A case of order-delivery process

21.8. - Searching

In the final days of August I got inspired and started searching for a new element to my collection of weird junk. Being a tightwad of sorts I just checked the BBTS' price for a reference point (they also had eyewatering S&H prices and even more importantly, they were legally obliged to visually ruin what I wanted with a couple of orange pieces of plastic, which did not inspire me either). Next on my list I checked the Japanese 'zon but I hadn't got an account there (I had this weird idea of the European UK/DE Amazons syncing but maybe I had created my accounts so long ago I had just forgotten) and the prices in the East were over 2x over the ones shipped to the USA (also ruined with excess plastic pieces in the country of origin).

Within my own continent the German and British stores had suspiciously cheap artifacts listed. The explanation was that they were the not-so-obediently-licences-things kind of things. Damn.

Still, the collector bug had bit me and I ended up thinking seriously how bad the difference between a knockoff and an official piece were. The end result of my studying was that no, not bad at all. If nothing else, this could provide me with a sure and absolute answer to the question "Do I want to own the official version despite the price tag?" and if that answer was going to be along the lines of True I could just order one and this one could be donated to the Project Assistants for playing. Or I could bring it to the office as decoration!

28.8. - Placing the order

After wasting some more days pondering and changing my mind I gave my written orders to the German Amazon and started waiting. Of course I could've ordered the exact same thing from ebay as well, I just had not thought of it. Perhaps I thought, in the back of my sick mind, that this could prove to be less of a hassle in practice, in vain, as I was 100% certain of having to pick up the phone and call the customs office for item codes.

I pixelated the example pic just for the fun of it, even an eyeless person would recognize this

Waiting

The box had started its journey on the 30th and I was perfectly prepared to wait for about twenty days before anything of importance was going to happen. Of course I was refreshing the "track package" view a number of times per day just in case my order pinged at a checkpoint somewhere along its route. Every single time it was the same: no updates.

11.9. - Reception

On a Wednesday morning I arrived to work as usual, turned on the lights, started the coffee machine, being the first one in. Stumbled to my workstation half-awake and found a surprising cardboard box on the corner of my desk! It hadn't been stopped by the customs, even as I was so sure it was going to be in their clutches for a painfully long amount of hours while the bureaucracy grinded forward. Not that I was complaining, no no no.

11.9. - Deboxification

Of course I had to open the actual box right away, immediately, stat! I was giddy as a schoolboy, as Dr. Jones put it. On the topmost blister we had a set of spare faces, a key to Vector Sigma, a mistreated alternative chest plate, the mind control helmet, a laser dagger/sword, a pistol, an energy mace with a posable and a freely floating energy chain, a flight stand and a silencer. Giggle giggle.

Following the packing order the bottom blister had Megatron himself with his forearm-mountable cannon. I may have chuckled out loud for the nth time in a short time. Luckily I was still alone at the office, the hour being indecent and all, so I didn't get any odd looks.

Oh yeah, there was also an instruction booklet, but 98% of the textual content was 100% useless for me, as I didn't understand a single character that was not from the Latin alphabet %)

At some point, while I was detaching the Fusion Cannon that I had just quickly installed on his forearm, you know, to see if it fit, I accidentally pressed on the button on it. It had come with batteries installed! Again, I may have laughed out loud, after being briefly spooked by the unexpected sound effect.

In the mode 1 the cannon played out the transforming sound, it had both the sounds of transforming into the robot form and into the alternative mode.
The mode 2 played a Megatron quote from the Japanese version of the cartoon, it had a set of five, obviously I didn't understand a word. After reading what they were I could almost get them. Now the world was just missing a Frank Welker sound chip...
Mode 3 played the firing sound of the Fusion Cannon. Kaboom! KABOOM!

Muah!

The minion of MP-13B

Deficiency of my cassette collection

When searching for MP-02 I was grumbling about that Soundwave only coming with five out of six of his most important cassette minions, as Ratbat was solely bundled with the black version (MP-13B). This summer I realized that someone could sell just the individual minicassettes and started searching. Before long I found myself in ebay and of course someone was offering a Ratbat for mere 8€ (incl. S&H).

A couple of weeks later

The guesstimate for delivery was almost three weeks in the future, so I wasn't really holding my breath. Then, two whole days before the first day of the timeframe I noticed a padded envelope on the desk next to mine. I obviously assumed it was for a colleague, who occasionally had worked there. My well-intended idea was to take it to him, as I had seen him in the café area a while earlier, so I rechecked the recipient's name and oops, it was for me instead!

