Alien slime with a Kanohi Hau

This is a post entirely about the mysterious Smooth Recusant that can be seen in ROTS, the third film in the prequel trilogy.

Recently I was working on finally painting some little 3d printed star ships I purchased off Etsy and wanted some references for how to paint the Recusant. You have to be careful with stuff like this because there's a lot of fake clone wars stuff floating around out there muddying things.

Like, this image is real:

this one is fake.

be careful out there, its dangerous.

Outside of that one side view, and this cutaway, which for obvious reasons isn't the best help for working out the painting on the hull, there isn't that much out there for this ship, sadly. So I decided to watch the film and make my own references.

Very quickly I noticed something was up.

Something very strange was going on here.

Again and again, when I looked close....something was really off.

I think its quite clear that this is quite a different ship.

What I think is going on here is something that's quite common in games, where there are multiple different versions of a model, a close up, high detail version and then a far away, lower quality one. You can see that's clearly the case when looking at other ships, Here is the Venator seen right at the start compared to a background Venator seen moments later.

Note the much more simplified, smoother appearance and the lack of the circle emblems.

Similarly, compare these Munificents

See how the second one lacks the more detailed blue striping and white triangular detailing, and over all seems a lot smoother.

So what I think is happening here is that the distance model of the Recusant is most likely an older version of the model. You see this a lot in game development, where the low detail model is made at an earlier time, but they're still reworking the main model so the two diverge.

The differences are quite vast, in universe you could make the argument that these are two completely different classes of ship really, just with similar silhouettes.

The main armoured shell that makes up the front part of the hull is much smoother, completely missing the long super structure and clusters of antennas that run along the top of the high detail model. This also means its missing its bridge, but its possible in this version it was meant to be located somewhere underneath. This series is no stranger to a design being flipped over or reversed during development after all.

It also has a completely different paint scheme, featuring long horizontal lines of blue with more details at the prow, vs the final version which almost entirely relies on vertical striping but leaves the very prow unadorned.

Most interestingly is that it seems to be lacking the two side engine pods seen in the final version, instead having only the centrally mounted one.

I can't find any views of the lower detail model from the rear so its hard to tell if it did just have the single engine pod or if there are more engine lights, but it really does seem to be missing the two side ones.

Its honestly quite hard to get any good shots of the higher detail one, as its primarily used when they're right up against it.

Here's a fun example of both on screen at once, the triple engine pod end fills the screen and off in the distance the single engine podded version can be seen in full.

Both versions of the ship can be seen rotated 90 degrees to the common horizon at some points too, so that's fun.

I find this sort of thing incredibly interesting, it really gives an insight in to how the films were made and how iterative the process was.

I want to end on one little detail I always missed in the movie. Early on in the scene the camera follows the fighters as they fly along side a Recusant that gets one of its engine pods blown up. I always thought this was just showing how long they were, and that they were probably designed to be so long and spindly just for this scene, but watching it closely I noticed that its actually TWO Recusants, one after the other that they fly by.

There's a blink and you miss it part where you can see the engine light of one of the pods at the rear of the first ship and then a blur as they pass by the bow of the second.

And this is the one that gets its engine blown up!

I just thought that was neat.