The Opus Magna is an Amphibian Assault Carrier, or an aircraft carrier on tracks. I have to admit that the inspiration to building this comes from Klaus over on Dei Greci and his Athena build. I am by no means as skilled in plasticard building as he is. But During the Desert blade and dropship build I have come to realise that I like scratch building and that I need to improve. First I thought about building a leviathan, I found a picture of one on Google (leviathan) that was build from the imperial bastion and two bane blades. In the beginning I though about building something similar but I could not get a silhouette that I liked with out doing more or less a copy. Then I started to play with the idea of having a landing platform at the back using the skyshield landing pad. This was however to big for the small frame of the leviathan. So what to do? Make it bigger, and bigger it got. Now the design is based around four bastions, two baneblades and three landingpads. I did some to scale drawings using measurements from parts that I have and numbers from the internet. From this I can get the dimensions of the build. The over al length of the Opus Magna will be around 1.3 m, it will be 25 cm wide at the tracks, 40 cm over the flight deck and some 30 cm to the deck. I will continue to do scale drawings to confirm dimensions and to get a feel for the proportions before actually building something. To do this build I will need a lot of plasticard even if quite a lot will come from different kits. But the Evergreen plasticard is quite expensive, especially if you are building big things and using thick sheets. But in the end plasticard is just polystyrene sheets so I did some search on the internet and found a supplier, Plexiglasbutiken, that sold sheets 1 m by 1.4 m in 1 mm and 2 mm thickness where a 1 mm sheet is the price of two Evergreen sheets. With that I could start contemplating to actually build something this large. The sheets arrived to day and now I can start to plan and cut out the bottom and see what kind of rigidity I can achieve. Once I am sure that the build is possible I will rob the piggy bank and make an order for the rest of the parts that I need for this. This will very probably be a very long project with a lot of scratch building but also incorporating parts from other kits. Is this something that is worth doing? I dont know.
