Z! Nice job. :3

The temptation to make a "A fair lady indeed!" joke is too strong.

Never drove a Fairlady, but I hear the RX7 was the best.

I'm a fan of the Nissan 350z myself.

Nice!

Forget the car, I want the skunkie... ;)

d.m.f.

Fast car, faster skunk, what's not to like?

I remember totaling my Nissan RX-7 long ago.

Good times.

Taral, I don't mean to nitpick, but do you have a problem with feet? ^^

In what sense? I just prefer to keep the detail low, because its how I see 'em unless I've got my nose to the toes.

*giggles*
I'm guess I'm just a fan of footpaws at times. ^^

I love your work a lot, in pictures and in words. ^^

Ah well, I don't usually do foot pads anyway. Kjola in particular are furred on both sides, upper and lower, like a foot in fuzzy socks. For other types of characters I just overlook the pads on the bottom.

Excellent art, Taral. Cool car for a hot skunkette.

very lovely artwork

And I shall be the ass to make the comment, "there appears to be two fair ladies in that picture." Very well done XP

Another much-needed nail in the coffin of political correctness, and two very elrgant models.

Why isn't it politically correct? Because gas-guzzling, pollution belching, internal combustion engines aren't green?

Drat. That's "elegant", of course.

She's cute :D

As usual you do a great job illustrating streamlined tech alongside smexy fluffy things, but...Why'd you draw her on that thing? The 300 series was heavy, overweight with luxuries and an elongated chassis against Mr. K's wishes which required additional anti-flex reinforcement (and thus even more curb weight).

The Fairlady badge goes back to '62, and was renamed after '67 to the Z series. Fans of the car kept CALLING it Fairlady so much that eventually they put the name back on it in Japan. The last 'official' Fairlady was the '67 432 though.

I wasn't aware that they 're-Fairlady'ed' the 300ZX, but then my fixation is the '70-76 period when they were definitely 'Z' and not 'Fairlady'. (Owned three over the years, including a factory '76 Scarab-Z in which the infamous 4-and-a-quarter hour SJ to SD run was made with Wolf Kidd. Sadly, right now I only own a more 'economical' car.)

It was Drjackal's choice of car. Maybe he had one once, but the wheels fell off. (That's an old, old joke in SF fandom, stolen from some venue even older.) I don't think it was officially a "Fairlady" but from what I gathered when I Wiki'd it, owners still called it that.

I'm a fan of the 350Z and some other Japanese cars. The Honda Acura NSX 2002 is about the only one that measures up to being a "supercar" though.

The reason I dote on the mid-70s is that they were solid sportscars, not muscle cars or supercars. Lightweight and with wonderfully responsive suspensions. They could corner and curve-carve like they were glued down. The Scarab plainly felt like _cheating_. Engine dropped a couple inches, battery moved to the back along with fifty pounds of lead to keep the center-of-gravity where the designers intended it...And a hp-weight ratio that was flat-out ridiculous. So it could still corner like mad in club SCCA events, but also go like a bat out of hell down straights.

And ohgod...They were CHEAP.

There are sports cars and there are sports cars. I rather like the small, lightweight cars with modest horsepower -- like the Triumph Spitfire, Lotus Elan, early Corvettes and their somewhat more powerful brethren like the Jag XKE. Already the Lamborghinis and Ferraris were lurking in the shadows, but they were uber-expensive and just a little effete, despite the horsepower.

Now a car has to cruise at 200 mph and have 800 hp to be taken seriously.

I think the best of both worlds is blended in cars like Porsche 911 or Corvette Z06. Plenty of power, high speeds in the neighborhood of 180, but not ludicrously over designed and specialized.

If I had my druthers I'd update the XKE. Keep the basic car, modernize the interior and accessories, and upgrade the engnie and running gear.

200+ to me seems silly and unuseable, and 800hp is a wonderful way to say 'Hi, I don't give a fuck how much I spend on gas.'. You never really use all that.

Then again...

Our final average was over 115 on the SJ-SD run, but that was with a couple of interruptions. The real average was around 140 (at 4AM on a deserted, extremely straight freeway, which I had advance intel about the police activity on). At about 150 the real limiter hit...Aerodynamics. Spook or no, she started lifting. Traction being rather precious at high speed, I never pushed it further.

I would definitely class the 2##-series Z cars (not ZXs) in the legacy range to cars like the Spitfire and early Vette (the Scarab, OTOH was a Vette-killer (BTDT) and probably would show well against an XKE (never had the opportunity).). To my way of thinking, the max-possible speed is less critical than precise and immediate handling and bury-you-in-the-bucket acceleration when-you-want it. The latter are useful in any speed range, the former is, well...It's dick-swinging, and someone can always buy a bigger, better prosthetic if they have money to throw at it. There are real, hard limits on feasible traction and cornering that can be maximized on a much lower budget, which is one reason club SCCA is so much fun, IMHO.

Before the Italian halo cars took over the market, most sports cars enthusiasts would agree that top speed wasn't all that important. It was acceleration, responsiveness, and handling that mattered, and a little car with a modest engine and a top speed of around 115 was ideal. Who could go 195 on a typical English or European country road anyway? You'd have 2.4 seconds before you hit an S-curve or went over the top of a steep hill.

