Bandai Star Wars minis

Project start 2020-09-26

I picked up a few of these some time ago in an attempt to get a friend hooked on scale models. She got hooked allright..on Lego. So the little snap-tites languished in the stash for a while.
Only two of them are likely to be built in canonical configurations and markings, so I guess these are both Sci-Fi and What-Iffery
Oddly, the minis need more work to turn them into good looking models than their 1/72 counterparts. The scale is just too small to do any sensible multicolour tricks in plastic, so while paint is mostly optional with the bigger ones, the minis really need it. While the 1/72 models come with both decals and stickers, the minis have only stickers, and that's just nog going to work. I used a combination of the stickers and the 1/72 decal sheets to create (somewhat simplified) replacement decals.

I never liked the "nasty bug" black and orange scheme of Poe's special, but one of the kits was just that, and consequently moulded in black plastic, so I had to use that as the base colour. I swapped out the orange for gold, and reverted the "ace special" rear end with the extra engine to a regular configuration.
The next one assumes there was a need for a high speed interceptor variant, created by replacing half of the guns (and their attendant power drain) with missile pods, allowing the ships to engage agile targets long before closing to gun range, possibly without ever diverting power to the remaining guns. This clearly has nothing to do with the fact that I have a whole bunch of flawed 3D printed rocket pods lying around hoping for a purpose, what a silly idea..
Can't have Star Wars without a certain modified freighter Weathering leaves much to be desired; somehow, this one just didn't want to look properly grubby.
I decided to subject Green 5 to some abuse. The greebles area behind the cockpit, and part of the tail were painted light grey, and then the lot was hit with a wash made up of a mixture of Vallejo 'steel' and 'red leather', as were the engines. It's too red for the engines, but over grey it works well. The engines were hit again with a 'gunmetal' wash, which took some of the edge of the red. I also gave is a dusting with grey chalk, hoping to bring out some surface detail, but the effect was limited.
I used a wash made up of yellow ochre and gunmetal for the engines, and over the greebles this time. I like the look on the engines, but the previous redder version is better for the greebles. The whole ship also got a light grey wash; this didn't bring out as much detail as I'd hoped, but it certainly is a good grubby base coat.
I had doubts about my ability to reproduce the happy accident of the light grey wash on the red T-65, so some experimentation was called for. Finemolds suggest a 70:30 mix of white and FS16440 as the overall colour of an X-wing. I lightened that even further to 4:1, and shot that all over the plain areas of this Y-wing. I think I'll be using this specific recipe a lot for any white bits that just look too stark when painted white (like SF fighters, usually). Only a light grey wash for the lighter bits this time, while the greebly parts were drybrushed with very light grey before the reddish wash.