AstroMOO! Orbital Milk Tanker

The Milk Tanker

When you build an orbital dairy you need orbital milk tankers to move all that orbital milk from your orbital cows and orbital dairy farms to your orbital dairy plant. Standardized freight driver modules such as the 'Mesley' class unit are used to push or pull tanker units to their destination. The tanker units are designed to dock with the orbital diary platform for easy extraction of their liquid cargo.

The Model

This is the first model I built after leaving home and moving to the country. The major industry of the town I moved to is the Murray-Goldburn dairy plant which means there are a lot of milk tankers thundering past my house in the wee small hours. Fortunately my bedroom is right at the back of the house and I've learned to sleep through all the noise, however the milk tankers provided the inspiration for this build.

The freight driver unit was inspired by John Douglass' series of Awtoes - space ships built from cars. I'd had a very beaten up 1963 chevy model lying around for over ten years. It belonged to a high school friend who assembled and painted it very badly before passing it on to me. I naturally looted it for parts, but I never came up with a use for the body. Until now.

The Mesley class freight driver is built from the rear of the 1963 chevy with massive engines built from PVC pipe, toy car wheels, citadel paint pot lids and anything else that came to hand. I added some panel details here and there, built a docking plate and added some sensors. Since it's meant to be and industrial workhorse I painted it yellow with yellow auto body primer, and then dirtied that down. I also added some black stripes to break up the shape a bit.

The tanker unit is built from two lengths of PVC pipe glued side by side with plasticard plating across the middle. I added plenty more plasticard for detailing purposes along with various greeblies. There are a few rare-earth magnets mounted to both halves of the combination to hold it together, although only just! I couldn't shoe-horn enough magnets in to do anything more than hold it together when it's sitting flat. When you pick it up, it falls apart.

I painted the tanker unit white and black cow-hide after someone on the Starship Modeler forum suggested that was the way to go. The Logo was created using Lertracet letters along with some freehand painting. I'm rather proud of the silly looking cows on each side.