by Jason Smith

Vangaard/CEC's one claim to fame was the Vangaard Gyre e3-A Scout Ship (made famous as Kyle Katarn's Moldy Crow). But one ship isn't enough to keep a company in business. Once the plant was shut down, a few of the designers bought up all of the remaining fuselages and began to shop around for parts to complete them. They looked to present a craft that would be interesting to those looking for speed, power, and distance. After a couple of shrewd business deals, they were able to incorporate a cutting edge sensor system into the ship. As a result, they decided to market the ship, both for function and out of legal necessity, as a long range scout ship (due to some of the otherwise illegal components). While the ship excelled in speed and power, it lacked in creature comforts. The area aft of the cockpit had only enough room for two small bunks, and a small crew area. To compensate for this, they added an interchangeable cargo hold between the cockpit and the sensor suite. Only a small number of this craft were ever produced. Sabaac's Luck is one of the few still flying.

The cockpit is highly detailed with control panels covering almost every surface. There are two distinct areas of the cockpit, the pilot’s area and the navigator’s area. Each of the seats and consoles was built from styrene and greeblies. Other than that, I wanted to go for a kind of piece-meal look to the ship. I designed the primary thrust engine to overcompensate for the size of the craft. The center section of this was left open to expose the “guts” of the engine. The five secondary thrust/maneuvering engines were built to have a different feel that the rest of the model. The entire ship was constructed from scratch using sheet and tube styrene and a small bit of greeblies. The laser cannon was made from brass tube and styrene. It was painted with Tamiya paints.

Image: Underneath

Image: Cockpit

Image: Front view

Image: Rear view