The bells in my head were still silent, because as I said, I wasn't expecting to get my order delivered in at least a week. Only when the bubble-wrap revealed a small, magenta-coloured transparent plastic box, I got super excited. Of course I showed the thing happily around the office, only Tuomas from IT knew to appreciate my shoppings. Oh well, at least I wasn't the only one who thought it was cool!

Ratbat

"The road is my dinner plate." 

"Has no friends, only business partners... his only allegiance is to himself. Refuels by plunging his mecha-fangs into new cars' gas lines -- the better made the car, the better the gasoline tastes. Maximum flying speed: 104 km/h. Carries two radar-guided, free-electron lasers that detect the presence of an object as small as a fly. Wings contain mechanical sensors for locating fuel sources. Has 30cm wingspan that can enlarge to three meters. Wings are vulnerable to artillery."

In the old Marvel comics Ratbat was the baddie who told Trypticon what to do, bossed / scared the fleshlings on the Decepticon's paradise island resort and who knows what else. Sadly I've forgotten so much over the years, and as I gave away my pretty-well set up collection of the comics (those that were translated to Finnish in the late '80s - early '90s) about an eon ago, I couldn't really refresh my memories.

The great overseer of fuel consumption, the minion of the Comms Officer of the Deceptions, the sixth minicassette minion. That was it, now this part of my collection was complete.

Specs

Strength      **********
Intelligence  ********** 
Speed         ********** 
Endurance     ********** 
Rank          ********** 
Courage       ********** 
Firepower     ********** 
Skill         **********

The toy

A slightly bothering little detail was that the cassette container was coloured like a charged Energon Cube. Or maybe it worked nicely with the nature of the character. At any rate, I was certainly not going to order more stuff just to get a clear plastic box for him to keep the set looking uniform.

Cassette form

As all the other minicassettes, the Masterpiece Ratbat was wonderful. Funnily enough, now that I was rechecking these photos, I noticed that the shape in the front face of the cassette looked like a skull.

Bat

Because Ratbat's body was pretty small compared to the massive wings, the transforming process required while forming the torso the outer edges of the cassette and the center piece were to be rotated around and bent over a few times. It was gorgeous!

"What is your command, commander Ratbat?"

The spacey undercarriage

A problem

The first and the largest problem with those feet I cut off so many years ago was that simply regluing them in place wasn't just that easy and simple. Judging by the profile of the bits I had just cut and snapped them off with side cutters, very crudely. That had made the potential contact surface incredibly narrow and as the paws were supposed to carry to full weight (increased by the greeblies) of the model, I had to reinforce it somehow.

My great idea was to check if someone had made a 3d model of them and then print out replacements. Nope, no one had done that, not for this exact model nor just about anything else, either.

An attempt to fix it

My go-to reinforcement method so far has been lenghts of paperclip, that has worked with OmniMechs and whatnot pretty nicely. Just as I was going to get working I realized I had somehow misplaced my old Citadel-made pin vise drill and I really couldn't find it anywhere in the house. So I bought a new one that came with a couple of different sized drill bits too (they had a set with something like 20 different drill bits as well, but I wasn't quite that mad yet).

I started by cutting off two pieces per landing gear and by bending them into a useful angle for these purposes. Those pieces I superglued onto the mangled landing gears. After that I drilled a few holes into the also badly mangled landing gear bays so I could install these later.

At this point I had realized that it wasn't going to be enough. Most likely this setup would need some diagonal support in the form of push-rods or something. That wouldn't end up looking just like in the movies, but the way I saw it, actual planes also had structures like the things I was imagining in my mind, the end result would look kind of plausible.

Update

My approach didn't work. The installation was not succesful and the paperclip bones did not fit in (and they had no good grip inside the spaceframe, either). Maybe this was all foreseeable, but it was something I had to try.

I was pondering if I should try to scratchbuild new ones out of styrene. Most likely it'd be a too ambitious a thing to start with in a model this prominent. Especially as I had no proven skills in that area of the hobby. I decided to sleep on it.

Shuttle washing

Highlighting

Those bits that I had not touched up with white I worked on with a grey wash (Vallejo Model Wash for dark & grey vehicles (76516 Grey)). Perhaps that could've been applied on the off-white bits too, but I'd test that out on the underbelly first, because if that wash ruined the white it'd still be easily fixable - or kept on on the potentially superdirty underside of the shuttle.

I began with the most unnoticeable part, the front bottom section of the cockpit module. Then I went through the whole module pretty rapidly, concentrating on the funkiest surfaces and details. Some kind of a brighter spot of colour (red, green, blue on a cable, a button) might improve the area by breaking up the slightly monotone grey world. Perhaps, perhaps.

