Nearly ready for the tabletop for big scenario games — a quartet of GR-45 Transport ships.  These are from the old AMT/ERTL Rebel Base Diorama plastic model kit.  That rebel base nominally hosted GR-75 freighters, but at 24cm long, the model fits the bill very nicely as the smaller GR-45 in X-Wing’s model scale of 1/270.

The ships are shown here just balanced on top of FFG’s large ship bases for the photographs.  For game play, I will be using 8cm x 8cm bases for them with the ship overextending each end.  Using any larger bases would be too problematic for the game mechanics.  Eventually these ships will go onto the CorSec Engineering’s Omni-Stands with telescopic rods.  (As soon as I have room in the budget to place an order with CorSec for a stack of large ship and shuttle sized flight stands.)

These ships took a minimal amount of work to assemble.  They just needed some good sized schmears of Testor’s Contour Putty to fill in some large gaps in some places where the 2 hull halves fit together poorly.  Then as usual, coated the putty with a thin layer of CA glue to harden it up.

Painting was very straightforward.  Primed them light grey, then added some minimal colour panels and ribbing, using a different colour on each ship.  Then went to town with heavy weathering using a variety of colours dry-brushed on.  Used slightly different combinations of weathering colours on each one for a subtle unique differentiation — they all haven’t been making identical shipping runs and have been exposed to different elements at different destinations.  Finished off the top surfaces with some lighter highlight dry-brushing.  When that was all dry, sprayed them with Dullcote for a flat finish.  Then after the Dullcote was dry, painted the engine glow and dry-brushed the light yellow light spill from the engines.  Engine glow is Clear Turn Signal Amber, applied very thickly and allowed to pool heavily in the recesses of the thruster rings.

****

Update: added additional engine detailing, blog entry here.