Home » A Daydreaming Designer Revisits A Curious ‘Motorhome’ Project

A Daydreaming Designer Revisits A Curious ‘Motorhome’ Project

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Imagine it’s around 1989, and you’re inside a weird-looking leaky building that purports to be a design school. You’re all sitting around a studio on the paint-covered steel stools in your high-top white Reeboks when the instructor walks in to lay out the week’s project. You hit PAUSE on your Echo and the Bunnymen cassette in the Walkman to listen. Here it is:

“Take an animal and make it into a purpose-built vehicle.”

Vidframe Min Top
Vidframe Min Bottom

As GenXers, we readily admit to having been influenced by MTV, arcade video games, and images of the excesses of the ’80s. Still, there is one part of our upbringing that we don’t discuss quite as much. Most of our educators (and even parents) reached their formative years during the hippie decade of  “free thinkers.”

If you went to an art and design school in the Reagan/Bush era (Editor’s note: Didn’t everyone? –PG), you would absolutely have been taught by instructors with, well, unique viewpoints. We would often get rather bizarre assignments from early on, and the results were even stranger. “I really want to get my girlfriend on my back and fly through your sculpture” is how one teacher commented on my roommate’s completed project. Actually, many of their comments would get them fired and canceled today, but you get the picture. Crazy was right on the surface with these people.

Back to the assignment: what animal to choose? I am really not a big bug person, but for some reason, I chose a big bug: the Goliath Beetle. It’s impressive since it’s just so damn big, and you can really see some of the shape details that you miss on the ‘standard’ sized insects.

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Original2

source: Wikipedia /Fir002 and Wikimedia/Fungus Guy

A closer look at a beetle reveals a number of things. One, it’s a pretty clean shape that can lend itself to some kind of vehicle relatively easily. Second, the shape really does NOT look that much like the Volkswagen Type 1 Beetle that stole this insect’s name. In fact, I think a Tatra T87 bears a stronger resemblance to said insect.

Tatrat87
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Tatra 87 Rear (foto Hilarmont)
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

 

Regardless, we weren’t supposed to make a car out of this animal anyway, so this vehicle might as well fly. It is possible that I was subliminally influenced by the sleeve for Journey’s Escape which was likely lying around our apartment (but we were now art students and too cool to listen to that shit anymore).

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That vehicle on the cover of this corporate arena rock magnum opus appears to be beetle-influenced (Scarab Beetle?) but functionally I never knew what the vehicle was supposed to do, other than help Steve Perry and his bandmates break out of some tiny glass ball that they inexplicably got trapped inside of by REO Speedwagon or something. Hard to tell.

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source: Wikipedia (Columbia Records) and etsy (for sale listing)

Purpose is the big problem here. This is a design project that runs counter to the form-follows-function mantra you often hear since you’re essentially doing the opposite: finding something that this animal/vehicle might do. This big-ass beetle apparently lives on tree sap and can go for long periods of time without food, so I figured something that worked in the woods might make sense.

I’d seen Return of the Jedi years before, and while that Ewok crap was a nightmare, the speeder that flew through the jungle seemed rather cool.

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Someone has even tried to replicate that will a small hovercraft you can see in this video.

Also, I knew from reading about the insane journey where three Corvairs drove through the rugged Darien Gap in Panama that there’s plenty of undisturbed, unpassable forest in the world:

Why not change that by violating these precious woodlands with a giant bug-shaped flying machine? Something that can go over any surface and even be able to clear the way if necessary?

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Seriously, this is what I did in school while you were gaining, say, useful financial or medical knowledge. Plus, we paid tuition to do this shit.

Anyway, trying to get through rough terrain is best done, if at all possible, without wheels. Mechanically, as design students and not engineers our solutions here were often of the pull-out-of-our-ass variety, as you’ll see. The giant bug vehicle would be a hovercraft, with four fans or jets underneath to provide lift (if it’s fans it would likely need a hovercraft ‘skirt’). The openings would be able to pivot side to side or front to back like on the hovercraft you see in that forest video above, or even like the single jet with multiple outlets on a Harrier Jump Jet (I had no idea it worked with ONE big engine):

F402 Image01 2

source: Wikipedia/Alan Wilson

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I like the jet idea but that might catch the forest on fire…but it’s a RAIN forest so a little warm air might do it well, right? Well, fan or jet-powered, this type of lifting system would allow for easy helicopter-like movement in any direction, and travel up to a certain speed. If you’re on a long, clear surface (like a body of water or plains) and want to cover ground much faster (like triple-digit speeds), there’s a jet on the tail at the back that can turn side to side for steering. Also, small retractable wings extend from the sides for additional stability at speed. Or something like that.

