Long time no post.  A trip out of town, a busy month at work, and the worst cold and subsequent respiratory virus I’ve had in years has kept me away from modeling.  This is the first weekend in over a month that I’ve actually sat down to do some building.  So, on with it…

The Vipers in the Battlestar Galactica universe have multiple RCS (reaction control system) thrusters throughout the airframe.  These are the same types of mini-rocket thruster nozzles that the Space Shuttle and indeed any other real-world spacecraft use to maneuver in the vacuum of space.  The kit comes with decals to depict these, but I want a little more 3-D realism, so I’m drilling them.  The first photo shows the tape that I’m using to lay out all of the lines that the RCS fall upon so that I can get everything nice and straight.  I have the first three drilled into the top of the nose, and I had to do them three times before I got them to my liking.

The next photo is of the lower part of the fuselage.  As with most models that give you an in-flight or landing gear option, if you close up the gear doors, they don’t fit too well.  Much filling and scribing has been done to get them to this point.  If I do another of these models with the gear up, I’ll simply block off the openings with sheet styrene and rescribe all of the joint lines freehand.

The final photo is the top engine.  It’s a separate piece, so it gets painted before assembly.  This is simply the gloss black primer, prepping for the application of some metallic paints and wiring details.