stevethefish
My name's actually not Steve
- Joined
- Jun 12, 2015
- Messages
- 295
For those of you who are on the Starship Modeler Forum, you may have seen this. It was on the Crusher Joe thread that has since fallen into oblivion because... darnit, KILOBYTES of data don't grow on trees, son! Here I have reproduced the posts I made to my Tumblr feed (link's in my sig file below).
So in September 2018, With news that Hasegawa would be releasing this subject in 1:72 scale in December, it really motivated me to begin building the ones I have. I own two of these kits, and my intention was to do the blue Fighter 1 and the red Fighter 2. These 1:100 scale kits by Takara are from the early 80s, when the movie first came out.
For an old model kit, the proportions are pretty good. I really like the detail on this model, however the rear engines lack detail. There is a thruster can directly behind the cockpit, two large ones in the middle of the back of the plane, but the four thrusters (two on each side) have zero detail at all. Comparing to the Hasegawa kit, these thrusters are set inside of the rear of the plane and do not protrude much. I needed to come up with some replacements.
Kotobokiya makes these supplemental parts in their Modeling Support Goods series. I found ones that were perfect size. This is the Vernier Nozzle set III. Unfortunately, each of these sets only had three in the size I wanted, so I had to buy two more of these sets in order to get a total of eight, four per ship. Since I live in Japan, these do not cost much for me, so it’s all good.
So I set about drilling these out. Once I got a good hole drilled out, I used my rotary tool to get all the rest out and make it look good.
Here is a before and after shot. On the left you will see how the kit comes, and on the right you will see the Kotobukiya verniers in place.They look cool! Fitting into the hole they look set into the engines instead of protruding outside far.
The problem with adding these new thrusters is that the joint where the wing fits into the fuselage will interfere with these thrusters since they are set into the back. In this picture I’m pointing with a skewer to the part I needed to cut out.
I left those alone at this point, however, since they provided something for my alligator clips grab onto.