I was super excited to see the Omicron class shuttle from The Bad Batch get released by AMT!
Waiting for it to be available was the hard part…
It’s a great little kit. I busted this one out in five days with lighting.
I started with painting the black for the solar panels then masking them off
Next up was assembling the cockpit section with a single 3 mm LED to illuminate the cockpit glass.
Then in the midst of constructing the fuselage, I added two yellow 3 mm LEDs for the forward lights, four ice blue 3 mm LEDs for the engines, and a 1.8 mm red LED for the rear turret window.
It’s a snap kit, so I spent extra time on test fitting and carefully gluing the body together to limit light leaks. Then it was time for a coat of Tamiya Haze Gray.
Now comes the fun part…panel painting
Because I only use rattle cans and brush paint, there was A LOT of masking lol
Perhaps I should start using an airbrush…anyway…after a few decals and weathering, here she is:
In conclusion, this was a fun and relatively easy kit to put together. With or without the lights it goes together clean and allows you to focus on the paint work, which there is quite a bit more than I realized.
The only Star Wars kits I’ve messed with in the last 25 years are the awesome Bandai kits. This kit is not at that level of quality, but it’s really good. The sprue gates are large and the plastic is thick and initially felt brittle. It’s not brittle, but it felt that way. However the fit was very nice. I pressed the pins together and ran Tamiya extra thin along the edges and she went together well. The fit was so good I did not have to create styrene boxes around the LEDs to block light leakage even through the wing joints. I was pleasantly surprised.
Considering this ship is only seen in a cartoon, the detail was also solid and well defined.
The only real complaints from me are the absolutely craptastic decals and the lack of interior of any sort. The large cockpit canopy and rear turret window are just begging for some interior detail. If someone puts out a resin or 3D printed interior, I would probably build another one.
It does, thanks. AMT/Ertl did the prequel kits and then Revell of Germany did some of the exact same subjects but were often better.
Revell did two different series from the later movies (Solo, Force Awakens, Last Jedi, Rogue One). One was a cheesy battery lights and sounds one and the other were pretty good quality kits.
