by Michael Anderson

For this piece, I used the Moebius 1/32 scale Viper Mk. II from the new Battlestar Galactica. My intent was to create Starbuck's crashed viper on 'Earth'. I used Paragraphics photo-etch set for the cockpit.

In depicting Starbuck's corpse in the cockpit, I decided that I wanted to show her burned and decayed skull inside the helmet. In order to achieve this, I cut off the resin figure helmet and made a RTV mold of it. Then I cast the helmet in clear resin, and proceeded to dremel the inside of the helmet to hollow it out. If you look at the pictures, you can see that the face shield is indeed clear. For the skull, I took a 1/35 scale head and took the dremel and ground away the face to look like a skull. After painting, I placed the skull inside the helmet and glued both back onto the body. I also replaced the right hand so as to be NOT holding onto a joystick.

For the exposed guts of the Viper, I hit the spares box for anything that might look like it would fit in a real world airplane. For the ribs, I enlarged blueprints of the viper up to 1/32 scale and used them as a pattern.

Painting was straight forward Tamiya white and Testors Metalizers for the guts. Everything else was enamels. Weathering was oil wash inside the cockpit and a few different shades of dark gray and black pastels for the reentry burning.

The grasslands were Woodland Scenics and dried wheat from Michaels.

Image: Right side

Image: Right/rear

Image: Ground level

Image: From above

Image: There is indeed a skull inside the helmet.