Given my usual gla­cial build­ing pace, this was an extreme challenge!

The idea, devised by Homo Fer­ratus, had only three rules:

  1. You must use 1 Ping Pong ball!
  2. You must build it within 1 hour!
  3. Don’t cheat, watch the time! ;)

So, I ploughed through my sprues and bits and gathered a few things that might come in useful …

After a manic 45 minutes cut­ting holes and ran­domly glu­ing on parts, then shoot­ing some white primer on, I had this:


The final 15 minutes were spent wait­ing for the primer to dry and quickly brush­ing on a Games Work­shop wash (Gryphonne Sepia). Once my time was up, this is what I had:




Not too bad for an hour I thought!

Later on, I went back and adding some more decals and ID stripes and here is the final thing:



I also came up with some back­ground for it:

Wächter Orbital Sur­veil­lance Drone

Deployed in NEO and Lunar orbit, the Wächter is an AI sur­veil­lance drone utl­ised by the SDR to watch for Mer­cen­ary troops and ves­sels. The Mercs spent a lot of time hunt­ing these drones down, first in mod­i­fied AFS patrols and later with Fire­ball and Fire­ball SG hunt­ing teams.

The Merc suc­cess rate in dis­abling the Wächters was very high, and the assembly and deploy­ment of replace­ment drones was too much of a drain on SDR resources to enable them to be replaced quickly enough to be an effect­ive deterrant to Merc plans on the Moon and sur­round­ing space.

More images can be found on Flickr. Forum threads dis­cuss­ing this build can be found at SFM:uk and the Maschinen Krueger forums.