I've also been on a Edgar Rice Burroughs kick, specifically around the Mars/Barsoom and Venus books, a result of a month or so of puttering around on VSF stuff.
So last weekend I decided to hit a used bookstore near me that I knew had a Burroughs' crate in the back, mainly hoping to find the first book in each of the Mars and Venus series, I have a bunch of the rest but haven't started either series since I couldn't start at the beginning..
So I did score Princes of Mars, and some Tarzans (the lost city type ones), but I hit a nice motherlode of Verne as well. Michael Strogoff, Up the Niger Bend, and Master of the World (so I'm still stuck looking for the beginning of a series!). Also there were two books, Demon of Cawnpore and Tigers & Traitors, which more in-depth reading of the back blurbs revealed to be the two parts of one novel, The Steam House.
This is a long-winded way of getting to the point: I now have a book about a steam elephant! Not just a steam elephant though, I was planning on doing some of those as Contraptions for Land Ironclads anyways, in fact someone on the Wessex Games VSF mailing list has already statted some up.
This is a steam elephant pulling a caravan of "steam houses".
This is steam-nerd heaven to the nth degree. And I never knew. Now I need a proper land ironclad version, or two in miniature.
So while I just got into a few pages last night, the internet has proved useful, and I now have some initial musings to post.
This is the edition I have:
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwfnnIhMdkFTgZy0FMAmIROtYC1a1CyS2r79OZ3kdUsap_pkMTspMKboyq5ZuhoO5AiyKuZ3nXsF41hwd-kEfj4gy1KNyZ9OX6Iwat1OT_-oOWURgpnNYLGGwwRd_gEaxzzf6325Y2A5U/s320/demonofcawnpore_1959_ace_newyork_fitzroyedition_.jpg)
But not this one:
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZRuRN9Nd-fJ3zS30e-MTvDBBo_cqTgktqa8dDGsPT4t7jetG6dA5GcnYvZOn4Jy7M_yOJs7RBuvj9il2vlYE7gBTExOtwWqlQKmd8mPoOpNLKvKlSIatQTUYY2jOzBaHUBp0AlSMmvLI/s320/demonofcawnpore_1959_arcowithbernhardhanison_fitzroyedition_.jpg)
I'm back on track with this, from Wikipedia:
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgujxmoHl2VxUMBm34LoFADf2km8WK0PeGcXODjYHh8G-6R5Z3pL8Vs7Qq_bSjmvHTW7jHjy6Ydbqz8eAuOS_IDSqL55wge8-Hy77uSkdue88XxQDWsAf8Z5T4H8P1XUXeHi2YCnAUYXJM/s320/Verrne-Dompar.jpg)
I'm going with 6mm since I want it to look behemoth-like (in the book apparently the beast is called Behemoth), and bigger than the steam elephant contraptions I'll do with Irregular's 2mm elephants. A 6mm elephant should be about 11-12mm tall, or about 3-4 stories in 2mm scale.
This also helps, although I'm not sure what happened to the rest of the caravan...
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1YHo4VMEn__ktCKOE06G7d0LqeF0kV1piiIqySnAuPoPqZXngIPHCpsauT0hIbzlkAgoENpulqWtOpDQihc0Ttj4t17lwaPuWo5JQ2PDUEquqbCvQ3rQ8RjkwUDZveka61Dx6dOv5-no/s320/steamhouse_couloured_illustr.jpg)
As a backup elephant I might get a couple of Irregular's African elephants with howdahs, and I'm thinking 6mm Hussite wagons may be a starting point for the rest of the caravan, with findings etc. as decoration. I have some coupons for next week to see what I can find. I may just end up scratch-building the caravans.
I don't think I'll mess around trying to make the howdah circular though, unless I find something that's an easy fit. I'll probably just file down the figures sticking out from the top, put on a minaret-style roof, file off one shield hanging from the side and turn the other one into a gun mantlet.