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Strike Rouge is built from the spare parts of the original Strike, in the war crunch time when its pilot Cagalli wanted to kick ass.
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Strike Rouge Without the Aile pack. I like the design of Strike very much - very utilitarian without being too flashy, yet maintain a meanness to it.
Not a big fan of the original pink base color, so I went with radome instead.
It's too bad that they made the "Kusanagi" insigna on the right shoulder in white, you can barely see it.
The launch platform is a great idea, you can take so many cool shots with it :)
Should've trim the decal on the shin... I hate the frigging verbose Bandai decals.
I added a bit of detail to the skirt armor, including the vents and the triangular panel lines, since the original is rather bare.
These days I spend a lot of time highlighting the edges of armor, since I believe it'd make the lines of the mech stands out more. It's not so easy for near-white colors, but titanium white is strong enough that you can notice.
Love this shot a lot :)
Indulgence at work :)
More indulgence at work... the lighting interacts with the eyes very well. The were painted with titanium white on flourescent green, I couldn't believe how well it catches light.
Front page slashing pose... These days I like painting the saber with a gradient of flourescent pink. The original clear rod looks a bit fake, but I don't like total flourescent either as it looks a bit toy like. Tried the gradient and liking the results so far.
Slash 2!
This is a bit unncessary... but the flourescent look fantastic, especially when the rest of the scene is quite dark.
The Aile pack makes it difficult to swing the shoulders forward, but it kinda works.
Lock on!
Pretty neato firing shot, last from the launch pad.
Must-include from-the-bottom view. With a little padding the B-Club HDM fists works with the MG kit. The hands of the MG kits tends to be too large! The HDM ones looks better.
Back view of the Aile Striker. I love the design of the Aile Strike pack, its flaps are stuck out in a much cooler manner that the pedestrian design of the Impulse in Seed Destiny. More importantly, it feels more integrated with the mech, rather than "Look! I put a plane on my back!"
Profile of Strike with the Aile pack.
Hope you enjoyed Cagalli's machine! More rants below.


Introduction

Scale
1/100 		Maker
Bandai
Completed
01/2005
 Retail
4200yen

Spolier alert! In another brave attempt to squeeze every last penny of fanboys, Gundam Seed introduced another variation of Strike during the final episodes - the Strike Rouge, piloted by Kagari. The concept was a bit abhorrent at first, since Strike is a pretty masculine design, and yet spraying it with a pink/red motif to make it more female. Also I'm not sure if Kagari the tomboy will approve of such a girlie coloration (ok so all Orb mechs has this red thing going... fine). But then the name sounds pretty cool and being a fan of Kagari, I felt into Bandai's trap, right when they have Kagari and Athrun embrace in front of Strike Rouge's head, before the sortie. It just looked very cool from that angle. And then we had it doing the very touching Athrun rescue at the end...

The MG Strike Rouge features the Aile striker equipment. As cool as it is, I wish they'd either go with the IWSP set, or even have B-Club release a resin set. Building two of these aile packs (the other for the normal Strike) aren't that much fun. Fortunately, I really love the aile pack - very unique design, much better than the very pedestrian Force Impulse variant.

 
Kit Review

The MG Strike & Strike Rouge are very well done kits, featuring a very "genki" look with a very lean and sportive look. The only thing I'm not completely happy about is the lack of waist movement; the *HG* Astray Red can do it, and yet they cheaped out here. Of course I could've do the conversion myself, but then why not spend the time on the PG Strike which can do a better job of that.

 

Building

I really don't like the pink base color of the Strike Rouge. Not only is it very dirty looking for a mech, it also reduces the contrast of the mech, making it look a little boring. So I decided to give it the VF-19 valkyrie's radome + white as the base color. It resembles this flesh color which has enough red to blend in with the chest's red color, and yet enough yellow to contrast it a bit. I think it worked out pretty well; the down side is that the white decals no longer do anything on this base color. Ah well. The launching base is a great idea, many cool poses can be gotten from that.