Chronocidal

The problem with the canopy is that they literally added a frame underneath it, making it just way too thick. remove that, and it'll fix a lot of the profile. I'm planning to grab it, but I might wait a while. I've spent too much on flight sim hardware in the past month to justify it.

I think what makes the old Monogram molds so valuable is the breadth of their coverage from the mid-80s. They were pretty high quality for the time, despite the bad parts breakdown/nasty seams, but the breadth of the catalog couldn't be beaten. The old Century Series kits in particular seemed to be a subject that no other company wanted to tackle in 1/48th for years, and there was a time when you'd see the old F-106 kits going for absolutely ludicrous amounts on ebay. Some of those designs have since been covered by other companies, but even now, some people prefer the Monogram molds for one reason or another, in spite of the massive amounts of putty and scribing it takes to make them presentable.

Yeah, their quality is all over the map. In recent years, I believe they have even sold some reboxed Hasegawa molds? Or was it Hasegawa that reboxed their kits for release in Japan? I recall someone telling me their 1/48 Rafale was actually a very good kit, but I think that's one of the oddball Hasegawa crossovers, and I think the Idolmaster release was using that mold.

Can't say I expected anything beyond that. The 1/48 kits are at least the right aircraft though, whereas the 1/72 ones are adaptations of their mid-80s snap kits of the F-14A and prototype F-18, complete with molded-on missiles, and built-in intake covers, because those kits were released with the gear in the fixed down position.

Actual refund, or store credit? I'm not interested in cancelling, but that is odd for them to actually do it.

It's kind of a shortcut, but spraying/brushing the canopy frame's inside color over the canopy before spraying the exterior color is probably passable if you're building something with the canopy closed. Leaving the cockpit open, I'd probably want to paint the inside frame, though.

It's not the video itself, the embedding broke it. I had to break it out into a new window to see the whole frame, then it worked fine.

Oh, heh, I mis-phrased that.. I picked up the Y-Wing with the intention of redesigning it, but haven't gotten to it yet. Basically, while I wish I'd gotten an earlier Y-Wing with the full engine domes, the most recent design absolutely nailed the main fuselage. It's basically a greeblie-by-greeblie reproduction of the studio model, based on a quick comparison with my Bandai 1/72 kits. In fact, I love everything about it, save for the engine domes and the cockpit, which is just comically undersized and mis-proportioned. You know there's a problem with the scale when the UCS version uses the same sized cockpit as the minifig version. That A-Wing looks better than the Y-Wing, but still needs some work. I'm honestly just a sucker for using stacked plates for subtle curves, and the A-Wing suffers from the same mess of mixed slopes that plagued the UCS Slave I. It's better, but the disjointed sections don't blend well. Either way, I'll pick one up for the majority of the parts, because that canopy is going to probably reach Millennium Falcon cockpit levels of rarity. I'll just need to rebuild the leading edge structures.

I'm actually a little sad about the A-Wing, because it looks to me like LEGO pulled several ideas from a MOC I've seen tons of pics of... and managed to actually make it look worse than the original somehow. Probably because they cut down on the size so much. It's not terrible.. but it needs a rebuild/rework. The profile on the LEGO website is just way too thick from the oversized canopy. Really, the angled assembly of curved bricks building up the main body just winds up looking like a complete mess compared with the clean stacks of angled plates on the MOC version. I'll probably wind up grabbing one either way, to round out my collection of OT UCS fighter designs, but I've got no qualms about redesigning it mostly from scratch using the parts, which is what I did for the UCS Y-Wing as well.

Yeah, actually, I was going to say.. I can think of a few companies/organizations that might be really interested in the ideas behind your dissertation. Just depends on who you want to work for.

This actually turned out in my favor when I kitbashed a Max 1S from a broken 1A and a broken Roy 1S. The Max was missing the heatshield entirely, but I still had the black one from Roy.

This is very true. Arcadia has kind of flip-flopped on whether or not they glue them in. Some, like the plugs for the wing screws on the VF-0D just popped right out, but I almost had to drill out the plugs on my YF-19 to get the wing gloves apart for my wing mechanism mod. In comparison, Bandai just has a glue fetish.