Even if I owned something ridiculous like a Mercedes Benz-McLaren SLR, or a Saleen S7, or a Pagani Zonda C12, where would I drive it at even a fraction of its capabillity? Why pay for special racing grade gasoline, or proprietorial windshield wiper blades that cost $89.95 each? But people do. It's not quite as dumb as spending $110,000 on a Hummer equipped with ribbon tires and a quadraphonic stereo system worth more itself than a Chevy Aveo. At least a halo car has class.

I think the most expensive supercars at the moment are the McLaren F1 and the Bugatti Veryon, both cashing in at over $1,200,000. I hate to think what the insurance premiums are like.

I think there are a couple of others up in that class but they're coachbuilt.

And yeah, it's just crazy. One used to occasionally see truly wild stuff driving around here, but past a certain point, unless you race, your hobby is owning the thing, not driving the thing.

And ohgoddon'tstartmeonHummers. :6 The real thing are just adequate for the role they were designed for. They are hopelessly out of place playing at being SUVs, and the 'H2' built with all that topheavy mass on a car rather than a truck chassis/suspension is a nightmare in handling terms.

I read at one time (it may simply be urban legend) that in Japan, before you could ride a motorcycle of a given displacement, you had to work your way up, being licensed for each lower displacement class and driving it for a year or two without incident.

I really wish something like that would be applied to civvy cars here. The stereotype of the soccer-mom barely in control of Juggernaut is nigh-ubiquitous out here, not to mention the various urban cowboys with trucks they need a ladder to get into. Most of the populace doesn't _need_ to be in anything bigger than an econobox nine-tenths of the time. Accident lethality would drop back significantly, I believe, since we've got better safety equipment now, so if there were less tonnage of out-of-control vehicle involved...

<_<

I excuse my Z-car weakness based on actually racing as a hobby at the time. X3

There's a notion that driving a huge, heavy car is safer. Perhaps for the driver it is. Most of the energy in a collision is imparted to the other car. Personally, I don't see this as a satisfactory safety measure -- protecting your life by increasing the jeopardy to someone else's. Better both cars were small and light.

Sometimes you really have to wonder what people are thinking. I actually have seen a Hummer H2 on the street, tricked out as a low-rider. Dub wheels, ribbon tires, extra chrome. What idiot bought an off-road vehicle only to customize it so that it was barely fit for the pavement?

Now that the civvy Hummer is going to be built by the Chinese, I wonder how long it will last as a symbol of American manliness and rugged individualism?

Have you ever seen a car called the N2A 789? The maker is No 2 Alike. They use a fibreglass replica of the front end of a '57 Chevy, the mid-section of a '58, and the rear fins of a '59 -- hence 789. The body is build on a C6 Corvette chasis and engine. It looks uber-cool, but I suspect that the $60,000 cost on top of the price of a C6 is prohibitive to everyone but the class of people who snort coke regularly.

There's also that weird car that was used in the live-action 101 Dalmatians movie, that looks something like a modernized Deuesenberg. It's a real car you can buy on drive on the street, though I doubt there's as many as there was of the real Doozy in the 30's.

Slick slick slick! I should do some car bunnies too... I need the practice on vehicles.

This is exactly the kind of thing I was ripping off from you when I "created" Kelly O'Dor. Beautiful beautiful beautiful!

I need to do more finished art and give up producing hundreds of cheezy pencil sketche pin-ups every year. I've accomplished the second part...

Do, please, work on the former. We'll forgive you if you backslide on the latter...

Actually, we're greedy and want eerything from you. One of the true "class act" category of artists. If you create it, we want to see it.

Friggin' wow, It looks awesome, well done and well worth the wait. Thanks alot.

Rally Stripe.

A beautiful car and a beauty on a pic always wins.

Sexy

Sweet! It's Zeemon!!

Like Nissan. I have a Quest (2004), which I love. The first new car I bought was a 200SX, which was a fantastic car. Always liked the Z model (Fairlady). A few years ago, when they released a new design, I saw a billboard in LA that had the car in silhouette, the only text on the sign was "Z". I remember thinking. "That's all they really need to say!"

All in all, the Fairlady series are too '80s for me. I was never happy with the prevailing "wedge shape" as perhaps was best exemplified by the Corvette C4s.

That's a sweet car. Pity I never saw that kind of ride here in South Africa. Guess we were too much into Nissan's pickups.

I don't know too much about the highways in South Africa, but perhaps a pick-up is more practical there. If not an armoured car...

(A recent book on paleontology in South Africa that I read, didn't paint a pretty picture of the country-side.)

Nah, we have a decent road network here (though many rural roads are now pothole hazards, no thanks to our current government). We like pickups because of the macho factor that comes with it, though they are plenty of off-road places to use them.

Armoured cars might come in handy against all those minibus taxis, heh.

Maybe we should draft those bus-taxis to Afghanistan? The Improvised Explosive Devices by the roadside can be scarcely more dangerous than rural transportation in the developing world. Of course, I don't know how to get the Taliban to ride the busses...

I regularly hear news reports about bus crashes that claim a lot of lives. Funnily enough, it almost always seem to occur in Peru, Nigeria or India.

Or the Philippines. But bus crashes there tend to be overshadowed in the news by ferry sinkings, which lose hundreds of lives instead of dozens.

Really cool car and skunk girl...

A hot car is never displayed without a equally hot babe in there with it.

That's why cars have two seats... or even four.

this is bringing back memories of my 85 300zx, that was a fast car and real good on gas, too bad i couldnt find a sexy skunk to pose on mine though