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About The Kit »
After completing this kit, I must
admit I really like the Strike Gundam from Gundam
Seed. Sure it's "Seed", but it's not
over the top like most of the other Seed Mobile
Suits. The Strike is a basic and well-rounded
unit and is not an elaborate design, but still
more modern than say the RX-78-2.
The Strike Gundam is a general-purpose/multi-role
unit. It's a Gundam at the core armed only with
2 Armor Schneider Combat Knives and some head-vulcan
cannons. The "Striker-Packs are what make
this unit "multi-purpose". Basically
the Strike has multiple hard-points to attach
various "upgrades". There's the Aile
pack which is basically a flight back-pack, shield,
and beam rifle, the Sword pack which gives the
Strike greater melee capabilities with a large
beam-sword and cable-claw dealie, and the Launcher
pack which is your basic BFG and rocket launchers.
Pretty nifty design that way.
Because of this I wanted to design
my own "Striker Pack". I had been wanting
to do a "ninja" MS for quite some time
now but nothing seemed right for the base kit.
The Strike had been sitting on my shelf for about
a year and I had one of those "doh"
moments and got to work on the "Shinobi Strike".
My main feature was an arm-mounted
sword and sheath. I played with a lot of ideas
before I came to the one I built. I got the idea
from a cool blind swordsman from the PS2 game
- Shinobi who had a sword strapped to his forearm.
The sword is made from a leftover
gun handle, sharpened styrene strip, and misc.
bits. The sheath is made from square-tube styrene
which was cut, shaped, sanded, etc...
The other idea I had was for a sensor-jamming
backpack of sorts. I wanted a nice-size round
part on the backpack, but nothing seemed right.
Then I found a large washer and got the idea for
the jammer-ring. After holding the rubber washer
up behind the Strike the look of it grew on me.
I went to Home Depot, bought a PVC test-cap, cut
the lip off it and that's what the ring is made
from. The rest of the backpack is made from ReGZ
BWS parts and Sheet Styrene sanded to taste.
The color scheme and decals reflect
that this is a testing unit for prototype Striker
Packs. The decals were designed by me and printed
as usual by Models4U who did an excellent job
as always.
About The Base »
The base is the stock launch deck
that came with the MG Strike. I drilled out the
little holes and added blinking LEDs using the
4060 timer chip. No movie clips yet.
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