If you want something done, give it to a busy person to do is a saying that floats around. It’s often true that when you’re in a certain creative groove, you can spin off other projects much faster than you might otherwise get to them!

That proved the case while I was deep in building the large and complex shuttle/dropship for my Lead Adventure Forum Build Something Contest 2025 entry.

I had extra plastic kits parts around from the 1/72 LeClerc MBT kit I bought to pillage for kitbashing parts, I had some rather cool pieces of offcut styrene around, and I wanted a landing pad to stage photos of the shuttle on, so it all came together in a trio of related projects.

The Drone

This started life with the top of the LeClerc turret, the cap off an Angosturna bitters bottle rescued from the recycle bin, some googly eyes and other bits from the dollar store, and various styrene bits.

The angosGMBH Distraction-class Autonomous Sensor Drone is set up for planetary and space surveying and exploration, with various sensor loadouts depending on mission. No crew space is available, although the tiny cargo/sample bay on the port side could accommodate a human-sized sophont in a space suit for a very short, very uncomfortable ride, if it hasn’t been adapted into a drone bay for auxiliary sub-drones. Some Distraction-class are themselves autonomous intelligent citizen-drones, although most have only limited-ML minds, and some platforms are old-fashioned remotely operated vehicles.

The drone went together in a single evening and was primed and painted the next day. I got zero photos of it in raw styrene.

The Distraction-class has since been decaled and weathered; I’ll try to remember to get some proper finished photos of it soon and post them.

The Sensor/Comms Tower

This started with the increasing amount of styrene offcuts piling up around the edges of my workbench. Many of them were too large and too interesting in shape to just throw away, so I started fiddling around while waiting for solvent cement to cure on the shuttle and built this little tower in a couple of evenings.

It’s about 5″ tall to the top of the actual tower. The side profile is the offcuts from the nose skin of the shuttle, the various circles and hexagons are from building the docking port in the roof of the shuttle. The rest of the thing are either random offcuts from shuttle building or just stuff from my raw materials stash.

The Landing Pad

This is from the last big piece of 1/8″ foamed PVC in my stash; I’m going to have to go get more from our local signmaking/plastic supply shop because it’s wonderful to work with. Stronger, cleaner, and easier to cut than foamcore, it can be embossed and engraved easily and cleanly, and it’s less murderous on knives too.

The whole thing is 12 inches by 12 inches, assembled from two 12×6 pieces with some connection strips underneath. It got grey primered, then a messy dampbrush/drybrush combo of various tans and greys over that, followed by a few washes in black, grey, and dark blue. There’s expansion cracks engraved right into the PVC, and after the main paint had dried I did a couple of marking lines with tape and a stippling brush in white and bright yellow-green. (Reaper’s Dungeon Slime paint. Highly recommended if you want an obnoxiously bright hazard warning colour!)

I also did a low wall piece with PVC offcuts. It’s 10″ long and about half an inch high. It got the same paint as the pad, with the top third or so painted white when I did the pavement markings on the pad.

I’ve got a few final complete primered shuttle photos to show off soon, and after the Build Something Contest rules allow, I have a bunch of painting progress photos to post. The shuttle was a big painting project and painting took most of March and the first week of April!