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Republic Star Destroyer

By Mike Walston

Revell's Republic Star Destroyer kit is big enough to add lots of lighting,  with room left over to do some scratchbuilding too. In "The Clone Wars" series, and one of the cut-away books I saw later, the large flight deck with hangar bays seen in "Revenge of the Sith" was shown in a lot more detail, and had impressive sliding doors that ran over halfway down the top fuselage.

After cutting off the large top plate at the front of the ship, I copied the detail patterns onto two 1/16 inch thick plastic pieces to use as doors.   I designed the hangar bay openings and floor patterns on CorelDraw, and cut them out of more stock plastic. I lit the port side openings with white LEDs, and the starboard with blue. I found that when I used the same color lighting on both sides, the aluminum and light gray paint I finished the flight deck with would reflect the lights and make the hangar openings harder to see. I also opened up the hangar doors on the port side of the ship and scratchbuilt a small bay lit with a white LED. White and blue LEDs light up the underside hangar--which also has the tiny on-off switch in the middle of it. The engines are all lit with blue LEDs  and have  frosted clear plastic covering the bulbs. The  locator pins of the assembled superstructure are big  enough to hold it in place without glue, so I hid the 9-volt power supply in it.

An  additional pic  of this model  made it into the February 2012 reader gallery of FineScale Modeler magazine.  

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