GIANT LASER TANK!

Giant Laser Tank.

Built entirely in Inventor Fusion, then imported into Maya. Approximately one gazillion verts.

This was originally designed for the cover art I am doing for the relaunch of "Amazing Stories" magazine (edited by Steve Davidson).

This is some fun ad copy that Steve wrote for my design:

DEFEND YOUR PLANET! After just a few short weeks of basic training, YOU could be in command of your very own Planetary Defense Battery BLAST THOSE BEMS! Join the Laser Troopers today and defend your planet from alien invasion. Why walk into battle when you can arrive in air-conditioned comfort and style, riding inside the state-of-the-art command center of an EDF GIANT LASER TANK sitting in your custom-contoured command couch, issuing instantly obeyed commands over your own personal neural net? ONLY THE ELITE NEED APPLY! Just say NO to probings! The Experimenter Publishing Company, publishers of AMAZING STORIES magazine, along with Hugo Award-winning science fiction artist Frank Wu are pleased to introduce this key fob replica of an Earth Defense Force planetary defense Giant Laser Tank (official military designation - GLT). Based on the design that helped turn the tide during the Voldrani Rectification (responsible for destroying an as yet undetermined number of Torgs), the GLT measures approximately 390 feet long, 180 feet high (to top of turret); the 10K Terawatt laser barrel is approximately 130 feet long. A 3" model is roughly 1:1500 scale. (A 1/35th scale model would be nearly 11 feet long!) The Giant Laser Tank appears on Frank Wu's commemorative cover for the first new issue of AMAZING STORIES since 2005. The cover illustration is an homage to Frank R. Paul's illustration for Amazing Stories Volume 1, Number 1, April 1926 issue. This model is available in 3.5 inch, 7 inch, 12 inch (this one!) and 22 inch long versions!

Reminds me of Keith Laumer's Bolos, Big boomers also.

Yeah, there is probably a little bit of the influence of the old game "Ogre" in the design, which in turn was inspired by the Bolos.

How many triangles do these gazillion verts form ? I am guessing that this model
must be close to shapeways' 1M limit...

In answer: I originally made this model in Inventor Fusion, then exported it as a .stl into Maya, whereupon Maya said it was over 2 million triangles. Which lead to freakage on my part, as it's twice Shapeway's limit. Then we re-topologized it and got it down to 200K. Whew.

(Here I give a shout-out to my awesome wife Brianna Spacekat Wu, who helped me tremendously with all these technical stuff and helped answer your question - I know Inventor Fusion but not Maya, as IF is easy and Maya overwhelms me with all its buttons - it's like trying to fly the space shuttle and if you touch the wrong thing, it all crashes. So Bri did the re-topo work.)

Oh, and here's another view:

Awesome. I would not have thought that 200000 triangles would suffice to provide that level of detail.
Reminds me of how much I do not know - my models so far are work-related and consist of a few basic
shapes only.
And it made me realize that I must have unknowingly used absurdly detailed spheres in my latest order
(courtesy of a largely undocumented program I used to convert VRML files to STL - just because it was
so much quicker than using openscad).

Thanks
Martin