It's always the same
There's actually a short and typical (to me) story behind this model. Back in the elementary school I visited the Fantasiapelit shop with my friend every once in a while, just in case they had something interesting. At this time I had already bought and built my first MPC-manufactured Imperial Star Destroyer model. Once I noticed a box containing another MPC model, the Tydirium from the Return of the Jedi. I was really interested in buying it because I had always like the ship itself but I didn't happen to carry those 100 FIM in my pocket at that point. Of course I could've walked those 20+ meters to the ATM to get that (I didn't even have a debit card at that point in my life, just a simple ATM card, mind you), but I was stupidly lazy and thought that "I'll buy it the next time."Of course the next time happened to be the very next weekend. Guess, if that kit was available anymore? No, it wasn't, that one box was all they had ever had in that shop, as far as I know. I swore like a pirate.
Attempts to rectify my situation
A good bunch of years later I started - to torture myself I guess - browsing eBay and of course there were unopened boxes of this model. But how could I have bought one at that time when I didn't have a credit card and neither did anyone I knew, for some reason or another. I couldn't and that's how it was.Many more years after that, when I had finally joined the broadband world (yes, the story and I are both that old) I got to know and even became friends with some people on the other side of the Atlantic.
Somehow I agreed with one of them that she'd bid for one of those kits on my behalf, send it to me and then I'd pay her back for all her trouble - obviously. There was one question: "how high are you ready to go?" and my reply was simply "I need that :P". The following day I was the happy owner of an old model kit and all in all one hundred euros poorer. Yes, instead of paying 100FIM I paid 100Eur (about six times more) but I guess that's how it goes when you waste ten years...
That packet took quite a while to get here, a few weeks even. When I finally got my large box in my hands I noticed curious markings on its sides. As everyone knows I live in Finland but for some obscure reason my box was first sent to Thailand instead, where they rerouted it somewhere else (IIRC it went back to States according to the logs) with a friendly "out of gors" scribbled on top. Dear USPS people, what's the difference between Finland and Thailand, hm? :)
Didn't matter, I was happy to get this model at last and I showed it by bouncing around the office, to the amusement of my coworkers.
Assembling after a 10 year wait
There's not horribly much I can tell about the assembly, other than some faded memories, so I'll skip most of them. One major issue was the joining of the right side wing and the hull. It was either badly done or I had ruined something while building (the left wing went in and worked just fine), because switching from the landing mode to the flight mode and back wasn't smooth at all. So I had to cut and file a bit to get the pieces together.The world of choices
While building I noticed that one has to make a permanent choice at some point: which mode it's in, flying or standing. If it was going to be standing on its landing gear, it couldn't be set up in the flying mode at all because the landing bay doors would block the wings. And if it's flying it would stand on its belly because the doors would be glued shut. Somehow I had thought you could alternate between these modes freely but that was not the case. Of course if the landing gear was built as retractable, it would've been way too flimsy to support the weight of the model. |
| The ramp opens! |
I decided to build it more or less complete in the [landed] mode, take a couple of photos and then finish the model in the [flying] mode. This is because I definitely wanted to have it flying around instead of sitting on its armored butt. It's just a huge, huge shame that the few pics I took are so awful :|
There's not much to say about the paint job itself. It was done with a paintbrush + some drybrushing, with Revell's enamel paints - two shades of gray. Some gun parts were painted with Citadel's Gunmetal (for some reason I thought at that point that guns needed to have metallic parts) and the engine ports were painted with Revell's glossy white. Somehow I didn't take any publishable pictures from the rear side of the model and I didn't remember to take new ones for this post, sorry.
SHU Ondiv
Because this project wouldn't have even been started without my friend Ondiv, I named the vehicle after her. Oh and besides, there's been enough of Lambda-class shuttle models named Tydirium, don't you think? |
| Mode: landed |
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| Mode: landed |
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| Mode: flying |
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