Activity

I started with the 1.5 Gundam and Kotobukiya’s Gun Blade Lance (note that with the weapon, positioning of the parts in sequence is crucial for assembly, but you don’t need to do everything the instructions say to do. Kotobukiya also gives you the option of using clear or clear purple blade parts).

Assembly began straightforward. At the chest condenser I used a trick I often use with models from ‘Gundam 00:’ I paint the area that the clear piece will cover silver to create a reflective surface. Then I use a Sharpie in the desired colour on the underside of the clear plastic covering (blue in this case). Snap on the cover and you should get some blue that reflects light nicely — well, in most cases it does. The reason I colour the underside is so you don’t lose the colour on your fingers.

You’ll also see I chose to use one of the camera stickers on the back of the head instead of the front, where the forehead jewel would have made the sticker redundant since I coloured that.

Use the silver-on-base, colour-on-cover trick for each of the condensers-turned-drives. Story-wise these will be based on the Quanta’s GN drives. They’re different colours because they’ll be producing particles at different frequencies. I chose blue as an alternate colour because it reflects how the more advanced kits in ‘Build Fighters’ tend to use blue instead of green. Both drives reflect nicely in the light.

Assembly continues quite smoothly from here. Instead of using the included black stickers I used my extra-fine black panel-lining marker to do the pinstripes on both sides of the torso. Assembly of the Gun Blade Lance and the backpack are both quick and painless. I also painted the shoulder pads and backs of the heels metallic blue, following the Kamiki Burning’s cues: more condensers means more power storage.

Then I got to the main GN drive. Pushing the envelope for what Celestial Being’s science team, the Vashtis, could do, it would be the most advanced piece of hardware for the time — and produce the purest particles. So I painted rings to mark which kind of particles the drive would be tuned to produce: gold and silver.

Then the rifle and shield came together quite nicely as well. The rifle is the same as on the Reborns, and the connection piece can be swivelled around to point the gun forward or backward, an obvious leftover from that unit’s transformation. There’s not enough room to store it while using the Gun Blade Lance.

The shield is awesome in its size, and since it connects to the same piece that one of the beam saber handles does, it has a connection point for that handle. Further, it connects right over one of the arm drives, which is perfect for reinforcing the shield with a particle field. A clever bit of design there.

The gundam can hold the gun blade lance two-handed, which looks cool.

I also decided to experiment with the clear beam saber blade. Practically this would tell me if I should paint or use Sharpies on the blade. My conclusion is that if I want the blade to look more solid and more powerful, I can use my gundam paint markers. Even this unit would be powerful enough to create particle transformation fields, and thus a more cutting blade like in ‘Build Fighters.’

As a final touch, I decided to give my custom 1.5 a name reflecting the melody it seems to play through the mix of its particles as it operates. The name I settled upon is ‘Lullaby Gundam.’
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