Obscure Zoids!

When I was a kid in the 1980s there was an old couple in my town who ran a small toystore. It was one of those stores which – despite its size – managed to carry a while lot of interesting things. I specifically remember a piece of shelf space stocked with what's now considered Original European Release Zoids.

What they didn't carry however were the sort of neat Attack Zoids – smaller simple kits which might have been sold with sweets, kind of like gachapon kits. I only found out about those much later and recently found a stash of reference in a folder. As for the newer animé Zoids... long before those came out the old man had apparently hammer murdered his wife. The building became a broker and then a travel agency.

Anyways, I've been wanting to redraw some of the early Zoids for my Zoids project and started doing so two weeks ago, intending to post here, but then I thought I'd start by writing a short fanfic. Then I got immersed in that couldn't set it down until now.

The Attack Zoids are of the Helic and Zenebas variety, without the windup mechanism, but still in the 1:72 scale. I did a fair bit of redesigning and renaming, e.g. giving the snail some suction/jet cups. All of these Zoids are very fast, running 100+ km/h and such. Zoids are likely very powerful compared modern military stuff.

The generic tanks are for scale and as a baseline – they're what the more exotic and cool Zoids are fighting in my story. Because I went for a good-vs-bad type setup with Zoids & pilots on the good side I didn't want to fetishise the design of the baddies. It's tempting to make the baddies cool too, but maybe they shouldn't be, you know? Maybe they should be just awful and boring.

As for the story, it kinda devolved into underpantscenes and obscure punk references so I don't know what to do with it now. At least I got some 25K words down, which is good practice. I've been using the OS speech synthesis to help me proof read and it's actually useful for spotting (hearing) issues with missing words and strange flow.