by Mark Powley
During the 80's Nitto produced a series of truly amazing sci-fi kits based on the SF3D photo-comic series by Kow Yokohama. Kow disliked the look of most Japanese animation at the time with their large, brightly coloured robots and spaceships all armed with mega-huge guns. As a result he gave his series a much more realistic look with a very retro German feel to it. I've done others from the SF3D range by Nitto such as the Neuspotter which is also in the Gallery.
Many years ago I when I got back into modelling I built Nitto's 1/72 Nutrocker from the SF3D range and put it into a mini-diorama. While I was happy with it at the time my skills and abilities have moved on somewhat and it went into storage. A couple of years ago fellow club member and good friend Stuart Beatson gave me a Nutrocker as a gift. It got half built before I suffered a bout of AMS pique and put it into storage as well. I recently overcame my AMS monkey and in a burst of inspiration dug out my Nutrocker. Then I remembered my older Nutrocker and decided to renovate this older kit and combine the two into a diorama. After several incarnations of design I went with an armoured column in an Australian outback setting. I felt that an APC was needed so after visiting lots of hobby shops I picked up Revell's 1/72 Marder 1A3 as I felt the Marder has a sporty futuristic look to it. This is a fantastic kit in it's own right with beautiful surface detail. The Nutrocker is a hovertank so The Marder was modified with side skirts to make it a hovertank as well but other than that I left it pretty well alone (I couldn't bring myself to chop up all that detail). The older kit was stripped of all it's (hand brushed!) paint and then cleaned it up. I decide to add some applique armour plates and an extra gun to it while I was at it just to beef it up a bit. The diorama was left quite simple. The windmill was a white metal item I got from a model railroad shop that I ended up rebuilding the lower section of while the saltbush is lichen from the railroad area as well. The grass is the hair from a shaving brush. I gave all the vehicles a very heavy weathering session as the tracks in the bush are very dusty and hovertanks would blow up even more.
Here's a piece of trivia for you: Nutrocker is thought to be a mistranslation of Nutcracker!
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