SCORPIO

From the BBC TV series created by Terry Nation - ‘BLAKE’S 7’

Featured in the 4th series of Blake’s 7 the Scorpio was described, by Del Tarrant, as a Mk2 Wanderer Class Planet Hopper. Once commandeered by Avon and the gang the ship had a faster than light stardrive giving it the capability to easily outrun any Federation ships.

The ship is not striking like the Liberator and is instead quite unassuming. The ship was designed by Jim Francis who was the VFX Designer/Supervisor for the series at the time and was built as a 5 foot long miniature by Rob Thornton who would go on to pioneer cgi vfx on ‘Babylon 5’.

I had previously created a box artwork of the Liberator as a Matchbox kit, so have assumed other kits from the series would also be Matchbox. Matchbox kits had the feature of being molded in either 2 or 3 colours of styrene - depending on the size and complexity of the kit). sometimes this would well - the tanks - and other times seemed like hinderance. The Scorpio being primarily one colour would be a challenge but could possibly be done with two shades of orange and then grey, brown or black for detail parts.

Designed by JIM FRANCIS