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Hello boys, long time no see

I finally sat down and got to some of my wave 4 stuff, with a particularly long tackle of the E-Wing... I just find the thing in it's original design (the one ffg used) looks like a flying.... female self-pleasuring implement. Boxy and inelegant, especially with the derpy gun on top of the canopy, I saw this redesign while researching paint schemes and decided I simply couldn't tolerate the original design... it had to be this or as close to it as I could reasonably get in a sane amount of time -



Now I have seen a few shapeways models, but that stuff is too grainy for me by miles... so it had to be a conversion. So, the chopping begins -









Then start building back up...



Add an extra couple of guns and a lick of paint and voila, sexified E-Wing -












Sooooooooo much happier with these....



Phantoms were a far simpler prospect... just paint...













Thanks for looking!

Honestly? I just find the cannon on the hood really terrible design... it obstructs a huge amount of the available viewing area, offers not tangible benefit over wing or underslung mounting for firing.... just makes no sense to me. I get the feeling shoving that cannon up there was some relatively desperate attempt by the dark-empire guys to make the shape of an 'e' somewhere on there lol (via the placement of 3 cannons).

So, I think it would be far more advantageous to put the sun-roof there and transplant the one big cannon to two smaller additional wing mounted cannons personally, better field of view, no compromise on firepower...

That being said, if you wanted to do a similar conversion but leave the cannon on top because it is an iconic part of the ship for you, you could do it super, super easily. The cannon part is a glued in bit that pops out with a little knife pressure, (the slot it was in conveniently matched the 'sunroof' I wanted) so moving it back completely as is is completely feasible.

For me, I wanted a ship that looked as fast as an A-wing, with as much firepower as an x-wing, and I am happy with the result on those goals for my personal taste, but as with everything, ymmv!

@Steelmage -

Re-shaped nose,

removed the dorsal cannon,

shaved the rear of the body to a slope *** also dug in a
recess on top, which was probably the trickiest bit

shaped the wings *** yes both outer and inner plates

*** GS's the bumpout sections that widen the body and give the intake looking area and extra engines their place to live, and also make the main body not just one long shaft.

mounted the wings more horizontally and added a strut to the wing *** various details were added with plastirod and card to fill spaces and add detail in addition to just the strut.

*** added plasti-rod enhanment to the intake area to beef it out and add more relief to the model

*** added extra, smaller guns on each wing -

Platuan4th wrote:
Was just curious, I much prefer your alterations and would do the same to mine if I were confident in my abilities to make clean cuts and sculpt.

It's not as bad as you think, most of the time, the blade of exact zero is longer than all the cuts, so keeping straight is fairly difficult to avoid... it's just that initial placement that can be minorly tricky but it wasn't so bad once I tried it on the first one, the next ones were easy.

RiTides wrote:You're an absolute wizard! I can't wait for Armada to hit, as I like the larger scale ships, but with the way you paint up these X-wing models they're just incredible.

Love the conversion, and particularly love the middle phantom paint job (is it existing hyperspace, or does that represent something else?).

Thank you Esteban - the effect is the energy discharge that moves over the ship as the cloak activates/deactivates. It kind swipes on and off from what I gather as opposed to the uniform fadeout of star trek cloaking. If you look close, you will see the same starfield and faint blue edge glow as the fully cloaked version... shoot me a pm, let me know how you are! How is the full modship feeling??

MoD, thanks very much man... I am sure you could manage a few tricks too though!

I hear ya... I feel the same generally about non-organic stuff, but it ended up going ok. For me anyways, it's a confidence thing, hacking into a model and imagining making a mess of it and wasting both time and cash. But, the more I do it, the more I try, and generally I get round-about the results I was wanting, though I am no master like Machinator or Boda Fett, those guys are hard surface ninjas...

I noticed this in my research, a bit of a combination by the look of it, not sure if this is in any way canonical, but it makes sense -