Rebel Base

Various views of a display I made out of some of the models in the MPC "Rebel Base" kit. The kit has a vacuum-formed base you're supposed to display the models on, but I chose to show them in flight.

The X-Wing had its wings ("S-foils", I guess) folded, so I cut them off and made new wings out of sheet plastic, and added new guns out of brass rod with blobs of white glue on the ends.

The Y-Wing was way too short and didn't have the open lattice in the exhaust, and the nose was way too rounded and blunt. I lengthened and reshaped the nose with epoxy putty, then used brass rod and a couple of aluminum rings cut out of some tubing to extend the engines. I made new nose guns and rear gunner guns out of stretched sprue.

The Millennium Falcon required the most work. As supplied, the side walls were flush with the edges of the hull, and bulged outward. I sawed and filed them off, and replaced them with a long floppy piece of sheet plastic that I bent to match the model. Then I glued random bits of junk from the parts box to replace some of the missing detail. The "dish" on top is the end of an enormous nutritional supplement capsule (red yeast powder, I think) and the guns are 40mm twin Bofors guns from some unsung 1/700th scale ship kit. Yes, I know they're really supposed to be quads...

They were painted a pretty dark grey, then extensively drybrushed with lighter shades before a few dulled details were painted in. The Y-wing carries markings from a Soviet "Guards" fighter unit on its nose, but the model is tiny and the decal is microscopic.

The base is half of a plastic sphere. It originally held a toy from the movie Akira, but my friend only wanted the toy, so I took the sphere. I filled it with Durham's putty and tried to paint it so it would look like a planet. I think its meteorology is a little suspect.

Odds and Ends

Here are some odds-and-ends things I've been tinkering with lately.

A Rebel Transport (better known as the "fish ship") from the "Rebel Base" set. It came with several X-wings, several Y-wings, a Millennium Falcon, and this thing. I'll add photos of the others later, but for now, this is what I've been doing while waiting for other paint/glue/decals to dry. Got a minute? Grab the fish and do some painting. I added a couple of nozzles made from the noses of 1/48th scale Maverick air-to-ground missiles, but otherwise, it's out of the box.

An itty-bitty Federation Dreadnought from Amarillo Design Bureau, intended for use with the Star Fleet Battles game. Someone does make decals for these two-inch models, but the idea of putting decals the size of an amoeba on a model the size of a Ritz cracker gives me the shakes.

More Amarillo Design Bureau ships, a Klingon D7 in the foreground (flat black with lots of silver drybrushed over it) and a Kzinti battlecruiser in the background (hull red, mostly, with decals scavenged from a Matchbox A34 Comet cruiser tank).

A figure I now refer to as the "Wally Dude", because I think Wally gave it to me. It's mostly a combination of old-school Testors square-bottle enamels and craft store acrylics.

More of the Wally Dude. The skin was medium brown Testors enamel with some orange acrylic drybrushed over the top, and I thought it worked reasonably well.