If you’ve been following “Send Wookiees, Guns, and Credits…” the GeekDad/GeekMom Star Wars: Edge of the Empire role playing game on Twitch, you’ll know that over the last few sessions we’ve “acquired” a Corellian YT-1300 Light Freighter. Being the party’s mechanic, I grew attached to her rather quickly and dubbed her the “Krayt Fire” in honor of the cargo containers in which we began our adventure as stowaways (and the poor dragon that was forced to plummet to his death by a heartless GM). Seeing as it shares the same body type as that other famous YT-1300, I hit up Amazon, got out my paints, and started working on immortalizing our new ride!
Out of the box, I almost hated to paint over her. Fantasy Flight Games has done an amazing job detailing their models for X:Wing and the Millennium Falcon is no exception. It’s not just the small painted details but the added washes that give the Falcon a sense of being a hard-used ship. It might not be a crop duster, but it’s definitely beat-up like one!
At first, I thought I could get away with a bit of pinstriping. And it looked good! But it also looked like a Millennium Falcon with a slightly different paint job (kind of like how Tom Cruise plays himself in every single movie, just with a different costume).
I even tried adding some washes from my Army Painter set to differentiate it from the Falcon even further. But that was just slopping mud on a dewback’s hide.
No, for this to truly be “our” ship, the Krayt Fire was going to have to stand out. I grabbed a can of black Army Painter spray primer and went with the nuclear option.
Once I had a clean slate to work with (mostly), I started building back up the red accents I’d initially painted.
When the red was uniform enough, I started using progressively lighter grays and gun metal drybrushing to add weathering and draw out the exquisite sculpted detail of the model. And I was done!
Then the Jawas came.
For those of you who haven’t watched the third episode (available on Twitch now until our fourth session this evening), during our exploration of our newly acquired vessel, it was nearly dismantled by an infestation of Jawas. We sprung the lock on a smuggling compartment that was packed to the glowy eyeballs with the brown-cloaked pests. They proceeded to run about, ripping things apart and trying to space us all (like you do). After we managed to calm them down and get to port, they felt bad about the havoc they’d wreaked and wanted to make it up to us by fixing the ship. We told them to go for it, forgetting that even “free” repairs come at a price.
After unsuccessfully negotiating for engine parts with a local merchant, we headed back to the ship only to find that it had been blinged out by our new three-foot-high pit crew. Our radar dish (lost in a canyon dogfight on Tatooine) had been replaced by old packing crates, the viewport was gold, and they’d painted a Jawa pinup on the side of the ship. There was no doubt, the Krayt Fire was now, truly, ours.
I layered up orange and metallic tones, along with some blue and white streaks on the radar dish to emulate that rusted look old shipping crates get. I also scrawled “Utinni” in Galactic Basic while I was there since that seemed to be the Jawas’ style.
Then I replaced my silver windows with gold and tried my best to emulate the amazing pinup art that our resident Wookie badass (and GeekMom contributor Shiri Sondheimer) had quick-drawn during our session.
The new, improved Krayt Fire debuts tonight on the GeekDad Twitch channel! Tune in to see if we can manage to actually get her off the ground! (FYI: consider this an “after dark” production of GeekDad and GeekMom… we’re definitely NC-17.)
