It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here, I know. Sorry about that. I’ve been busy. Partly work, partly not. One of the things I’ve been busy with since I last posted is getting somewhat obsessed with the X-Wing miniatures game. It’s a fun and in-depth tactics game involving little Star Wars spaceships, so regular followers of this blog will see why I like it. But I don’t want to talk about the game itself today.
Because I’ve also been getting caught up in the arts and crafts aspect of the hobby. Mostly that’s meant repainting ships, which I’ve done a whole lot of. But from time to time I’ve also made my own ships. That started with an extremely rough and ready extra TIE Fighter I made not long after getting the starter set, purely to beef up my rather thin Imperial roster. Two years or so on, I now have all the TIE Fighters I could ever want and my ship-building has switched to the vessels that don’t yet exist in the game.
The first proper project I undertook was Director Krennic’s shuttle from Rogue One. When that was a success I moved on to something a bit more challenging, with more colour and a lot more surface detail – the Consular-Class Republic cruiser that appears at the beginning of the Phantom Menace and throughout the Clone Wars. That went very well, and I still love looking at it up on my bookcase. Now that a growing slate of Republic ships are appearing in the game, I’m looking forward to flying it properly.
But what I’ve always really wanted to tackle was the Rebel medical frigate that first appeared in the Empire Strikes Back. The Nebulon-B Escort Frigate, to give it its proper name, is one of the most iconic and gorgeous big ships in Star Wars, its unorthodox shape making for an extremely visually interesting ship that combines power and fragility, as well as a wealth of details that make it a model-maker’s dream. Or nightmare, depending how you look at it. I’ve tried making one before, early in my X-Wing career. I built a 1:350 scale one out of foamcore, card and paper-clay.
The card Nebulon-B. It’s lost its stand and static discharge vanes in the intervening years.
This went OK and I had a lot of fun doing it, but you can’t get a lot of detail out of card and it turned out I’d made it too big to really be practical to use in-game. As my shipmaking skills grew, I knew I wanted to revisit it and make a slightly smaller Nebulon-B out of plastic.
This summer, I did.
Ancient Worlds 