The front-facing hull parts of the shuttle were going to be mostly overshadowed by the cockpit module, but I knew that the washing would still improve it greatly. Maybe I could've even used brown or even black wash on some areas, but I felt that the grey wash worked just fine.

I had not touched the inside of the shuttle after all, as I was going to glue the ramp in the closed position when I got that far in the reinstallation. The ramp just didn't look good enough to be kept open anymore.

On the rear side the general look with the twin laser cannon was a bit better after a wash, but I couldn't help thinking that maybe the cable-like things might work better in black. Just like on the underside of the cockpit module, a few monotony-breaking details could bring a great deal of improvement with little effort. Those laser gun barrels I'd most likely paint black, because gunmetal (not to mention brighter steel or even chrome) would not quite sit well there, in my imagination.

To summarize: within a few process steps I might add a couple of silly spots of colour to break the grey overall look. The wings were ok so I wasn't going to do anything to them, unless something required a new quick blast of off-white. This'd get done at the same time with the engine cowling, that, as the photo showed, was still grey and unfinished.

A storm of nines

def get_blog_age(self):
    age = 9 # ref. Rise of Skywalker
    return age

Right. Nine full years done. This last year has been a slow one, kinda like the previous one was, if you were looking at it from the scale modeling perspective. Other, more pressing things have eaten much more time and those have not fit the theme requirements of this silly blog.

Pygame

I'm somewhat ashamed of admitting this publicly, but the python bit up there was my first (and ridiculous) three rows of code since April 2018! Maybe at some point I should get up to speed and install python 3, a new pygame and their friends on my 'puter to rejoin my goalless game project. Most likely I'd push the existing codebase to /dev/null and begin with something new, because just looking at the post history the last time I wrote about it was five years ago (part IX, what a coincidence!).

Gaming

Yes, I admit, I've been pretty lazy over the last couple of years and easily jumped on reducing my incredibly Steam backlog. In a sense it's been good that the Project Assistant I has enjoyed Minecraft more and more, as that has caused some competition over keyboard time on my machine and I've then had less convenient excuses for slacking off with modelings.

In the 'Mumblings I've only mumbled about Battletech and Stellaris (spoiler warning: that one's still waiting for its turn after SHU Ondiv's cycle) because I have somehow thought that no one would be too interested in my comments about Stacking, Costume Quest, Brütal Legend, Bridge Constructor Portal, Deadbolt, Broken Age, Mudrunner or the old Shadow Warrior, nor that I had anything interesting to say about them. Perhaps I'd jump next on to Production Line, it might prove cool with its Factorio influences. Could be cool, could be boring for you, I'll make up my mind much, much later.

Scale models

During the last 365 days I have started a decent-ish amount (6) of models, of which four were made by Metal Earth Models. There's been a YT-1300 LF, Slave I, Tiger I, Soundwave and Ju-87, with the still-ongoing restoration of the Lambda-class Shuttle. The last two were the only ones have been tagged for this year, the last four were all of last year's cases (my working and reporting schedules have been gently offset lately: the IX/2017 wrapping up came out almost exactly a year ago) were built in the last months of 2018, the final one's reportage ended up early 2019. If you thought about it, a project per two months wasn't too bad, but as the MEM sets have always lasted a few silly evenings a piece, the time has disappeared somewhere.

This year looked like, should I say, embarrassing this way. Maybe I could finish up three projects. And what would I go for after the shuttle? The Königstiger w/ interior has been waiting for three years now, easily, should that get bumped to the top of the pile? That one wouldn't end up being done in this time, though...

Numbers through the history

for number in numbers:
    crunch(number)

All in all, at the time of writing this post I had typoed up 486 posts, of which 2 were still in the draft phase and 3 were scheduled, 4 were waiting for their translations for various reasons. In the last month the blog had been read 116 times and during all these years a grand total of 41104 viewings (wtff). All that has never ceased to amaze me because I've been writing this to amuse myself and I haven't advertised this anywhere. Insane stuff.

Unique highlights

Pondering by my paint collection

I was perusing my paint collection and the first paint I picked was perhaps my least favourite of the light greys I owned (VMA 71121 USAF Light Grey), because I thought it'd be a nicely subtle one for this model in few select places. As the second one I opted for RLM light blue (VMA 71101 Hellblau RLM 78) and decided that two were just enough.

The chaoticness of the end result could've been increased by painting different masked-off boxes with different paints, to companse the symmetrical layout of the highlightable panels. I decided to paint them all symmetrically, anyway, and I didn't feel that this was going to make it boring. I was just somehow reminding myself how many approaches I could've taken here.

