Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Fantastic Plastic 1:72 Snowspeeder in box review

There was a large envelope waiting for me when I got home from work this evening. It was Fantastic Plastics snowspeeder.
The first thing I noticed was yes, this ship is small. But anyone reading about it already knew that. The next thing I noticed was that there was a little more flash and pour stubs than I've seen in other FP kits. But no problem, flash and pour spouts don't scare me. But there are a good number on tiny parts and I would go thru and make a parts inventory so something needed doesn't get thrown away as flash or as part of a stub. The kit is actually very nice. The parts are crisp where they need to be - rounded parts are as such and straight edges are crisp and straight. And a lot of detail was packed into this little 2.75 inch ship. For example all the little "tubes" around the two main thruster nozzles are well done and crisp despite being only 3mm long. The same clean lines are found in the rear heat dispersion fins and the similar fins in the front. The two pilots are terrific. The clear resin cockpit is what it is, altho it's not as cloudy as some I've seen. After polishing and a few dips in Future it should be pretty respectable. There are options for making the air brakes open or closed. This gives a chance to make an interesting dio if you bought more than one. I only have one right now but am thinking of getting another. The decals were done by JBOT and are well done. The decals also come wioth a two sided color page showing placement of them. Nice touch for these little decals!

Two sections do stand out a little. The laser cannons are well represented and the barrel is straight. But in mine, while it IS straight it is a little flexible. So I guess you could cut the business end off (which is well done) and substitute a thin aluminum rod(s) for the cannon barrels. The other thing I noticed was the converters. In the center are supposed to be spaces. They are there but there are only 6 of them. Going to images there are more - I didn't bother to count them, but just suffice to say there are more. I'll go out on a limb and say it is represented this way just as a matter of fitting as much detail as human fingers can fit into a 4 mm space and not lose mold rubber in there. I guess if someone wanted to cut out that section - the forward and aft parts are good - they could subsititue a similar sized tube and scribe "more" of these spaces in to the center of the converter. With the one I have I'm not going to do that; my eyes are not that good and I would spend more time scribing these tiny things then it would take to build, paint and weather the craft.

The last thing that one notices is the harpoon. Looking down into the muzzle the 2 barrels are off set in an 8 oclock/2 oclock postions. That looks strange. So I go online looking and see that there are 2 barrels indeed, and the larger one is directly above the smaller one. Then I see an image from the SSM site and while that part of the ship isn't highlighted it does look like they are offset. Okay, so now I take out the DVD and start going thru the battle scene. Yes, as usual there is no canon placement of the harpoon barrels. ILM modelers must just have thrown these harpoons together. One snowspeeder as it leaves the base has the harpoon barrels straight up and down but the small barrel is one top and a space in between them. Other's are straight up and down with the larger barrel on top and a space inbetween. Wedge and Zev Senesca's (Rogue Two) harpoons appear offset. Finally Luke's harpoon is straight up and down with the larger one on top, but his has this rectagular piece of harpoon part inbetween the two barrels filling the space. Sheesh. So if you want Wedge's or Zev's ship just install the harpoon. If you want any of the others just cut the barrels off and rotate them into the postion that best represents the T-47 that you want.
All in all I give it a thumbs up. Thanks for producing this Allen!