The Kit
Brand: Hasegawa
Scale: 1/72
Media: Injection Plastic
The Subject
First introduced in 2008, the VF-1 was developed for the UN Spacy using Overtechnology obtained from the Macross alien spaceship. It would remain as the mainstay fighter throughout what would be called Space War 1. The VF-1 is capable of space flight and is able to have FAST packs attached to it to increase performance and ordinance.
The VF-1 is designed to be able to transform into a bipedal humanoid ‘Battroid’ mode and a hybrid ‘Gerwalk’ mode where the VF-1 takes on the look of a fighter jet with a pair of arms and legs. In Gerwalk mode, the VF-1 has the additional capability of VTOL operations and is able to skim the surface like a hovercraft. In Battroid mode, the VF-1 is pretty much capable of replicating human movements and most importantly, go into hand-to-hand combat with enemies.
The VF-1A is the most common variant of the VF-1 with a single laser turret on its head unit in Battroid mode and serves as the standard fighter for the enlisted ranks.
Info based on the anime series The Super Dimensional Fortress Macross, not Robotech 😉
Info from Wikipedia
The Build
This is my second VF-1 build although it’s been more than 10 years since I finished the last one. Unlike the previous one, I decided to do a straight OOB build with the brown and white grunt color scheme from the TV series which strangely was never kitted by Hasegawa.
The kit is designed to be built in sub-assemblies that are different from typical aircraft kits. The major components are: nose and front fuselage, tail section, the main engines and the arms. One annoying thing is you pretty much have to paint and mask off the exhausts before assembling the engines. Otherwise though this was a pretty straightforward build. Being a Hasegawa kit, it’s not a shake and bake kit but I wouldn’t call it challenging either. It’s just that at 1/72 scale, there are a lot of very tiny clear parts that require a lot of concentration to get right.
For this build, I decided to try using black primer as a base instead of my usual gray or white. One nice result is that the base now acts like a preshade for the other colors. What surprised me however was how hard it was to cover the black base with white color: it kept looking like a gray, no matter how many layers I sprayed on. This is especially evident in the main engines. Also, some of the smaller parts didn’t get the black primer treatment and the colors look slightly different. So this is something to keep in mind for me for future builds.
The colors I used for this build were:
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The whole kit is basically brown and white with Dark Seagreen for the gun. So while the color scheme is straight forward, there was quite a bit of masking to be done especially on the engines which required masking over compound curves.
Markings-wise, I referred to how it appears in the anime, meaning it doesn’t have the black stripes and almost all the other warning markings. I was pleasantly surprised by the ease of use of the Samueldecal sheet. Even stacking the decals wasn’t as PITA as I thought it would be. A slight problem was that I found some of the decals had gone out of position after it has dried. Oh well. If you looked carefully, I actually used both Prometheus and SDF-1 markings on the tailfins. I’ll just explain by saying this particular VF-1A (unit 013) serves on both carriers. 😀
The kit was then given a thorough panel line wash with Vallejo Dark Gray Model Wash with no additional weathering given. As usual with my aircraft models, this build had a few disasters that I had to fix. Nothing major happened but it’s still annoying.
So there you have it, another queen off my long list of shelf queens. I’m happy to finally complete it although I think I would do some things differently to speed up the build the next time I tackle another VF-1 kit.
Number 2 of 2016
