Bandai Star Blazers Mecha Collection EDF Destroyers

Here are some pictures of two complete Bandai Mecha Collection No. 12 EDF Destroyer from Space Battleship Yamato aka Star Blazers. Each kit comes with a pair of ships. One set I decided to accurize a bit. The nose is wrong, the aft engine cone comes to too sharp a point, and whatever that senson thing is on top of the bridge should be streamlined to come to a point at the aft end. I also sharpened up some of the details, like those wing-like things that support some sort of streamlined things on the end. I whittled them down so they have sharp leading and trailing edges.

I decided to make the other pair have wave motion guns. For some reason, all the EDF ships except destroyers have this, so I figured the wave motion gun would eventually end up on destroyers, too. I used Evergreen tube that I cut to shape and sanded down, and puttied the inside to have a smooth concavity.

I printed decals to try to upgrade the look of the ships to the standard of SBY 2202, which is pretty faithful to the look of the otiginal series but with far better production values. I don't think there were ever any hull markings in the original series, but these were added in SBY 2199 and continuing with 2202. I don't think there is anything about the look of these new series that isn't an improvement over the old.

I didn't want to bother with printing white on my ALPS printer (frankly, it's been so long since I used it, I would need a refresher). Instead, I drew all the artwork in AutoCAD 2013 and made sure white areas would be color #FFFFFF so nothing would print there.

For the modified destroyers with the wave motion gun, I modified the plaque by shaving off the kanji that say "destroyer." This I replaced with a decal with Japanese writing that's clear with a blue background, applied over white paint. These ships are named Ikazuchi and Inazuma, poetic terms for "Lightning" and "Thunder." Two Fubuki-class destroyers built in the 1930s had these names.

I really like the trick of lighting starships with fluorescent paint illuminated by UV light. I recall doing this on my MPC X-Wing fighter back in 1978, and lighting up the afterburners of my model jet fighters that way, too.