2 Mech

To get through tight areas and to make space for more vehicles to pass, we’ll need some forestry-related capabilities. There are machines we know of that can chop down trees like toothpicks with saw-fitted arms. That object being held in the picture below is just one of the teeth that go onto the big rotating saw blades:

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sources: Komatsu and The Bishop

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At least two of the flying bug’s six legs would feature some kind of cutting tools. The legs also can grab objects and act as landing gear for the bug to sit on.

In school, we didn’t have time beyond the two renderings to determine what the inside of this thing would look like, and I figured it was high time I did. We know that up front in the ‘bridge,’ there will be controls for a crew of up to three, with the center one piloting it and the side crew able to manipulate the legs and saws.

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2 Front

However, where would the crew stay if they were on a long-term task where they didn’t leave? Needed fuel and supplies would be brought by other vehicles through the path they just cut, but they would stay in the bug so it needs to be like a mini motorhome as well.

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Behind the ‘bridge’ in front, there would be a space with a table, chairs, and monitor, flanked by wall cabinets for storage and a small kitchen area. There would be a tiny bathroom on the side as well:

2 Mid

Further back, there are three bunks with the center-mounted one raised up over the storage area, fuel tanks, or engine. Raising this bunk also helps separate the bunks for additional privacy (but there are sliding partitions/curtains on the openings to each of them).

2 Back

It’s a difficult job trying to make answers to questions that nobody asked, but it challenges you to find answers that at least make sense on some level. I mean, even the Millenium Falcon has toilets designed into it as well as other Star Wars ships.

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What kind of vehicle would you turn a Goliath Beetle into? As odd as these assignments were, in retrospect some of them really did stretch our creativity, force us to think differently and work to bring some sense of reality to the oddest concepts. It’s not unlike what I do now with the Daydreaming Designer exercises; it certainly it helped me thirty years later to interact with Torch and his odd requests for impossibly dumb vehicle concepts.

I honestly don’t know if this is a good thing.

All illustrations by The Bishop

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Professor Chorls
Professor Chorls
1 year ago

Okay, flying or not, I want a vehicle with that cab/dashboard design. I’m going to see if I make this happen during the Centurion diesel swap.

Gated_Grifter
Gated_Grifter
1 year ago

This looks and sounds very “Flight of the Navigator” to me. I love it.

Do You Have a Moment To Talk About Renaults?
Do You Have a Moment To Talk About Renaults?
1 year ago

Oh wow, thanks for including a couple of hi-res images of the original project, these will be wonderful as desktop wallpapers. Amazing illustrations.

StillNotATony
StillNotATony
1 year ago

Ah, design school.

One of my fellow students, seeking to suck up to our main instructor, made him a rubber stamp that read “CRAP” in block letters.

It did make going through a stack of thumbnail sketches very efficient, and you always knew which ideas he didn’t like.

Cheap Bastard
Cheap Bastard
1 year ago
Reply to  The Bishop

‘when I was teaching to pay for my masters degree’

Ah graduate school. The only job I ever had where my employer forced me to pay for the privilege to park on their lot.

Thomas Metcalf
Thomas Metcalf
1 year ago
Reply to  Cheap Bastard

My wife teaches at the local university and parking is something like $700. It is absolutely insane. They keep asking all academic departments to trim budgets every year but add highly paid V.P. level positions for the stupidest shit.
I had grand plans to go the professor route and maybe get a chemical reaction named after me. I peaced out of school and have never looked back.

Iwannadrive637
Iwannadrive637
1 year ago

Number one, thank you for this entertaining article. Tons of fun! Number two, thank you for saying, “…that Ewok crap was a nightmare.” After all these years I shake my head at biped beavers fighting space Nazis.

David Smith
David Smith
1 year ago
Reply to  The Bishop

It’s “Kars for Kids”, I wish I didn’t know that.

It is by far the most annoying “song” ever.

And curse anyone who ever brings it up in anything I’m ever exposed to again.

Sivad Nayrb
Sivad Nayrb
1 year ago
Reply to  The Bishop
Sivad Nayrb
Sivad Nayrb
1 year ago
Reply to  Iwannadrive637

Biped Beavers Fighting Space Nazis… Sounds like a bad porn movie.

