#december sky

I'm just building the high grade kit this week.

I don't have a lot of master grade kits under my belt yet and the FA-78 Ver.Ka looks intimidating as all hell. Maybe that's something to work up to one day...

Even though it's just a high grade - there's a lot of plastic in this box. 9 normal runners plus a bunch of polycaps and a couple beam-saber blades. And, oddly enough, no multicolor runner. Each runner is just a single color.

There's a bunch of color-correcting foil stickers, as well as some sticker-style decals.

I decided to use the foil stickers because I didn't want to try to paint all these tiny little details... But I'm not convinced they're actually adding much to the kit. I mean - those big thrusters on the front of the knee obviously look better in color. But the little tiny things on the side? I think those looked just fine without the stickers.

The artwork for the FA-78 shows its joints covered in some kind of protective shroud to keep dust and debris out. The HG kit replicates this with weird, wrinkly-looking molded plastic bits. They look OK, but it's a real pain to panel-line them. I gave up on actually trying to hit the lines and just kind of slopped panel-liner all over the parts and then cleaned it up.

The build is about what I'd expect from an older HG kit. There's lots of polycaps and the armor sections are basically hollow. And it's just purely the "full armor" version of the FA-78. There aren't really any bits you can remove to make it look like a standard/basic RX-78.

Of course it wouldn't be Thunderbolt without a ridiculously-huge backpack and entirely too many shields.

Clearly, there's a lot to this kit. I think about half the build was spent on the accessories.

This kit just looks good. Even without all the accessories. It's a very solid build. Everything feels very tight and stable. I had absolutely no trouble posing it at all.

This kit comes with a weird little stand... And while that's not strictly necessary (the kit can stand up without it, even with the backpack), I can't really see posing this kit without a stand. It's meant to be zooming around in space - not stuck on the ground.

I wish those little sub-arms on the backpack were actually articulated. I had some difficulty getting it posed with the two shields. But I guess that's what you get when trying to cram all of this into an HG kit.

So, clearly, I'm going to have to build the Ver.Ka.