Like Buses

They say you wait ages for a bus in the U.K and then three arrive at once. Seems like a similar effect can be seen in toy collecting, as the LP (Lik Be) Moon Explorer Car or Moon Bus as I prefer to think of it, has three distinct variations, the third of which arrived just this week.

https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2009/10/lp-vehicles-me-too-or-me-first-by.html

The basic vehicle has two main colour schemes of red and blue alternates and a third, later version appeared in one of the larger window boxed sets, with a rocket launcher. I have had the blue and orange versions for some time, but I got the red bodied version this week on eBay. It had suffered over time and has lost a pilot, tail fin and canopy. The radar scanner was damaged too. So a little fixing up was in order and I used a small tank wheel from a kit to rebuild the radar and found a fair approximation of the tail fin in the LEGO box. The canopy was much more problematic, as it fits over a curved body in a small recess. I found a plastic dome of roughly similar shape and sanded it down a little to sit roughly in place. I wasn’t too careful to fit it into place, in case a real version comes along in the future. So it’s far from ideal, but cosmetically pleasing.

Seeing the Bus again after some time, it occurred to me that LP had been borrowing ideas again, as we has seen with the smaller space vehicle range, shown below, which were based on a German Panzer IV tank chassis.

Looking at the wheel arrangement, I recalled that the overlapping idler wheels had been lifted from the panzer division once more, in the form of the fearsome Tiger tank.

So the rocket launcher had been ‘borrowed’ from the Lone Star diecast Modern Army series vehicles and the chassis for the two vehicles had a military origin as well.

 

You can see the pages from the ROCO Minitanks catalogue and the small space vehicle below next to a Minitanks Whirlwind model and the wheel arrangement is almost identical.

Below is an image of the Tiger tank, showing the clear influence of the chassis layout on the Moon Explorer Car too. It seems LP knew a good thing when they saw it and were not above a little plagiarism!