Filling the trapezoids

I started my painting process by airbrushing the light grey to the front boxes of the fixed wing and the long rectangles in the rear part of the bottom halves of the folding wings. Those just felt like the best candidates in my mind's eye for this shade that, as I said before, was not among my favourites.

All the remaining areas I painted with Luftwaffe's light blue that worked very nicely in this white-grey ship, in my opinion. The thought of adding a tiny amount of grey violet (RLM 75) did pop in my mind at some point, but I stuck to my original decision of using few colours.

Masklessness

The midpoint result after removing the masking tapes looked pretty neat. Maybe I'd still have to touch up on the fixed wing's left rear side with some insignia white, but otherwise I was more than content. Later on I'd wash the front and back areas of grey in the hull, but the white areas I most likely was going to leave as-is. I was somewhat afraid of even a light wash being too strong here.

Masking some wing panels

Masking tape, yay!

As like almost everything else, one could paint and style the Lambda-class shuttles whichever way one wanted to. Just like the great Bob Ross said: "You can do anything you like, it's your world". I decided to be halfway boring and instead of strong personalization I'd do a couple of panels in grey - of two different shades, even!

I started by choosing the second to last right trapezoid -shaped block from the ends of the folding wings, on the sides that were going to end up facing inside. Both were masked the same way, but I could've of course done the inner shape on the other one only, for variety.

On the fixed wing the three boxes on the rear end caught my eyes, perhaps they were a bit too obvious, even. Still, I chose the lot of them again.

My process

Before we get to the photos I thought I'd mention why I was wasting your time and my drive space with masking process pics. According to my own hazy memory I hadn't documented my working steps decently or properly in ages, no matter which part of the process was in question, I'd just gone with a light "this is where it was and this is what it ended up" set of photos and explanations.

Not that I had any delusions of thinking that someone was reading my Project Mumblings to learn something new or to compare approaches in applying masking tape :D This was again something to satisfy my need to add some variety to these posts and here we got, me telling and showing what I did and how, for a change

Right. Because all the outer edges in this group were such that I could just pull four lenghts of tape to cover all of it, I started with the two tiny bits in between them. I was going to paint the insides and the bumps, so everything around them was to be protected. For that I applied two bits of tape tightly on the surface I wanted to protect and pressed the tape very snugly along the outer edges of the panel lines.

Next I made incisions along the panel lines with my xacto knife. The obvious benefit of a sharp blade was that I could cut the tape easily without having to resort to using force and then also scouring the plastic itself.

With some gentle poking with the tip of the blade the excess tape came off nicely. At this point everything looked to be in order.

All of this was done on both sides of the wing in a couple of silly minutes. The biggest hindrance was the shuttle itself, as I had to balance it on the table and between the table and my leg, to support it and to keep the wings from being bent.

To avoid excess boringness I wanted something else on the fixed wing than just the three boxes I already half-complained being obvious. I chose a small trapezoid from the leading edge and taped around it. As said, I did all this identically on both sides, even though nothing really forced me to do things that way.

The last panels

Now I was left with the bottom surfaces of the rotating wings, that were soon going to be the outer sides. Maybe boringly I did those identical as well and masked off a right angle trapezoid from the tip of the wing.

As my last highlightable panel a long rectangle that ran lengthwise along the rear edge from the bend towards the tip was chosen. That just felt like a nice part to bump up a notch.

Mere seconds before turning the compressor on

As this subheading said, just before I started painting I utilized a ridiculous amount of post-it notes to protect my model from overspraying. This was to be done because some of the tape masks were a bit narrower than my paranoia with my airbrushing allowed.

Bright white highlight

I had been going back and forth inside my mind, if I should or should not use a tiny bit of bright white as a highlight for the shuttle. There were two concerns that I had: either the effect was way too strong and it'd ruin the whole off-white idea, or that it was completely unnoticeable. The thing going for it was that if it worked, it'd be a subtle but neat little thing.

In the end I decided to give it a shot, as ruining the whole model was pretty unlikely and if my concern #2 was going to be the way things went, I would've only wasted a bit of masking tape, time and a few drops of paint.

Protective masking

Only the recently painted cockpit interior needed any special protection, as everything else was already white on some level. I applied masking tape very strictly along the outer edges of the canopy edges and the empty space I was going to cover with a piece of kitchen paper. The point of the lump of paper was just to protect from the paint spraying from the zenith, the sides weren't an issue because I wasn't going to be pointing from those angles anyway.

Highlighting

First I blasted some pure white (VMA 71001 White) on the cockpit part and from there I proceeded to spray the wings and the spaceframe. I held on to the hull from the bottom so that I also kept the wings as tightly shut in the landing mode as I could. I did most of my airbrushing from a "straight above" angle, but for the wing tips I did some variation, just to help those a bit. The distance was always kept as what I'd call respectable, 'cause I didn't want a strong effect, just a gentle highlight.

