'Flight' from PhilH: The Rebels Muster

Star Wars Fever is gripping the four corners of the land, with the latest blockbuster Episode VIII: The Last Jedi recently released, smashing box office records (surprise, huh?) and  being better than Episode VII: The Force Awakens. 

With the theme "Flight" to interpret, I thought I'd surrender to Star Wars fever for this theme round and take my Flight to space. The dogfighting and starship design in the Star Wars franchise is iconic, and I endlessly watched the original trilogy in my childhood, mostly for the bits with pew pew lasers.

So, for this theme round here is a motley bunch of Rebel squadrons for Fantasy Flight Games' Star Wars: Armada fleet battles game.

I've actually been painting these fiddly little guys for some time, so this post is actually me "pulling a Greg" and posting Challenge and pre-Challenge output together to pad out the numbers. So, while there are 18 X-Wings, 6 Y-Wings, 6 A-Wings and two YT-2400 Light Freighters, only the latter two groups were painted entirely during the challenge.

X-Wing fighter-bombers, painted pre-challenge, marked up as three different squadrons, each squadron getting on base with an alternate colour, that denotes them as an ace, that I can use to represent the many named characters  (Luke, Wedge etc) that also feature in the game.

Y-Wings in their classic yellow (well, gold). Funnily enough these are my favourite classic Star Wars fighter: big lumbering brutes with their massive engines and stubby guns in the nose

Painting the engines on these took me a stupid long time, so you get a picture form the back too.

A-Wing interceptors: fast, green and get blown up a lot

YT-2400 Light Freighters: think of them like the baby brothers of the Millenium Falcon. These aren't from the films and I'm not immersed in lore enough to too you much about them. Though the SW: Armada personality for these is a chap called Dash Rendar, the protagonist of the old LucasArts Dark Forces first person shooter. Oh, I loved that game in my youth (along with the X-Wing/TIE Fighter dogfighting games) but I sure don't remember his ship from it. 

And finally group shot, of the whole lot of them running away from Imperial firepower, which the Rebels tend to do rather a lot. 

Points for these? Well, firstly I've only painted eight of them during the challenge, and I've no idea what scale they're supposed to be: the scale in SW:Armada is all over the place, to accommodate little fighters on the same tabletop as vast Imperial-class Star Destroyers. I'd put them roughly the size of a 6mm vehicle.

Now, where are their Imperial foes...?

Neeeeeeeeeaw