Serenity: 1/288 Firefly

Firefly was one of the best, and tragically short lived science fiction shows ever made. Serenity, a Firefly class transport, is the main ship of the series and while she may never win a beauty contest, is non-the-less one of the coolest ships ever.  Serenity also had a cameo in the new Battlestar Galactica series

This is my build up the the 1/288 Stargazer kit.  It's mostly resin but does include some thin wire and styrene for pipes and some sheet styrene for the solar panels. At a first glance this model is very good, at seems very accurate to the CG model used on the show.

What you get:

 I had a few issues with my casting of this kit, nothing serious and should all be very easy to fix. There are a few air bubbles on the main engine part:

 And some thick resin pour stubs:

 Here it looks like maybe the mold is going out, on both sides there is resin that will need to be drilled out for the wings to fit:

 One of the cool features on this kit, removable shuttles:

 They don't quite fit flush, but a little sanding work should fix that nicely:

 These are parts for the landing gear and wing details. I don't like how these were cast as one "part". I will have to sand them down to remove the excess thickness, and then cut them out of the resin chunk they were cast in.

I found a website with some amazing renders of Serenity. Painting this used, beat-up ship is going to be a real challenge. At this point I'm not really sure where I'm going to start, but my airbrush is going to get a workout.