Battlestar Galactica Colonial Viper

I was in 5th grade when I built my first Battlestar Galactica Viper. Within a year, I built four more. They were common kits, very easy to build and damn cool. I did my first weathering on a viper. Mike Coffin showed me how to dry brush black soot around the laser canons. It brought my model alive.

When I got back into modeling I found a place in Canada that had some Vipers and Cylon Raiders. Knowing that I might not ever see them again as cheaply, I bought 4 vipers and 3 Raiders. I gave one pair to my son and built this Viper.

This was an early model and I used this model to get to know my airbrush. I also mixed my own colors; Liquitex acrylics.

The original Viper had an elastic mechanism which would shoot a plastic peg out of the nose by pushing a trigger on the underbelly. I guess there was some uproar with a child getting hurt by a Viper doing this and they removed this feature. They omitted some pieces and changed the instructions, but the fuselage still has the connections for the mechanism and there are holes in the nose and underneath. I puttied these over.

I painted false panelling on the sides and of course a lot of battle damage. If you’ve ever seen the show, you know these guys were always getting wounded and flying through exploding Cylons ships. The Cylons were never wounded. They must have kept their munitions spread out evenly on their hull; the slightest hit would blow them to smithereens.

I didn’t spend a lot of time on the detail of the engines and guns; just a bit of dry brushing. When I made this model, I wasn’t very comfortable with decals yet. This was my decal breakthrough kit, if you will. I got most of them on right. I noticed that the engine intake decals weren’t big enough, but I went with it. I felt blessed not to have had a problem with them.

I didn’t use decals on the canopy. I painted them instead. I used liquid latex as a mask and airbrushed the windows for a smooth finish. This didn’t work in a big way. The latex, which model God David Fisher himself recommends, isn’t good for such delicate work. It works great of masking large areas of figures, but if I had to do it again, I’d use tape. I had to repaint the canopy lines.

There is an aftermarket cock-pit available for the viper, complete with Egyptian headed pilot. I’ll probably get that when I build my next one.

The stand is the one which came with the kit, painted black. Really original, I know.