A little more progress on the E-Wing this week. I have been trying to tackle the problem of the top cannon. The way the ship is designed the third cannon on the top of the ship goes over the canopy and sits right on top of the pilot. I figure that this would cause a number of problems from getting the pilot into the cockpit to blinding him every time he fired it. I spent the week trying a few different fixes for this.
The first idea that I had was to simply shorten the barrel. I cut of the resin barrel and replaced with styrene the same as the main guns. Not bad, but still just lacking something.
Taking a design cue from my E-Wing scratch project, I thought I would try my hand at building a two barrel turret. What I like about this idea is that it preserves the "third cannon" look which is unique to the E-Wing but gives it a more functional role. With a turret, you get a cannon that is out of the pilots view and a 360 degree range of fire, allowing you to shoot at any enemy fighter trying to take you out from behind.
Here is the first attempt. After looking at it for a day, I decided that it was simply too big.
This is the second turret that I built. The cannons are much smaller and look more in scale to the rest of the ship. I'm really liking this one. I still need to thin the mount down, just to keep a sleeker profile and add a little photo etch for detail.
All I have left construction wise is to rebuild the cockpit. The kit comes with a chair, but it places the pilot a good ways back from the controls. Since there is so much room in the cockpit, I'm going to move the chair forward and then build a droid socket behind the pilot. The E-Wings didn't have external droids, but to me it just isn't a Star Wars fighter without an R2 unit somewhere.
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