Rulebreakers Revell 1/48 Tie Advanced "88" series

[Rulebreaker]

Tie Fighter retrofit to Tie Advanced X1

1 Scale Discussion
see here

why this scale, because its cheap, amazon lowered the price of the kit even more, down to 12, was 46
and its a good practice befor moveing to a bigger scale like 1/32 or even 1/24

2 Unboxing
see here

the Outland Tie and the Tie Fighter Parts are used and modified with some old scratch building

3 Build - Retrofit
From the Tie Fighter Build i have some inner wings left, they get cut in to the main shape of the wing, the solar things get cut out.

i'm not a flight/plane engineer, so i dont know if those are spars or ribs, so lets call em spareribs

After measureing, research, and drawing, i cnc'ed the wings out of 1mm sheet, bend it and then it gets "skined" with .25mm black styrene


Wing bending
normaly bending sheet creates a round "corner" so i milled a gap along the bending line, so it creates a sharp edge on the outside

worth mentioning, when bend in perpendicular direction of the rolling surface, the curve gets bigger but is more "strong"
so when beding in direction of rolling, the bending curve is smaller but less "strong"
i tried it, the material used is very good and doesn't bend, i bought a more expensive/stronger one
if needed, i thoughed of welding the inside corners or at least fill it up with some jb weld, but its not needed

The styrene is glued on with super glue, then all other parts can be simply glued on with regular model glue


when trying to put it on the included stand, because of the weight of the wings it always drops/turns into this position
so i cut M4 thread into the hole, wich fits nicely, i ordered some M4 tubes, where they will later stand on

out of the Outland fuselage the Ion engines are cut out roughly and then cut into shape

i'm realy happy, how it turned out, for that small scale it looks very good


Noteable things
* less glue, makes less scrawled/clogged/blurred traces here and there, don't know if this will be seen after painting
* the super glue, there is only one second, the precisely cut styrene sheets, when not perfect aligned, ther will be gaps,
so for the future, rather cut them a little bigger and then after glueing remove overhang material
* plastruct and evergreen are not compatible, plastruct "H" profiles are 1.6mm, evergreen "H" profiles are 1.5mm
* did not expect that i need around 15 "H" profiles for two wings
* i'm glad that i took black styrene as base, so i have a very good contrast of what i'm doing, white on white is hard to see
* i used 1.6mm "H" profiles, the "U" ones would have been a little flatter with only 1.1mm height

to do list
* order more material - done
* i'm 90% sure i will machine the solar plates, its simplier than casting 1mm "thick" negatives
* finish wings
* make "addon armor" plates for the fuselage - the hexagon whingbox profile, needs to be "turned" 60 degree
* make hyperdrive
* find a good solution to connect hyperdrive with the fuselage

 

[Rulebreaker]

the tubes came and i mounted them together

maybe a little long, but i cut that later

 

[Rulebreaker]

For the "hyperengine deck" i thoughed, only glueing it to the fuselage won't be stable enough, so i thoughed of squishing the base plate between both fuselage halfes

The Wingbox halfes have a cut away section so the halfes get together better, i'm cutting it furter

when cutting the hull in half it looks funny like cat ears

i also used the progress from the tie fighter cockpit

this time i also added the small mirror("batman" thing) behind the viewport

painting the inside, dry brushing the floor, adding red details, i also added the rear faceing screen(just eyeballed it)

i cut the baseplate, by scalling down the mpc vader part out of paper to "see where i am"

looks a little short and the curved parts also looks diffrent on the studio model, so i changed that and glued the paper on a 1mm styrene sheet

 

[Rulebreaker]

I have worked on several ways to machine the solar arrays.

i tried diffrent approches, but one big problem, for a full pair of wings i need 17k holes O_O
each wing has +8k holes, have fun machining 17k holes...

in softer material it looks better, but imagine cleaning up every single hole...

so i needed a simplier solution and i found this

plastic mesh canvas 10 holes per inch
* thicknes is the same as the "h" profiles
* its black
* easy to cut
* somewhat cheap, out of one sheet i can make around 4 wings, around 2 euro per sheet, makes it 50c per wing
* time saveing

the problem, the holes are a little big, but going up to 12, 14 or even 16, they dont make squares any more, but circle holes...

on this wing i only tried to make it work, but the other wing is going to be unified, so each solar panel has the same length, width and angles.

for this wing i had to eyeball every "h" profile, but now i want to make it look better, so instead of handcrafting each i cut them to specific length and angle from/on a template.

