I’ve been largely ignoring the 1/24 Takara/Wave scopedog kits in my backlog and written them off as “will not build” after the 1/20 Bandai versions came out. The former requires a lot of work to make them look good enough whereas the Bandais were easier to build into nicer kits. Case closed?
Except I’ve been itching for the 1/35 Last Red Shoulder platoon kit from Wave (also Dengeki’s). Well not exactly 🙂 I’ve seen the Roots of Ambition conversion kits for the Sunsa mission, and the group of 4 in red shoulders, all customized with stowage, was a sight to behold.
Now these are tiny 1/35 kits unfortunately, they’re really smaller than your 1/144 gundam kits standing around just 11cm tall, AND they cost a lot – with the 14400 yen kit + 9800 yen conversion it’s a couple of hundred down for just these little guys. Since I have one 1/24 STTC finished with a couple still sitting in my closet, I can complete the team with a just a couple of 1/24 kits, with a Lehman/Liman command custom included. The cost should work out better and with more work I can end up with bigger sized models.
In the Roots of Ambitions OVA, the Sunsa battle sees former-enemies-turned-friends fighting in a platoon, with:
Baiman’s custom, having an arm solid shooter and no waist weapons, using a bazooka as hand weapon.
Chirico, having both the SMM missiles and gatling waist mounts and the destroyed right arm, using heavy machine gun.
Gregor, which I like the most, have no waist mounts and heavy track armor, 6-pack shoulder missile pod and heavy machine gun, with its very distinguished scope “rack”.
Muza, with short heavy machine gun and 2 waist mounts. Lightest of them all.
Finally Lehman, who did heavy battle with Chirico, having just gatling waist mount and the huge antenna backpack and a pile bunker. Lehman does not use the turbo custom legs.
I’ve also eliminated the option of creating the team from 1/20 scopedogs. There are Sunsa mission conversions for them from Rampage, but they don’t look good. Rampage seems to have them undersized, not to mention they’re way overpriced – they need you to buy the STTC conversion kit AND the Sunsa mission pack. No go.
So I went over to Yahoo Japan auction to look for my 1/24 Sunsa kits, bidding through a proxy service. I didn’t realize it but there were actually two separate issued versions – original Takara kits with resin add-ons, and later Wave kits with resin add-ons. The difference is that Takara kits has resin parts for fists and head, which were later converted into styrene counter parts in Wave kits. They aren’t the same, and after getting the respective kits I didn’t realize the resin fists were so much nicer than the really awful Wave ones. The cost ended up as slight markup from the original kit price + shipping, the latter was quite dramatic unfortunately. But it still works out well. Now it’s just a matter of me grinding through the conversions, all 5 of them!
Here is the Chirico kit, of the Wave variant. Chirico has a few ammo boxes in his back as stowage, and the special exposed right arm from the damage done by Lehman’s raid. You get a lot of nicely casted ammo boxes as well.
Inspired by a hardcore 1/24 Votoms fan, I not only narrowed the scopedog’s body like I used to, but also added height to the waist. This seems to pull the body up and make the kit look more energetic. I’m not doing the interiors to save time, and the cockpit hatch is glued on.
After a lot of hack jobs, this last cockout narrowing was the most successful, with carefully sawed off (0.5mm) piece from one side.
Here additional plaboards are added to increase height of the body and the width, so that the pelvis area doesn’t look too wide with the narrowed anemic waist.
Despite the work I’m enjoying this quite a bit. I ran through a number of Bandai kits lately and even though the subject matters differs, the build always feel the same as they’re rather simple to build. Instead it feels like I’m focusing the model kit experience on painting with the Bandai kits, which seems a bit lacking. Doing this hack-and-slash with these oldies bings the “building” part of modeling back and it’s been fun… but I can’t wait for it to be over since doing 5 of these guys can wear thin quick!