Nic Periton
Nic Periton
1 year ago

And, after much thought and deliberation, and expensive educational assistance you came up with Thunderbird 2 ?

Sivad Nayrb
Sivad Nayrb
1 year ago
Reply to  The Bishop

Product Design school grad from ’88 here… Same memories of dank, leaky, musty buildings used by Design department & recall laughing at Graphic Degree majors obsessing over letter spacing… and cocky Architecture students.

Hugh Crawford
Hugh Crawford
1 year ago

Insect derived design? Timber harvesting?
I was thinking that I knew where this was going but I was wrong.

I mean, just look at this, cooler than a Unimog with all the attachments https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=92&v=CD2V8GFqk_Y&embeds_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&source_ve_path=MzY4NDIsMzY4NDIsMzY4NDIsMzY4NDI&feature=emb_logo

Mr Sarcastic
Mr Sarcastic
1 year ago

Always loved the Mach 5 and other vehicles that had saw and boring extensions. Even if it was possibly to cut through trees or dig dirt at a high rate of speed they never accounted for the extraneous trees and dirt and where it would go.

WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE EXTRANEOUS ?

Cheap Bastard
Cheap Bastard
1 year ago
Reply to  Mr Sarcastic

Oh I do!

I had the same problem with Star Trek. Red shirt get hit by beam weapon, the body vaporizes, where does the vaporized matter go? It can’t just disappear! Shouldn’t there be at least a cloud? Wouldn’t the explosion of a vaporizing body in the closed confines of a ship be more dangerous than a projectile weapon? Why don’t the internal ship walls vaporize when they get hit? If they are invulnerable to beam weapon hits why aren’t the red shirts using that for body armor? Why does ANYBODY willingly wear a red shirt in that show?

Or how about the transporter? Does it exchange the volume of the destination with the passenger? If not why isn’t there at least a gust of wind as the materializing passenger displaces that volume? And why isn’t that transporter the ultimate medical device? The bio-filter alone should eliminate any and all communicable diseases. Hell the industrial version it should be able to resurrect a vaporized phaser victim – or at least whatever pattern the device had stored in the medical memory bank.

Sooo much extraneous!

/r

Sivad Nayrb
Sivad Nayrb
1 year ago
Reply to  Cheap Bastard

I’m more perplexed by space ship explosions that make a sound that can be heard by another space ship miles away.

Thomas Metcalf
Thomas Metcalf
1 year ago
Reply to  Cheap Bastard

Transporter episodes were the worst. People stuck in the pattern buffer, Riker’s transporter clone, etc. I think they tried too hard to explain how it worked and the more they explained, the less plausible it got. It is easier to suspend disbelief if they say ‘magic’ rather than clumsy explanations of destroying a person and recreating them from raw atoms but somehow having memory intact.

Chris Stevenson
Chris Stevenson
1 year ago

Interesting that you cite Star Wars as partial inspiration, but the final design fits in well with Star Trek, especially early TNG era. This thing looks like it could have been carried on the Enterprise-C.

Mr Sarcastic
Mr Sarcastic
1 year ago

I am seeing more of a Flash Gordon universe. Looks a lot like Ming the Merciless’s deathship.

OverlandingSprinter
OverlandingSprinter
1 year ago

Finally, FINALLY a flying vehicle with the potential to be built-out as an overlander!

Time for me to subscribe to Autopian with cash money.

10001010
10001010
1 year ago

I guess my art teachers were from a different generation. I can remember one that would yell at us in front of the class if whatever we created in anyway resembled and animal or a face or even a cloud.

Mr Sarcastic
Mr Sarcastic
1 year ago
Reply to  10001010

I guess i was a decade ahead. Used to smoke dope do a hit of acid spend $20 on 50 cent hiball nite. I r opened our minds.

Vicente Perez
Vicente Perez
1 year ago

Now we are talking! Flying car, who cares? We have helicopters for that. HOVERING car, that is where it is at. No worrying about roads, no worrying about tires… There is true value to that.

Rad Barchetta
Rad Barchetta
1 year ago
Reply to  Vicente Perez

Yeah, man! Then we can go bullseye womprats in our T-16s back home! As long as they aren’t much bigger than 2 meters.

Gilbert Wham
Gilbert Wham
1 year ago
Reply to  Vicente Perez

I want a world with more ekranoplans and zeppelins in it. No, I don’t care about the reasons it’s a bad idea. I just want it.

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