I’ve fallen in love with Fantasy Flight’s X-Wing Miniatures Game. It has a great combination of deck/list building and quick game play with just the right mix of finding the right combo without being combo-dependent.
But what really sold me was the Millennium Falcon. And if one Millennium Falcon is good, by all means, three is better!
Ok, well, so you can’t have three in a game. The YT-1300 is the generic freighter and the Millennium Falcon is a unique variant, a 1 point upgrade to a normal YT-1300. So since I’ve got three YT-1300’s now, some of them are going to need some modifications to differentiate them from the named ship.
This is the first time I’ve worked on one of the X-Wing miniatures, so I did a little experimentation. The X-Wing models come pre-painted and the YT-1300 is nicely detailed for the price, especially considering Star Wars pieces usually carry a premium.
The first goal was to remove some of the wash to give the whole model a cleaner look. I dipped a piece of blister foam in some odorless turpentine and gave it a little scrubbing, paying close attention to the rear vents that were especially dirty. A good cleaning lightened the color and brightened it up compared to the factory paint job.
Next up was to cover the open access panels. The Millennium Falcon has a lot of special modifications (or is a piece of junk, depending on who you ask), so I figure a ship with fewer parsecs under her belt would be a little more buttoned-up.
This plasticard was carefully cut to fit the openings and then super glued in pace. I used a standard hole punch for the front round openings and split a hole punch circle to give some detail to those covers. The rear panels got bit-scraps of plasticard for details and then I sculpted some tubes on the panel opposite the communications dish. I used the left-over greenstuff to fill in the port side damage and create a new pipe junction to cover most of the damage on the starboard front.
Since I’d only made a few changes, I didn’t want to strip and re-paint the whole thing. I don’t plan on making any changes to my Millennium Falcon, so I wanted this new ship to be consistent with the factory paint. I touched up the new white panels with a combination of the older Citadel Foundation paints: two parts Astronomican Grey with one part Deneb Stone. The combination is a very close match to the warm, factory grey. I also touched up some of the panels in the rear, to give it a little less worn look. I also did a couple of thin coats of this color over all the red panels, since I wanted to have a distinctive accent color on the new YT-1300. The Foundation colors blend well with the factory paint job because they are a little more muted. The blue accent is Mordian Blue and I found that Citadel Codex Grey is a good match to the dark grey already on the model.
I finished off the model with a thin lamp black oil wash on the new paint, and a thin lining of Chaos Black to help emphasize the edges on the new panels.
That’s all there is to it. Here’s a picture of the final product next to the original. Close enough to not look out-of-place, but different enough to not be confusing on the table top.
Still one more YT-1300 to modify, but for now, may the Force be with you!
