This is Slinkara's Pod, a tentacled pilot from the jungle planet Sknaht. It was scratchbuilt from various kit sources and materials. The pod was made from an ERTL TIE fighter body, turned sideways, with one wing support cut off. The upper wing of a B-Wing fighter was chopped and rearranged into a rudder, then filled the resultant gap left by the wing support. The cockpit features full instrumentation "borrowed" from various aircraft and helicopter kits, then bashed into something a living mass of tentacles could control. The front end is where the real work is at in this pod. The fully independent, jolt cushioning suspension was created by gluing up some Indy car parts with some F-18 landing gear as the cable attachment leads, adding a few R/C car shocks, then finally finished off with a bomb fin radar mast sticking out the front.

The engines started out as 1 foot of 1" PVC pipe. I used the leftover BOP grills as intakes, then added piping detail made from kit parts, fishing line, and solder wire. The cooling tubes running down the side of the engine are scratchbuilt Omega cruiser engines with drywall screw mollies as vents. The binder is made from a clear plastic knife, carefully cut out into an electrical shape with a jeweler's saw. It runs between two binder plates made from T-80 tracks. The afterburners were courtesy of a 1/32nd scale F-15C. All was painted as if it were well rusted and dirty with Metallizers and TMM paints.

The pilot was sculpted out of ProMat clay, then painted with Citadel colors. The pod was painted in various Citadel and Testors Model Master colors. Tail artwork is hand painted, as is the custom on Sknaht.

Editor's Note: This entry is mounted on a base with another model. I have cropped the other model out of the pictures, since otherwise this entry meets my contest guidelines.

Image: Side view, starboard engine

Image: Right side of the pod

Image: Top view of the pod

Image: The man behind the curtain