Ok, the leg covers I'll give you, but the arm "screw covers" were stickers, and they didn't even match the plastic that I could see (probably a lighting effect). Maybe I'm weird, but I actually hate screw covers in general, because I enjoy being able to take things apart and put them back together, especially when things break and need fixing. The only thing screw covers do is ensure that I wind up damaging things while trying to get them apart.

Honestly, I'm tempted to see if I can't remove both tail modex markings like was done with the YF-19, where the white text came right off the top of the black. Removing both would make it really easy to just replace both with matching decals.

Looking very much like an extensive kitbash of several kits, including the Sv-51, Sv-262, and quite possibly chunks of any number of other aircraft. Really makes me want one though, and I would be very curious to see the entire transformation for that design.

That all looks aamzing! From what I understand, the front gear well should still be accurate, since I believe the entire forward fuselage assembly on the superhornet is identical to the original, so they could use the existing tooling. Can't honestly tell the difference on the rear ones though, you did a great job extending the smaller bays to fit.

Oh, those look gorgeous. I really need to take the time and do that some time. Assuming you sprayed them all?

That -might- work, though it will take a slight redesign of the pieces to be assembled that direction. If it comes down to it, yes, a lot of my parts could possibly be done that way in halves, similar to how I made my Shapeways version, but the larger problem then becomes that I do not trust printing large pieces flat, because they curl horribly. For instance, I would never print a wing shape flat. I might split it in half and place the wing root on the plate though, rather than printing the entire wing in one piece with the back edge downward, which is how I've done the tails already. I would have to run a few tests to see how well the details turn out printed on their sides. It's just a long process, since even these smaller parts take over twelve hours to print due to the fine layers and engravings. The bigger main wing will probably take over a full day.

Ugh, lower surfaces are the bane of my existence. I get great details and smooth printing as long as everything is on the sides or top, but I pretty much have to treat the print surface as the underside/backside of every part, which messes with how I actually want to orient the print layers. Have had some good success with printing more parts from my excalibur though. All this time spent working from home is great for keeping an eye on my printer.

Ahh, yeah, the Y-wing backplate? Seriously, IDing random kitbash bits that were used in my favorite science fiction designs is one of my favorite pasttimes. Edit: After watching it, I see I remembered an entirely different component.

I couldn't bring myself to jump on the Arcadia re-release. The gold paint actually doesn't look that bad, but the yellow tinted canopy kind of drove me off I think? Overall I think it just reminded me of the old Bandai DX 1/65 in a bad way.

I usually just fall back on the idea that engines are hot, and the material is either going to be be a darker metallic, or even if it's some sort of ceramic, it's going to scorch. I think this is a larger model that was used for close-ups in ROTJ. Great photos of the original ANH Red 5 here as well. http://www.modelermagic.com/?p=5942 The film models tended to just paint the nozzles like your typical jet engines.. which.. since they were literally the afterburner cans from J-79s kitbashed from an F-4 Phantom.. well.. Granted, it's science fiction, but part of what made the OT ships so realistic looking is cribbing details from real life. If you wanted a factory-fresh look, some kind of burnished titanium tone would work well, but all of the Alliance x-wings were clearly far from factory condition. The fun question I always wind up asking myself though... "Am I making a model of what a real X-Wing would look like, or am I trying to duplicate the individual details of the film miniatures?" It's a more complicated quandry than you might think, since while many details on the ships can be excused as some sort of intentional feature, other things aren't so easy to ignore. The molding flaws in the Saturn V stage sections used on the nacelles, the lack of nozzle details on the inner surface, and the odd circular hole between two vanes of both the fronts of the cannon housings and the exhaust details are harder to explain, and make me want to fix them to look "real."

Honestly, I think that looks nearly perfect. I would actually ramp up the shading toward the nozzles as well, maybe make the rear engine nacelles more uniformly dark. While I'm not sure the movie models were painted with metallic shades, that might look good on the nozzles themselves. I was going to suggest toning down the brightness of the yellow, but I can already see you're working on that with the upper nacelles, and weathering the rest of the ship like you have the back half should look great.

I'll say it flat out, one of my favorite things about Star Wars kits is that they generally don't need decals at all. I much prefer just masking and painting all the markings.

I'm kind of torn, because I also love the classic blue logo, but that does hit a few nice nostalgia bits seeing the logo I grew up with.