by Gary Oshust

The Centronian fighter is feared for it's heavy firepower and speed by both capital ships and other fighters bounced unaware. It Packs 6 Mk 5 Baryon torpedoes for the big ships and 8 Meson projectors that can make quick work of lighter armored targets. For propulsion it has one main Davydov drive and three supplemental drives on the ship's stabilizers giving it an acceleration of approximately 2500 m/s squared in vacuum. Its biggest weakness is the lack of maneuverability. Sporting four directional ion thrusters, it is not the quickest turning, but many experienced pilots of the Butcher Bird are known to disconnect the safety lockouts on the Davydov drives to supplement the ion thrusters, often to the unfortunate surprise of less experienced pilots in more nimble craft.

I'm a big fan of the retro Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers ship design, so rather than assemble a ship out of bits and greebles, I went to wax sculpting and carving for my design. The ship is comprised of 5 parts cast in resin plastic, the fuselage which is roto cast to be hollow (saves weight and cost), the three fins and the engine. All the painting is done with acrylic and the custom decals are done in Adobe Illustrator and printed out on white decal paper that works on ink jet printers.

Image: Top view

Image: Front

Image: Wax master