Sabre Reconfigured for Flight Ops

It's been quite a while since Klavs has shown off a new Sabre, but he's back in the cockpit and taking another crack at it now. At this point the design is still in the pre-texture phase, but the spaceframe is already quite solid and the fighter is looking well equiped with its particle cannons, neutron guns and healthy complement of missiles. The nifty version with landing gear deployed also reveals several internal bays for additional ordnance!

Re-kajiggering a lot of the old models, to optimize things and maybe make them a bit more realistic by relying more on texturing than all the overly-chunkified modeling I did to make them look better as 3d printed models. In many cases I'm having to re-model them from scratch, but thems are the breaks. Pretty happy with the Sabre's overall configuration, and she can even carry 6 torpedoes!

Wing Commander has always been the perfect crossroads of Naval Aviation and Sci-Fi for me, probably why I love it so much. So, when working on this model of an early model of the the F7U-1 Cutlass, I was struck by how easily it could be turned into a Wing Commander ship! It's almost "Rocky Jones" in appearance, and it's easy to see how the shape would have blown people's minds in the early 1950's who were used to looking at Corsairs and P-51s. Only very peripherally related to Wing Commander, but there you are. Was there ever a WC Ship named Cutlass? Seems like there should be!