its time.

Does anybody know the story on this jacket art?

Back in the Hangar

Sorry I've been slacking off on posting these last few days. I'm still dealing with serious health issues with one of our cats, Banzai. (He's the yellow-and-white guy on the left in this picture, the other guy being Oz.) He been off food and we weren't sure he was drinking. Two trips to the vets and about $300 later, we're making progress. He's hydrated again, and actually ate a couple of kitty-treats out of my hand this evening, the first solid food I'm aware that he's touched since before Christmas. So I'm hopeful that we'll get him eating again, and back on the road to health.

Okay, so this picture is relatively free of 1/6th content, it isn't completely free.

The picture is taken in my office, a converted 1943 garage I call "Hangar 18" after the mythical hangar of UFO lore where the remains of a crashed UFO and its pilots are kept. I left the ceiling unfinished because I liked the rustic look, and any added woodwork was stained to match the reddish color of the 60-plus year-old cedar. Among the added woodwork is a "cat bridge" along the top of an existing wood rafter that the cats were using anyway, and the cat-ladder on the left, which extends from the beam to the office floor. Just off-camera up and to the right is an opening into the semi-connected house attic. The cats can leave my wife's attic office, go through the attic, and come down the cat ladder in my office.

Considering that the office is my primary GI Joe display area, it's a good thing that both cats are pretty-well behaved about my collectively. They usually stay off tables and shelves, and rarely knock things over. An especially worrisome display is the shelf of pilots right behind the cats. What you can't see in the picture is that this isn't a normal shelf (see picture below). It's a hand-carved replica of the front of a WWII B-17 bomber, produced by a local craftsman (since retired for health reasons, this was one of the last ones he made). It's a beautiful piece, and great for displaying GI Joes, but it's only supported by two screws in the back of the fuselage, so any "wing walking" by the cats would be disastrous.

Tempting through it must be, though, none of the cats have ever bothered it. Let's hope it stays this way, as this is one item in my collection that is literally irreplaceable.

Big Bird

I mean, what else would you call a big yellow C-130 Hercules? This is one of my more unusual photo edits, in that there aren't any 1/6th items in it at all.

I started wondering, how does the Adventure Team deploy all those vehicles and fuzzy-headed guys all over the world? Obviously they'd have a transport aircraft of some sort, but what would it look like? This is my attempt to answer those quesitons.

No idea where I got the base shots. I'm not even sure if it's a real plane or a model. I was relatively new at doing sophisticated photo editing when I did this, and I could doubtless do better now. The green shadows and the too-dark tail don't look quite right. (Must be flying through the shadow of a cloud. Yeah, that's the ticket.) Still, fairly cool.

But then you start to wonder, what's in the plane? I had to look around quite a bit to find this base shot of vehicles being air-dropped, and then I used an existing shot of my custom MLV (Mobile Logistics Vehicle). I think it's a little undersized, but as I recall, I had to do it this way to make the perspective work.



Finally, my favorite of this bunch of photo edited shots. It really looks like I took my custom LMUTT mini-truck and plopped it down on the ground behind a Chinook helicopter. It's difficult to tell where the grass in the base shot stops, and the grass in my front yard starts. Stretched out, this makes a pretty cool desktop.

Hmm, I suppose I could have tried to make the Chinook yellow, but that's taking "flying banana" way too literally.

So, now you know more than you wanted to about AT air-deployment. "The Adventure Team is needed..."

...well, somewhere far away.

Hang in there

It's about midnight here, and time to post another picture. Here's one more from the archives, a favorite photo edit.

The figure in the foreground is an Adventure Team dinosaur hunter I kitbashed a while back named Scotty Travis.

The location here is actually a roadside along Highway 101 just north of Newport, Oregon. The "cliff" here actually isn't rock, it's just packed, sandy, soil, cut away by road workers. The distant cliff behind the helicopter is actually only a few feet from the figure, but it gives a pretty good illusion of distance. The 21st Century Toys rescue helicopter was actually shot in my office, and added to the scene later using Paint Shop Pro.

By the way, with any of the pictures here, the small shot in the message is only a thumbnail. Just click on the picture to see it full-sized.