Goliath Class (SBY) Super Battle Carrier

NOTE:  You can click on most pictures to get a larger view of them.

Rewrites: May 2016 & May 2019

I always felt that the Earth Defense Force was seriously lacking in carrier capabilities.  This ship was my attempt at getting a little over zealous with the whole battle carrier idea.  This model was also the first time that I designed my own kitbash for the Space Battleship Yamato universe.  All of my previous kitbashes were based off of other people's work and already existing ship designs.

For example, let's take a look at some of the stuff the Gamilons had.

 

And when the Earth faced the Comet Empire, we ended up having to deal with even more carrier fleets.

 

The Earth Defense Force did try though.  All of thier battleships had a small contingent of fighters, but they were always outmatched when it came to facing down a full fledged carrier.

When season two of the series came around, we saw that the E.D.F. had made a tiny bit of progress with the addition of the Lexington Class Battle Carrier to the fleet.

But let's face it, all they did was remove a rear gun from the Borodino Class battleship and drop a flight deck on it.

In all honesty, I didn't see this giving the E.D.F. much more of a fighter carrier and I certainly didn't feel it gave us poor humans much of an advantage.  A majority of the ship was still taken up by the Wave Motion Engine and it's components.  And we really didn't see much of this type of ship except in a few fleeting glimpses which meant to me that the E.D.F. didn't take them too seriously either.

I am a big fan of building the Bandai Mecha series of ships and I had always lamented that they had never produced the Lexington Class in this size.  I eventually did a bunch of research in obtaining some source pictures so that I could kitbash my own and this was the final result.

 

You can read more about this build at THIS LINK.

While doing the research for the build of the Lexington, someone had sent me the following picture.

Basically, the artist used the same concept as the Lexington Class, but they doubled up the deck capacity by using the Gamilon Twin-Tri-Deck Carrier.  The picture was cool and all, however, I still felt like there was some serious lack of internal space on those two ships, thus still cutting back on the fighter capacity.  The idea did intrigue me though and got my creative juices flowing.

I began to wonder what a joint project between the Gamilions and the Terrans would look like if they combined their technology.  And the Goliath Class was born.

Goliath Class Super Battle Carrier

Unknown Scale Bandai Mecha Kitbash

 

 

 

 

With this design, the E.D.F. successfully grafted the hulls from a Gamilon Twin-Tri-Deck carrier onto the very powerful core of an Andromeda I class battleship.  The core of the ship,has the large Wave Motion Engine to supply more than enough energy to move and defend this massive vessel.  And the main gun turrets and AA missile tubes provide more than enough defensive ability to the top of the ship.  Four smaller gun turrets were mounted on the bottom to provide some extra defense ability in this location.

Since the core of the ship provided more than enough mobility, the engine compartments on the carrier components were blocked off with hanger doors and this gave the ship extra fighter and crew storage.

The Build

Parts Used: Bandai Mecha (Older Version) Kits: Andromeda I Class Battleship, Gamilon Twin-Tri-Deck Carrier

Overall, this was a pretty easy going build.  It really was just a case of mounting the twin carrier decks to the side of the Andromeda hull.

The only real challenge was getting the carrier hulls to go flush against the Andromeda.  I could have achieved this in one of two ways.  Technique one would have been just to grind off the one protruding piece from each side of the Andromeda.

As you can see from the above picture, the Andromeda has a piece that sticks out from either side of the hull.  I felt though that this piece gave me more of a glue surface so I opted to keep it intact.  I then drilled out some small whole and then used cuticle clippers to cut out the plastic.  I smoothed out the cuts using an exacto knife.  The holes were not pretty, but they would be covered up when the hulls were finally attached.

After I had put the carrier hulls together, I realized that I had miscalculated where I was positioning them.

The way I currently had the side holes for mounting, it would have meant that the front landing strips would have been sticking out past the front of the Andromeda.

I've seen the show enough times to know that there is a bit of a muzzle flash that comes off the Wave Motion Guns.  This of course put my hanger decks in danger of being melted away at the first firing of that mighty gun.

I realized that I desperately needed to slide the carrier parts back a tiny bit on my model.  With the addition of a few more drill holes, and more clipping and trimming, I was able to successfully move them.

If you ever decide to do this ship design, paint all the detailed parts and areas first before assembling the ship.  The final design makes for a couple hard to reach areas that proved to be a bit difficult to paint after the assembly.

The only other tricky part was trying to keep the hanger bay entries intact while at the same time, getting rid of the bridge assembly that connected the original ship hulls together.

The easiest approach for me was to cut across the main center piece and once I separated the hanger bays, cut them loose from the connecting plastic.  This then left a nice beg gaping hole in the back part of the hanger bay pieces.  But luckily, the kit came with parts that made for a nice way to cover over the hole and add some extra defenses to the ship at the same time.

And that really was it for the tricky parts of this build.  Over all, it ended up being one of my more easy kitbashes that I've done.

If you want to see more Work In Progress Pictures, or the entire Finished Product Photo-Shoot, check out the links at the end of this article.

And that pretty much wraps up my discussion on this kitbash of mine.  In the end, I now had a very unique vessel that lives up to it's classification name.  I also had a ton of fun designing a whole new ship class.

BONUS ROUND!!!

Every once in a while, I'll have a little extra stuff to share with you.

Apparently, I wasn't the only one who thought that the Lexington Class from the TOS Second Season was not good enough.  When the show was rebooted, and the show writers got to redo season 2 of the show, they re-imagined the battle carrier concept.

And in all honesty, I hated the design.  The raised flight deck seemed highly improbable as well as impractical to me.  And so, I set out to redesign the redesign.  And that brought about the Vanguard Class Carrier Prototype.

 

I am not going to talk much about this model here as I already have written a very detailed article about it.  If you are interested in checking out this model, you can do so at THIS LINK.

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:

The Ship     Work In Progress Pictures