 

[Millenniumf]

Y'know, you might try using the solar panels from the Estes Darth Vader's TIE Fighter. They're slightly bigger than the scale you're working in, but much finer than the mesh you've got there. You could mold each panel type and cast them and use them on the wings you're building after trimming.

 

[Analyzer]

Fantastic job!

It kind of sucks that the only way to get matching scale Vader Tie and regular Tie outside of 1/72 Bandai and Fine Molds is to have to scratch build/kit bash wings from one or the other

I may be wrong since I do not have them on hand for comparison, but AMT/ROUND 2 really dropped the ball when doing the "1/32" Tie. It is claimed to be in scale with their Vader Tie, but from pics I have seen, the cockpit ball and window frames are mush bigger in the 1/32 regular Tie when they should match

Revell also blew it. Their large scale Vader Tie is pretty close to the exact same size as the AMT one, but the large scale Tie they did was not in scale either and it looks like the Outland tie is not a match as well

 

[rbeach84]

Y'know, you might try using the solar panels from the Estes Darth Vader's TIE Fighter. They're slightly bigger than the scale you're working in, but much finer than the mesh you've got there. You could mold each panel type and cast them and use them on the wings you're building after trimming.

Unfortunately, the Estes X-1 TIE is much smaller than the Revell TIE kit that Rulebreaker is using, I'm afraid. It is sized such that the cockpit ball actually matches the AMT TIE kit...close to the TIE marketed by Fine Molds as 1/48 scale.

 

[Millenniumf]

Unfortunately, the Estes X-1 TIE is much smaller than the Revell TIE kit that Rulebreaker is using, I'm afraid. It is sized such that the cockpit ball actually matches the AMT TIE kit...close to the TIE marketed by Fine Molds as 1/48 scale.

I have the Estes TIE Advanced and the Revell TIE Fighter, and the Estes TIE is actually spot-on as far as scale, if you go by the width of the fuselage. The cockpit ball is undersized for the size of the "tail", so the scale of the wings should be just about right. In the pic below, the sides of the Advanced are touching the hubs of the Fighter's wings.

EDIT: Actually, now I want to get another Revell TIE Fighter and use it to mod the Estes Vader's TIE, lol!

 

[rbeach84]

Yeah, that does look close. This is what I was thinking of perhaps:

The Revell TIE is the same as the thread's kit...

 

[rbeach84]

But when I compare the front aspects of the "fuselages", the size difference is quite evident. First, the Revell & ESTES models, with the side detail aligned best possible:

Now the AMT "1/48" scale TIE and the ESTES:

So the AMT and ESTES are nearly exactly the same diameters whereas the Revell kit is significantly larger. I think comparing a standard TIE to a X-1 Advanced creates an optical illusion due to the cone shape on the backside of the X-1.

Better size match is found between the cockpit ball diameters of the Revell X-1 Advanced and their corresponding TIE fighter. This is borne out by the fact that the cockpit interior parts are near duplicates (or exact?) between the two Revell models. Which seems logical, that they would leverage parts in common... see my prior post for the kit numbers. Note that the Revell 'Vader' TIE is sized such it is 93% of the old MPC model kit, which I find interesting as well... Cheers!

 

[Millenniumf]

But when I compare the front aspects of the "fuselages", the size difference is quite evident. First, the Revell & ESTES models, with the side detail aligned best possible:
View attachment 1864204

Now the AMT "1/48" scale TIE and the ESTES:

View attachment 1864205
So the AMT and ESTES are nearly exactly the same diameters whereas the Revell kit is significantly larger. I think comparing a standard TIE to a X-1 Advanced creates an optical illusion due to the cone shape on the backside of the X-1.

Better size match is found between the cockpit ball diameters of the Revell X-1 Advanced and their corresponding TIE fighter. This is borne out by the fact that the cockpit interior parts are near duplicates (or exact?) between the two Revell models. Which seems logical, that they would leverage parts in common... see my prior post for the kit numbers. Note that the Revell 'Vader' TIE is sized such it is 93% of the old MPC model kit, which I find interesting as well... Cheers!

Yeah, I'm aware of that. Like I said, the ball cockpit on the Vader's TIE is undersized compared to the rest of the fuselage. MPC did a poor job getting the proportions correct, and it carried over into both the Estes TIE and the Revell TIE Advanced. I think if you took the ball from the Revell TIE Fighter and married it with the Estes Vader's TIE, it would look much more like the studio model. But this is just my opinion; none of the kits on the market apart from the Bandai one and the recent 1:32 TIE really get the proportions right anyway.