I decided that with the F-16's huge canopy, I needed the ejection seat to be more detailed than what came in the box. So I got hold of a pair of ACES II resin seats from Legends Productions, a Korean resin kit manufacturer. The resin seat comes with molded-on seat belts and is generally much more detailed than the default kit seat.

I colored the seat based on references I got from The Ejection Site. A simple wash with diluted black color and some minor drybrushing is all I need to add depth and bring out the fine details of the seat.

OH DAMN! This is TOO COOL! It's 8 feet long, weighs over 150 lbs and made up of more than 35,000 LEGO pieces! It was up on sale on eBay and all proceeds would go to charity. Nice.>

Funny thing though, I think they named it wrongly. They call it the Rebel Attack Cruiser when it should be the Republic Attack Cruiser.

Anyhow, bidding has ended and this masterpiece fetched a price of USD31,602.00. I bet it's some rich bastard with a ton of space to display this monster. Crap. Hahahaha!

Wow. The new year is coming soon. Time sure goes faster and faster.

But I digress. Onto modeling stuff. A good friend of mine Gareth just showed me an experiment he did. His objective was to get a richer color palette for his Gundam model kits. The picture shows a before and after color chit of his experiment. I must say the 'after' color has a richer, deeper and creamier impression for me.

I still haven't figured out how to pull off this rich color if I need the color to be dark. Maybe it doesn't matter if it's dark?

Hmmm... with the ending of the Gundam SEED Destiny (GSD) series, the attraction of the MS featured in the show isn't as strong anymore. In fact, without the constant weekly exposure of the anime, I'm becoming more and more ambivalent with the MS designs. Crap design? Or just cynicism. Oh well...

Speaking of GSD, one of the newest kit from this line is the HG Murasame. In the anime, it's one of those mass production units that blow up in almost every scene it appears in. It's also a blatant rip-off of the Zeta Gundam design. Funny how I used to actually like the design...

So the BAKAC 2005 has arrived. And like the past few years, I have nothing to show for it. Although this year I was closer to joining BAKAC than I ever was. I actually had started on an entry already, my MG Dom that I nicknamed 'Desert Rat'.

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This kit is part of the 'US Aggressors groupbuild'. Construction went on quite straightforward although there are some problems here and there. Nothing that putty couldn't fix though. One particularly annoying part is that I have to putty off the holes under the wings meant for underwing stores. Obviously if I was bulding a normal F-16 loaded with a ton of weapons I wouldn't be bitching.

As per normal with aircraft kits, the cockpit has to be painted first before further construction could be done. It's simple matter of grey for the whole cockpit tub, black for the control panels, green for the MFD screens and some drybrushing to bring out the detail of the control surfaces.