I am a HUGE fan of Bandai's mecha collection for Space Battleship Yamato models. Their small scale models allows me to build and display a large collection of starships for relatively cheap pricing. Sadly though, there are certain ships that they never produced for their collections.
One of those ships was the Gamilon Rocket Tanker that we see in episode 16 of the Quest For Iscandar series. The ship is approaching Beemera (renamed Beeland for Star Blazers) but is intercepted by the Black Tigers who tag it with a delayed rocket. The ship then blows up as it is about to land on the planet.
Well, after building some fuel pods for a Star Trek model that was on my bench, I finally realized how I could make this model build a reality.
There were not a lot of pictures for me to work with. I did manage to find these pictures on the Internet and these served as a good source to start.
This is what my final build ended up looking like.
Gamilon Rocket Tanker
Unknown Scale Scratch Build
This scratchbuild was inspired by a Star Trek build that I was doing that required some large fuel pods cargo containers. You can read about that build at THIS LINK.
As I was gluing the wooden balls together for that model, I suddenly envisioned the Gamilon ship and thought that I might be able to build this ship. I used various parts from my greebles box to get the model to look as close to the real thing as I could.
I started the build with three wooden balls and super glued them together. Thanks to the CosmoDNA page and Space Battleship Yamato FaceBook Page, I was given a bunch of reference pictures to work with. This was great because all of the pictures I found online of her, had the rear of the ship obscured. I had thought that this would be the most challenging part of the build, but the infamous Tim Eldred came through for me.
The next day, I did some digging through my greebles box and found the perfect nose cone for this model. I also trimmed down some Star Trek impulse engine assemblies to serve as the lift thrusters on the bottom of the ship. It looks like I will also be using the rear end of a Comet Empire Battleship for this model's main engine assembly.
The next day didn't see a lot of work because I was tied up at a second job. I did manage to figure out the main engine assembly by using the Comet Empire Battleship parts and another nose cone that I simply turned around to serve as an exhaust port. I'm still digging through my greebles box to find a suitable bridge module.
The next day saw a LOT of progress being made on this model. I ended up trimming down one of the tiny little fins from a Comet Empire Battleship and used that as the bridge module. I painted the whole ship using the same blue that I used for my Desslok/Dessler command ships as it was the closest color I had to match the reference pictures that were provided to me. Using some really thin resin sprue, I cut out a bunch of TINY pipes and conduits and glued them in. I took an old Gamilon Tri-Deck Carrier stand from my parts bin, ripped off the original post, sanded off the lettering, filled the base with modeling putty and then when that set for a bit, drove in a nice solid metal post. I'm hoping the modeling putty provides some stabilization weight to the stand, and the metal post will just fit nicer into the bottom of the model.
I then had a super productive four day weekend where I finished up this project as well as two others that were being done at the same time. I painted the base for this model and then finished up all of the detail painting, like on the bridge module, the main engine exhaust, the lift thrusters and some side details. Those side details actually took me two attempts to get them in a straight line.
This was one of those surprise myself builds that I walked away from feeling very pleased with the outcome. I hope you enjoyed following along with my build of her.
As always, I hope you found this article useful and informative. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to comment below.
So for now, "Live long and prosper!!!"
Additional Links To Photos Of My Collection:
Rocket Tanker ( The Model Work In Progress )
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