Incom T-65A X-Wing Fighter (Rogue Nine)

I was so pleased with the way Wedge Antilles' X-Wing came out, I had to do Corran Horn's personal fighter, too.

Parts: POTF2 Power F/X X-wing fighter. The decals were set aside.

Supplies: X-acto knife, emery board, file, super glue, brushes, Testors paints and Testors Dull-Cote.

Reference: I used a picture of Corran's fighter from the comics. Then, I compared that to the detailed descriptions of his fighter that were novel and I came up with a version I liked.

To start with, I took the entire ship apart and removed the cockpit area. I disconnected the Luke Skywalker figure from the little arm that moved his head. Do this carefully so that you don't mess up any of the other working parts (I ended up with all of the lights and sounds still working). I replaced Luke with a home-made seat. For my purposes, it is not necessary to have a figure actually fit in the cockpit. If that is your desire, you will probably have to remove all of the electronics and the battery box. The inside of the cockpit was then painted black. The color scheme was mostly the result of guesswork and my own preference. Corran brought his Correllian Security Force X-Wing with him when he joined Rogue Squadron and he never had it repainted. The color scheme is supposedly grey, green and black with a little bit of white. There are no photos that show how the colors are applied to the ship, so I had to just do it the way I thought it should look. The entire ship was painted light aircraft grey. The nose cone was painted black. I also painted a black stripe from the nose cone to the cockpit on top of the fuselage. The stripes on either side of the fuselage were painted green. The pattern for the wing markings was taken from Dark Horse's X-Wing: Rogue Squadron comics. The landing gear was painted "steel" and then given a dark wash. A few of the access panels were painted a slightly different color than the ship itself to indicate that they had been replaced. A lot of the edges were drybrushed with aluminum-colored paint to show where paint had been chipped off. The proton torpedo was painted white with red and yellow trim. Corran's astromech droid, Whistler, is painted similar to R2-D2 except that Whistler has green trim instead of blue. A few minutes of touch-up work and Whistler is all ready to go. The pilot was replaced with a Corran Horn figure that I had already made. I gave him a couple of washes and a light coat of Testor's Dull-Cote. The decals were applied at this point. Once again, special thanks to Jason Fleigel at FFURG, who made the awesome "kill marker" decals for me. The entire ship was given several washes of very thinned out black paint to show oil leaks and general wear and tear. Scratches were made with a hobby knife and then filled in with aluminum-colored paint. Testor's Dull-Cote was applied liberally to every part of the ship, except the cockpit windscreen.