Remote-controlled Air Defence Artillery Part 1

Over at the Facebook 6mm group, it's been conversion mania. One fellow in particular has been swapping weapons and turrets with the bodies of other vehicles left and right!  Very cool stuff.

I am THIS close (holds fingertips about 2mm apart) to having a game, but I just need some time to do it. Lately, I've had little energy to do much in the evening that would take longer than maybe a half an hour. So, all of the conversion madness possessed me to make an air defence missile on small-ish vehicle. GHQ sells the Avenger ADA, which is mounted on a hummer, but that thing looks way too big and probably would be too costly for my various nations of Gambusia. So, why not give a try at one of these:

from: army-technology.com

Not interested in the vehicle itself, but rather the remote-controlled missile launcher on top:

This one consists of four French Mistral anti-aircraft missiles and a 50 cal machine gun.

There are so many permutations of weapons configurations out there, that I decided I wasn't going to duplicate this one, but rather a genetic one whose missiles could represent any MANPADS missile.

As my template, I looked at GHQ's seated MANPADS launcher for their 3rd World Regular Heavy Weapons set (TW 13). I've seen this set up on some vehicles, but that looks way out of my league to scratch build. I'm not really sure why these have seats. A remote controlled turret seems easier to make (ha-ha!). For the vehicle to mount the turret on, I have a bunch of South African infantry transport truck-like things made by Scotia-Grendel. Like the Mamba, these things are classified APCs, but to me don't really look like APC to me. This guy is smaller than the Mamba. I can't remember the name of it.

MANPADS for the lazy man in front, SA APC in back

Measuring off of the MANPADS missile pictured above, I made my missiles out of 0.8mm styrene dowels. I then glued two of each to a thin styrene sheet that separated the two:

I then glued to each missile rack a base plate that was going to be glued onto the cradle:

Two missile racks ready to be attached to the cradle.

The two racks were glued to a side plate and then joined to a 1.2mm dowel that would be the pivot bar portion of the cradle:

It was very tricky business trying to get both racks aligned. I wasn't 100% successful, but not too far off. I then mounted this into a block of styrene that I had filed out a cavity, This acted as the base of the cradle:

I glued another smaller block of styrene onto the front of cradle that was to represent the optronic system. I decided to leave off the machine gun.

Here is what it looks like from the side:

Not perfect by any means, but it looks passable on the table top. However, I AM NOT GOING TO USE IT. IT'S WAY TOO BIG!

After staring at it for a long time, and comparing it to some other models that had launchers on them, it looked portionally way too large. After consulting Wikipedia, I found that these missiles are far longer than the Mistrals, or pretty much any other MANPADS missile. So, this is why this post is Part 1. I'm going to give it another attempt and reduce the proportions. If nothing else, the goal is to get the missile racks to be no wider than the width of the vehicle's roof. I will probably use the one I made for anti-air defence on a patrol boat.