Christmas 2020 Gunpla Diorama
Overview
SUTD Gunpla Club is proud to be sponsored by Toymana. For the past few years, SUTD Gunpla Club has been creating a diorama every Christmas to commemorate the holiday and usher in the new year. Having crossed 3 years of sponsorship and in light of the holiday spirit, Gunpla Club is creating a new gunpla diorama to celebrate Christmas 2020 and commemorate more than 3 years of collaboration with Toymana.
Inspiration and Ideation
With 30 Minute Mission going into its second year, they continue to bring many new and interesting side expansion kits along with their line of mechs. They are very eye catching and the possibilities of customization they bring is very captivating for us builders.
Taking advantage of this, we decided to custom build a mecha snow sleigh for Gunpla Santa. For this, we use the 30MM option kit 1/44 Extended Armament Vehicle. Riding it will then be a 1/144 HG Gundam as Gunpla Santa. They will then be accompanied by a four-legged plamo of some sort as the reindeer pulling the sleigh.
Our Gunpla Santa ended up as the RX-78-02, it is the grandaddy of gunpla after all.
We wanted to get a Lagowe/Bucue for our reindeer, but we were unable to get one. Thus we had to make do with whatever we found lying around. We ended up opting for a pre-painted Gaia gundam that one of our club members left lying around that we initially mistook for a Lagowe.
The Build
The 30MM kit itself looks rather interesting, and it does look quite appealing how it can be easily combined with other kits of its lineup. Seeing how the 30MM Option Set is a rather small tank, we decide to combine two of them into, using the magic of the high compatibility of the 30MM sets.
Sleigh – Extended Armament Vehicle (Tank)
The Extended Armament Vehicle is made up of four main parts:
- Front Threads
- Rear Threads
- Body
- Turret (we will not be using this part as it is a friendly Santa sleigh)
Following the colour theme of a Santa sleigh, we painted the tank mainly red with gold accents.
Each of these parts are full of pegs holes for attaching to each other, and it honestly made the customizing process of making a sleigh a smooth one. The high customizability of the 30MM line up really shines through and was quite prevalent when we were piecing all of the parts together for the build.
To build our sleigh for gunpla Santa, we started off with the basic tank as seen on the box cover of the set. It really gave a good base to start with, with nice gold threads mimicking the ski sled portion of the sleigh. The body of the tank served as a good seat as well. From here, we just started adding on parts from the second set. Using some of the body parts, we extended the front of the tank and gave it handles.
The kit comes with extra connector parts that made it easier to connect the parts together with pegs and clips. This really shows off the flexibility of the 30MM kits and its high level of customizability. We added parts to the back and sides of the tank to give it a fuller look, like a sleigh. We managed to even arrange it such that there was a peg to attach to Gunpla Santa’s back!
We then end up with a nice and cozy sleigh for Gunpla Santa, complete with a backrest, handlebars and even footrests for a comfortable flight through the wintry night delivering presents (and kits) to people all over the world!
Santa – Gundam: The Origin 026 RX-78-02 Gundam
The version of the granddaddy that we got for this review is the origin version, which was released in March this year. It was an exciting kit that was offered to us because of the many good things that we have heard about it, with its various different option parts, surface details and overall build quality.
Appearance
This RX-78-02 Gundam just looks amazing. It really lives up to its hype and we could tell right as we were building it that it promised excellent quality.
The surface detail on this kit, as expected from the hype, is simply outstanding and in a world class of its own. The sheer number of potential panel lining sections and the number of decals available really puts this kit as one of the best HGs that you can buy. All this attention to detail really lets this kit pit itself against some of the RGs that are available, and possibly even the older MGs, aside from the size difference.
Coupled with the nice range of option parts and equipment that comes with this kit, it makes for a very interesting kit to put together, especially in a fight with Char’s Zaku II. There is definitely a lot of potential especially when a gundam base is thrown into the mix.
Articulation
The RX-78 possesses a superb level of articulation, particularly for a HG. It features many moving joints all across its body, from its feet, legs, arms, torso and waist, with all affording a decent amount of articulation to give the kit a lot of poseability.
One surprising thing for us when playing around with this kit is the flexibility of the shoulder and leg joints. Normally on HG kits, these joints can be quite stiff or limited in movement by their shoulder pauldrons or waist skirts. However, due to the very simple design of this kit, the legs can bend almost 90° and twist and turn sideways, with the shoulders also being able to cross the chest fairly easily, as seen in the image above where it looks almost as if the shoulder joint is popping out.
Even the backpack itself has some poseable elements, with the beam saber and thrusters having adjustable pieces. Although we can’t really figure out any interesting poses with the backpack, we are sure that some creative geniuses out there could put them to good use.
Overall
We certainly enjoyed this build very much. Although the restrictions put in place didn’t allow us to plan out the Christmas kit the way we wanted, or let us come together to work on it in larger groups, it gave us the opportunity to see what we could do with what we were limited to. One thing to note that we overlooked was the joints of the 30MM kit. As we used spray cans (Tamiya and Nippon Paint), the thick paint layers made it difficult, but not impossible, to get parts to fit properly. Perhaps one tip for modelers in the future would be to mask off the joints and sockets to prevent this issue from happening to them.
We can’t say enough praises about HG Gundam: The Origin RX-78 kit. It really is an impressive kit and we would definitely recommend it. The 30MM Extended Armament Vehicle surprisingly fit rather well with the RX-78 in this build. This will definitely provide some inspiration for future builds.
From all of us here at SUTD Gunpla Club, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
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