Lunar Tank (Explorers on the Moon)

Explorers on the Moon (French: On a marché sur la Lune; literally: We walked on the Moon) is the seventeenth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. The story was serialised weekly in Belgium’s Tintin magazine from October 1952 to December 1953 before being published in a collected volume by Casterman in 1954. Completing a story arc begun in the preceding volume, Destination Moon (1953), the narrative tells of the young reporter Tintin, his dog Snowy, and friends Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, and Thomson and Thompson who are aboard humanity’s first manned rocket mission to the Moon.

 

– courtesy of Wikipedia

The finished model:

The story:

They walked… on the moon!  Okay, so maybe for a kid who grew up in the 1970/80s, after Neil Armstrong did it in real life, walking on the moon wasn’t as big a deal as it would’ve been for a kid reading the story when it first came out in 1954 – but come on… it’s still pretty cool!  And besides, Armstrong’s boring white suit had nothing on the Orange space suits with the fish bowl domes.

As I’ve mentioned before, the two-part Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon were perhaps second only to The Blue Lotus and Cigars of the Pharaoh as my earliest favourites, and I’m pretty sure a 2-in-1 softcover was the first Tintin album I ever (personally) owned.

So, when I decided to include the XFLR-6 Test Rocket and Blue Jeep in my Tintin project, I almost forgot that there were two separate albums.  Luckily my project has grown from being focused on one build per album – if you can even just see a brake light, it’s in the build.

I also knew that I was going to include the Bordurian Tank from The Calculus Affair in my project, so between the two of them, I tried to find a pair of 1/72 scale tank kits that could be properly adapted.  The Lunar tank had a few false starts… first with a Mercava II and then with a Leopard 1 A5 before I settled on the M26 Pershing – mainly because I decided to copy fellow Tintin model builder Arnold’s awesome Char Lunaire project – you should check it out!

As it turned out, I probably could’ve gone with any of the kits, since besides the wheels/tracks, I pretty much build the rest of the tank from scratch.

The build:

Since I got started on the Bordurian Tank project first, I started by cutting off the back grating and using them for a bit of a kitbash on that project.  Of course it didn’t really matter, because, after assembling the wheels, the first thing I did was slice off almost the entire upper deck of the tank anyway.  The turret and gun barrel never ever made it out of the box really before ending up in the spares.

First I used some polystyrene planks to cut out and glue together the main shapes for the tank.  It’s pretty straightforward, but getting the angle of the slope correct takes a little bit of work.  I had to trim the edges to get it to fit well enough to satisfy my eyes.  Then it was just putty and sanding to take care of the edges.

One of the trickier parts was how to create the glass observation domes.  I originally thought to use some clear glass beads, but the thickness of the glass creates a weird optical illusion from the light passing through it. So, instead, I decided to use a ball bearing perched on top of some magnets and create a heated plastic “smash mould” for the dome. It took several tries to get a shape (well 3 shapes) I could live with.  Then I needed to trim the edges and sand them down smooth.

Next I added a few more plastic pieces to create the various hatches and gave the whole thing a coat of paint – which, of course, instantly made me aware of the fact that a lot more sanding was needed.  After several more rounds of sanding, I drilled some holes and added some metal wire for the various railings.  Finally, I scrounged through the spares box and came up with some parts for the main light/radar mast.  I used a bit of tubing, a piece of landing gear, a still attached bit of sprue “overflow” to create the searchlight.  I also cut up some plastic ratlines leftover from my Cutty Sark kit used in my Fujimoto’s Submarine project to create the radar array. Another coat of blue paint, and it all came together.

The one thing that gave me some grief were the wheels.  Trumpeter’s kit had independent axels for each of the wheels.  A great idea, but it really just caused problems for me, and I ended snapping off three of them that needed to be glued back in place before I could paint the wheels and the tracks.  Oh well, lesson learned I guess.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with the result, but please feel free to tell me what you think.