Going Macro

Heavy Gear, its been a weakness of mine for a while, I like the idea of gritty sci-fi stompy mechs.  I have picked up a few Gears cheaply on Ebay but I never really jumped into HG as the Dream Pod minis are expensive.  When I saw the HG Kickstarter I jumped in at a modest level, I was delighted when it took off so dramatically.  The kickstarter arrived not long ago with a box full of mech kits.  Its been fun building up the armies.  It has, however,  restarted another itch...
...this

A Votex Landcruiser from DP9, the Vortex is a full-on fleet carrier for use in the equatorial badlands on Terra Nova.  I really like the idea of a model landship as a patrol base to use in campaign driven scenarios.  Why? well, I saw this on Starship Modeler

This is a scratch-built gear-scale Vortex Class Land cruiser model, its HUGE!

(www.starshipmodeler.org/gallery6/se_vig.htm)

However, while I can admire the gear-scale vortex, there is no way I'm going to build something like that, I need a smaller-ship that can actually fit in my gaming space.  More like this, a Destroyer-class ship

But while a Destroyer, is OK for troops its not too great for carrying gears or aircraft.  Instead, what I need is an Escort Carrier. Fortunately, inspiration struck and after a bit of careful Ebay-ing a parcel arrived from the UK. One CVE Landship proxy, a Captain Scarlet Skybase.  

As a CVE its pretty big, at about 22" by 20" by 4" high deck.  Its perfect for my purposes as a CVE for gears and light aircraft.  Its going to be a fun toy to use as a patrol base.  As for the toy aspects, one below-deck is for storage (deck 02), the other (01) has two working lifts and an a rearm/repair facility.  On deck here we see some ships we had to hand, a couple of Battlestar Galactica Raptors (one on a lowered lift) and Jedi and UFO fighters.

As a bonus the control tower opens to reveal a command space which is as close enough for 15mm as you get for a toy.

This was all great, until mini-me minor found out about it and wigged out over how amazing its is...  ...Mini-me major arrived later and the pair of them are running carrier ops off it as I type.

Mmmm, looks like I'll have to ask the kids if I can have my toys back so I can have a play with it myself  =8-)

As a note, we see one of Armies Army's VTOLs on deck, we don't normally play with unpainted toys, but the kids think these are cool and wanted to play with them