Terrox – Ken-McConnell.com

And then there was the canopy. I wanted it to have good visibility for the pilot and let people look inside to see all that detail I included. I later would put smoked clear plastic for the glass. The canopy was carved from plastic sheet and glued together. Lots of sanding was necessary to make the seams fade away.

Modern fighters usually have the insides painted white. In WWII they used to be zinc chromate a rust inhibitor. In Russia they use a teal blue color for their insides. I wanted to make this like Russian fighters, so I mixed up a blue and white and gray bottle of paint and this is the resulting color. I like it.

More fuselage details, the white pieces are from a WWI airplane model. No idea which one. The engines now have intake cowls made from kid toys. The colors will go away after primer.

Got her up on the mount while I add more greeblies. I like when I can get the model to this point. Makes working on it easier.

Plus you can tilt it over and work on the bottom. Which is way too clean right now.

Next up are the wings. I built them up like little boxes. The inside area is detailed and painted. Panel lines are scored with my scoring knife and some raised panels added. Done.

Here we are cementing the wings onto the engine nacelles. It took some fiddling to get the wing to stand off the side a bit the way I wanted.

Here is the fish, ready for boning, er I mean detailing the bottom.

This is a good shot of the engine intakes. I’m loving the shape of the whole fighter.

Coming at you, ready for detailing on the nose and some guns.

This is about to be awesome. I usually try and find greeblies that fit the area in which they are placed. It’s more art than science, although it helps to imagine what engineering purpose the detail might have.

More landing gear parts seemed to fit around the guns.

The bottom area has a mount point. It must be covered when I’m photographing the bottom. So I slid a panel all secretly. Can you see what changed?

This is the oldest trick in the book and when you’re making up the ship from thin air, you can do whatever you want to hide your mounts.

Next up are the details for the back side. Again, form follows function. This area is highly functional.

One last look at the top and bottom as I focus on smaller details.

The bottom reminds me of a ME-109.

Here are some engine details including an area not covered with a panel on the left.

Back side beauty pass.

Some shielding on the back of the canopy.

It took a while to settle on the details for the area behind the canopy but I think it came out pretty good.

Here’s the finished cockpit before painting.

This is the finished model with primer. Looking sharp. Up next – weathering.

This Votainion starfighter has it’s roots back in the early 1980’s when it was known as the Triak. I think “Tri” referred to the middle energy thing coming out the back of the fuselage. I thought about doing that with this model but then quickly scratched it. Some of the things I liked about this fighter were the jagged lines of the fuselage and the wings. Both were retained and the twin engine design which was reproduced pretty faithfully.

I started the build with the engines. Painted green and white from over spray on other builds are 1/2″ PVC pipes run through one inch pipe. I used the engine of a 1/32 scale F-104 Starfighter jet for the gap between the one inch pipes. On the ends of the engines I put some PVC connectors for the exhausts.

Below you see I decided to cut the F-104 engine in half and stick to the one inch PVC for the covered parts of the engines. You can also see the beginnings of the cockpit, starting with an old get pilot sitting on a gas tank. Heh. I also have a paper cut out of the wing for scale.

Below I used more paper to flesh out the cockpit, fuselage and a gun idea. The cockpit is closer to what I had originally drawn. It’s been reborn for the K’nat fighter.

Here we have the two primary starfighters for the middle trilogy of the Star Saga. The Alliance Spieron on the left and the Terrox on the right. These are the Swift and KIV-3 for the middle of the war. Man the Spieron’s nose is huge. Like, Klinger large.

After cutting up some plastic and positioning the cockpit I start building the mounting bracket for the aluminum block used for the mount. I wrapped plastic around the 1/2 inch tube to center it inside the one inch tube. You can see it sticking out in the image below. The cockpit is from a Tamiya F-14 Tomcat 1/32 scale.

Here I use camera tape to hold together the plastic so I can see the angles I’m dealing with. They are quite unique.

But that’s what I like about this model, it is all kinds of unique and different. It also has some call backs to familiar starfighters from Hollywood. Such as the Y-Wing from Star Wars and the Cylon Interceptor from the original Battlestar Galactica.

Here’s a look at the tail end. I still haven’t taken glue to it yet, but you can start to see the final shape a bit clearer.

Here’s a close up of the cockpit details. I used a third party ejection seat from an F-4 Phantom in 1/32 scale. The top piece there is from the F-104 kit.

Next up we’ll start gluing things down and moving forward on the details.

Tag: Terrox

Terrox Starfighter Build, Part 3

Terrox Starfighter Build, Part 1