Here is a giant laser tank that I am working on the cover for the first print issue of the re-launch of Amazing Stories (edited by Steve Davidson).

I made this in Autodesk Inventor Fusion, which really is a truly awesome 3D program!  (Easy to use - not so many buttons that you have option anxiety, like Maya!)

(The sharp-eyed reader may notice that there are tracks only on one side - this is because the tracks are very polygon-intensive - and thus take a long time to render, and in the final piece we only see the tank from one side.  Just like they only made the Death Star model for ANH about 2/3 of the way around - because you never see the back.  Or... Just as half of the bones in the human body are only in the hands and feet, so over half the polygons are in the treads.  Brianna brought this into Maya and at last check, there were close to 7 million polygons!!!!)





Steve Davidson - editor of Amazing Stories - made the comment that the laser tank is so big that the crew has to take little cars to get from one end to the other.  He had some other interesting comments about the technical features of the laser tank:

"Most of the space is taken up by accumulators, capacitors, batacitors, emergency steam boilers and gigantic rubberband energy storage devices.  (After much trial and error, it was determined that an upscaled version of rubberband propeller plans was ideally suited for storing the huges amounts of energy needed in a robust system capable of handling the rigors of the modern day battlefield...)