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| The Battlestar Valkyrie made its initial appearance in the Battlestar Galactica episode "Hero", in the form of flashback. Valkyrie was Captain Adama's old command, and when a member of her crew turns up in the present-day, we learn how fallible Adama really is, and how his actions then lead directly to him being shunted off to Galactica to get him out of the way. The ship also showed up as a different, unnamed, and much larger vessel in the movie "Razor". | |
This kit is from Timeslip Creations, and is in 1/4500 scale to match the Moebius models Galactica and Pegasus kits. An all resin kit, it comes with decals for the ship's name (2) and the landing pod deck markings (2). The kit master was obviously 3D printed, and the surface shows the gradations of it. If one were to spend a lot of time, most of that could likely be sanded smooth, but there are a lot of fine detail areas where that isn't possible, and honestly most of it adds a nice scale appearance to the kit. My copy of the kit was obviously pulled from a mold near the end of its life, for while there were no air bubbles at all in the casting, in several places the resin was short-shot, thin, or just plain missing, with mold tear lines visible in a couple of places. The baffles for the intakes and the exhaust of the engines (4 pieces each) were so badly cast that I couldn't salvage them at all. I was going to scratch build them, but Bob Morgan, who does a lot of 3D add-ons for the Moebius kits, offered to design the parts for me, which I then purchased through Shapeways. They look perfect. Thanks, Bob! |
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Assembly was straight forward; there are only about 15 pieces to the model. The only real difficulty was getting the hangar pods situated properly, as there are no alignment marks or pins. I attached them using 10 minute epoxy, which around the 5 minute mark of setting has enough give for the parts to be repositioned, yet enough hold to keep them where you put them. |
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Paints Used
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Painting started with a black primer base and an overall coat of Vallejo gray, leaving the color thin in shadowed areas to let the black show through a bit. All of the red markings were masked. The red disks on the top of the ship are supposed to be insignia of some sort, but I couldn't find anything definitive on the 'net, so I just made them look good with red paint. The decals for the flight deck were as thick as paper, which worked out well as one of the bays was so thin on the bottom you could see light through it. The name decals went on with no trouble, but did require judicious application of decal softening agent. |
Final details include gun barrels for the largest gun mounts, which I cut from short sections of 1/350th scale photo Overall a fun kit that I would build again. Completed June 2015. Model now resides in a private collection. |
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| Finished photos were taken with my Canon Galaxy s6 edge smartphone (the camera on that thing is INSANE!) and my Canon 400D (Rebel Xti) and 50mm fixed lens, using external daylight-corrected CFL light sources. Post-processing done in Photoshop using a gray-card reference shot. The title image was composed using 3 images, layered in Photoshop, to get a uniform focus. | |
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