Kestral Atmospheric Shuttle

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I love Babylon 5. Since I love modeling as well, I tend to get every Babylon 5 kit I can. However, since only 3 official kits were made (and two of them the same one) most of the kits are garage kits, many of them pricey, and some of them not very good.

Enter Planet V’s Kestral Atmospheric Shuttle. It is a garage kit, but it wasn’t too expensive and it is very good. I picked it up from Federation Models. It was the earlier version that came without landing gear.

I used to dislike this ship. It lacked style, I thought. But in keeping with the style of Earth ships in B5, its style was that it lacked style. Its utalitarian design is elegant and consistent and I have learned to love the ship. The lifting body design and black underbelly carries on the Starfury’s believability.

I began by washing the kit and test fitting. Since there were only a couple of parts, it was easy. The main hull is a single hollow cast resin piece - light and strong.

I sanded the model for clean up. Here I think I made a big mistake. I thought there was a huge seamline around the bottom of the ship so I sanded the hell out of it. Afterwards, I thought that it might have been deliberate because I lost so many panel lines including any seperation of upper al lower hulls. I tried to re-etch the obliterated panel lines but I couldn’t get a straight line on the curved surface. I ended up puttying and sanding it again. I managed to deepen the panel lines on the top of the ship as I had with the Pirate Raider to bring out detail.

I made another mistake in that I assembled the model completely and then began painting it. This proved to be such a headache, that I snapped off wings and the exhaust thrusters. I didn’t dare remove the tail assembly since I had to putty the seam and it was a pretty fragile piece. Having the wings and exhausts off was enough to make painting much easier.

I started by mixing up a good light grey with my Liquitex Basic Acrylic colors. I used Titanium White and Neutral Gray. I ended up making much too much of it. I used it as a base for the other grays on the panels, adding a bit more Neutral Gray, but I better find another gray ship to make soon!

For the underbelly and leading edges, I mixed the grey I had mixed with some Mars Black. I didn’t want a black underbelly, but more of a charcoal. The blue stripes were made by mixing my gray with some Ultramarine. Painting at this stage was all about masking and using light coats (trying to take a lesson from my Monolith which I kept overspraying).

I brush painted the exhaust thrusters with a black undercoat, then heavily drybrushed them with Liquitex Steel. I then picked out the hightest detail with Liquitex Irredescent Silver. It’s a formula I’ve used before and makes bare weathered metal look very nice. If I’d wanted a rusty look, I’d have used a red/brown wash, but I didn’t, so I don’t know why I’m telling you this.

I assembled the kit except the exhausts and sealed it with Future. I used an oil wash to bring out the panel lines and weather the rear of the ship under the exhausts.

I sealed it again and placed the decals. Here I made another mistake. I used a new decal settting solution and when I tried to slide a decal level, it lifed the paint! I had to touch up the paint on the starboard hull and I lost the decal on the starboard side of the verticle stabilizer entirerly. I had no replacement for it, and so used another number from the sheet. Although it takes it out of any competition, it’s actually not that noticiable since you can’t see both numbers at the same time.

I tried to use a little more wash to help hide the touch ups, but it didn’t do the trick. It actually made things a little worse insofar as the decal edges were more pronounced. My only solution was to heavily airbrush black stoot streaks along the ship, helping to conceal the lines and touch ups. It worked well enough, and the model looks nice, if overlerly weathered.

I put the base together, painted it the blue I mixed up for the ship, sealed it and used a couple of the decals to give it some interest.

I enjoyed the kit and love the model. Once again I learned a few lessons building it and improved my confidence. It took too long to finish since I was so distracted with building and painting WH40K models at the time, but I never lost interest in it and kept poking away at it for months.