Way back in March, I found one of the ships from the Lightyear movie intended for the 5-inch scale figures they produced on sale at Walmart and bought it. It was the XL-01 ship, which is a pretty cool ship, but I'd mostly seen everybody talking about the other ship they made for the toy line, the XL-15.
People were mostly excited because the ship was big enough that if it were modded in the proper way, you could fit one of the new GI Joe Classified figures inside the cockpit. There have been precious few vehicles in that GI Joe Classified line, because the figures are large enough it tends to make vehicles unfeasible...or at least prohibitively expensive. But here was a ship that didn't cost an arm and a leg, and you could repaint it to look like it belonged in the ranks of GI Joe:
Or Cobra:
These looked pretty amazing, but I wasn't really looking for a ship that could go with 6-inchers. I wanted ships for my 4-inch scale (1/18) space station.
Besides, I never found an XL-15 for a cheap enough price. I'd pay $10 for that XL-01, but not $40 for an XL-01. So I wrote it off...until yesterday.
I went to Ross, and when I walked in, I was greeted by the sight of an XL-15 on the shelf. I assumed it would be $20, because even Ross has hiked their prices recently, but I was surprised when it was, in fact, $10. So I bought that thing without delay.
I was pretty stoked to get my hands on one of these. And it came with a figure too. All of that for $10. That's a pretty good deal if you ask me.
I have an idea about converting the Buzz Lightyear figure into an astromech droid. I've seen this guy repaint the Buzz figures to look like robots instead of guys in spacesuits.
But what if you removed the arms, and swapped them out for R2-D2-like legs? Then cut the body off at the waist? Add a few things onto the dome, like an eye-like camera thing, and maybe some simple panels, and voilà, cool new astromech, right?
Here's a really crappy Photoshop visualization I whipped up for it...sorry it's so crappy, but can you get the idea?
Take what's on the right, and turn it into something like this:
But that's not all. This morning I decided to search the internet for ideas on what others had done to customize their XL-15s, and I found this picture.
I immediately started drooling. Oh my gosh is this perfect. This is exactly what I want to do. It's not exactly what a Battlestar Galactica Colonial Viper looks like, but it's close enough that it will make me perfectly happy. Besides, I'll never find a Viper in this scale (1/18) without it costing hundreds of dollars, so if I can take a $10 ship and make me what will pass for a Viper. I can't wait to do it. This is going to be amazing!
