KIV-3 Starfighter Part 4

Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four

In Part Four of this series on the building of a KIV-3 model, we take a look at painting the invasion stripes on the bottom of the wings. As any WWII aviation buff will tell you, allied aircraft were painted with black and white stripes on D-Day. This was to keep allied ground forces from shooting down their own planes.

It just so happens that those stripes make for some interesting camouflage for space fighters. But that’s not why I decided to use invasion stripes on Votainion or enemy starfighters. I set the precedent in Starstrikers and carried it forward for this prequel novel, Starforgers.

I decided to use angled stripes pretty early, but then started to second guess my plans when I realized that if I did the same stripes on the other wing, they would resemble racing stripes. Not what I was after. So I made a paper cut out and tried two different versions of the stripes. Then I photographed them against a black background to see how they looked.

The mirror stripes and reversing the color order looked the best. It also works quite well as camouflage. I then painted the model to match the paper cutout and touched up the yellow leading edge. The final step in the process is going to be adding markings for identification and unit markings. This particular model will be the personal fighter of Lord Kantor, the leader of an invasion force.

Kantor’s fighter must have some recognizable feature that separates it from the others to allow the hero to find him in the sky and duel just his fighter. At this point, I don’t know what that will be. Stay tuned next week to see what I came up with.