In the photo below the bits were drying (that thin a layer was most likely already dry, but I wanted to be safe). If nothing else, it clearly wasn't an overstrong effect, so all was good so far.

A cockpit update

Going my own way

This project pretty much begun with me searching for reference pics of the cockpit. Comparing to the Lambda-class shuttle cockpits in the movie this model has surprisingly few details in common, and I certainly wasn't going to go down the road of insane detailing. So I pulled a decision from my sleeve to use few colours for the buttons and displays (black, white, red, metal) even if a couple more would've been at home there (that meant I skipped a terminal-green and blue).

The basic bits

I started my detailing process by applying dark grey (still the same VMA 71123 USAF Dark Grey) to some of the surfaces that had gotten a bit too much overspray during the airbrushing sessions, such as the console panels. On the plain surfaces the very gentle hint of grey/white was just fine, as the overall look remained dark. While I was at it I also painted the frame edges where the viewport glass was going to be glued, as if it worked for airplanes, it was surely work here as well.

To give this cockpit a bit more worn-in look I drybrushed some surfaces with Steel (VMA 71065), which I also used for some randomish bits on the outside of the cockpit and the hull itself. The most noticeable marks of wear and tear I made on the door panels and the ramp in front of it. Finally I did a very gentle drybrushing of Steel on all the buttons, switches and displays.

Detailing

Both on the left and rights sides of the door was a set of lamps. In the Return of the Jedi they were a bit like blue WLAN signal strength markings. This model, on the other hand, had three light panels that I decided to drybrush with pure white (VMA 71001). My idea was that it'd look pretty nicely, but it wouldn't still be an attention-stealer.

Then I kept on applying white drybrushing over the buttons, because in my world just about all of them were going to be like that. For a short moment I was thinking if the light panels should later be treated with a satin or gloss varnish, but most likely they'd look more wet than shiny.

Now it was the turn of the displays and the things that looked like good old-fashioned dials on the dashboard to get black (VGC 72051). I decided that the plain black was going to be only a very limited thing and in very tightly contained number of things in the cockpit itself.

Next I returned with the white paint to add detailing to the displays I had just given a black backdrop. Both the pilot and the copilot (I was assuming) had somethingthat looked like a <= 14" CRT display in front of them. The leftmost one got a series of dotty rows to represent lines of text as an idea of a text-based status information or a system log, whatever they were reading from their MFD. To the rightmost one I tried to paint some kind of a X/Y axis for coordinates, for example.

Finally I took a bit of red (VMA 71085 Ferrari Red) and touched up a few buttons and button-like protrusions. Some of them were lonely and some were in small groups. What were they all about? I hadn't got a clue, some may have been "don't touch this self destruction thing accidentally!" kind of warning colours, some "this is important, so it's clearly highlighted" and so on. As I had thought before, maybe some keys could've been painted green and blue, without looking out of place, but at this stage I didn't feel the need for it.

Reinstalling the seats

As soon as these things were done for the cockpit, I glued the seats back in. Back in the day I had painted them, maybe according to the instructions, maybe because I just felt like it, with plain brown on the cushionage and lightish grey on the edges and backs. The contrast was strong and it looked kinda silly to me.

Now I repainted them with the dark grey (VMA 71123). Thanks to the overspraying effect I mentioned above, they were now clearly darker than the floor but not outrageously so. The seating part (the cushionlike part) I now painted flat black (VGC 72051). In my mind they now looked like a believable "metal frame with some sort of a disgustingly uncomfy vinyl-like padding" scenario.

The white bits, part 2

Finishing the wings

This was a pretty straightforward step in my project, plodding on the same tracks as the last time. Now I mixed my paint much more angrily, so the annoying half-dry paint spatters didn't cause issues

I begun by painting the bits I held onto before and proceeded to touch up the greebled trenches in the wings, just to be sure. Some of those needed another run, anyway.

Then I rotated the wings up and in a neverending circular motion airbrushed them with off-white. To finish up the session I attacked a few sections again, such as the shoulder-mounted double blasters' curved shield plates and the front edges of the hull armour (the front-facing surfaces I just covered with a post-it note to keep them not turning white by accident).

A generic look-around

Just to show how the whole thing had changed I took photos from the back and the front, also to show the greeblies. Of course they'd be much more impressive if the photos weren't scaled down so far, but I wasn't going to upload massive pics just to show a #wip feature.

I was surprisingly happy with the effect at this point. Of course there were some things that I was going to end up fixing still, but that's how it's always been and will remain so.