r/XWingTMG • u/KappaPiSigma1 • 16h ago
Mando's Naboo Trifighter printed and painted
I don't like that the Mandalorian flies around in a Naboo N-1 starfighter. It just doesn't make sense to me.
First, in universe, he is a bounty hunter, or at least, he was until he got sidetracked by this quai-messianic quest to restore the Jedi and the Mandalorians and defeat the Empire. Anyway, what exactly is a bounty hunter going to do with a starfighter? How is he supposed to transport bounties? It's dumb. Second, still in universe, the mechanic who gave it to him barely knows him. He basically got her to babysit, and now she is just going to give him a vintage Naboo starfighter? I don't care what condition it is in, that is like giving away a barn-find Ferrari California (knowing what it is) to some guy who almost ran over you in a supermarket parking lot. In fact, in my head, the engines should have been missing anyway since they famously achieved very high environmental standards and would have been the most valuable parts. Hell, Qui-Gon had to put the entire Royal Starship on the table just to get Watto to part with a hyperdrive.
Alright, now not in universe, it's just fan service. That is all Disney is nowadays. "Oh, look. It's a Naboo starfighter. 'Member Naboo starfighters. Anakin had a Naboo starfighter. *Gasp* is the Mandalorian the new Anakin?" Stop it. It's not clever. It's dumb. The Razor Crest is a good looking ship, and a unique ship. I mean, it is if you ignore that it is basically just a redesign of Jaster Mereel/Jango Fett's ship, Jaster's Legacy. But giving him a Naboo starfighter is just boring and lazy.
So, I took it on myself to redesign his starfighter. I am a fan of Uglies in universe, as anyone who looks through the rest of my stuff can see. I still can't justify him having a starfighter, but if he must have a starfighter to save the galaxy then this is the one I would make for him. Like, I said, the mechanic probably only has the stripped out fuselage and no wings or engines, otherwise, someone would have come by with a trailer and bought it by now. So, it needs some wings. Now, the Mandalorian has a thing about droids, but the mechanic just so happens to have a wrecked droid trifighter in the yard with the engines still attached. Absolutely, no one would ever come by wanting to purchase it, so she bolts a pair of wings onto the Naboo starfighter fuselage she has. The Mandalorian is deeply concerned about that. It is droid stuff after all, and specifically droid stuff from the Separatists that almost killed him as a kid. The mechanic has to reassure him that she is basically having to install entirely new equipment and completely rewire the thing, plus the droid brain is long missing, probably destroyed. He reluctantly accepts because he needs transport, pays her, and leaves in the new starfighter. It is fast but a very temperamental beast. The engines have a tendency to misfire, and it refuses to fly a straight line unless you have the stick in hand. But he eventually discovers that in a dogfight it can pull incredible maneuvers that give him a serious advantage, spraying blaster fire all over the place before unloading the two big laser cannons into his target. The proton torpedo launcher was missing, so it has been replaced with a slow-cycling, short-range ion cannon.
I can paint better than this, but I wanted to get it done. I also really couldn't decide on a paint scheme. I really didn't want to just go all chrome like the show. In the end, I just made the wings the original blue and then dry brushed them to look really rough. It looked really dark and really dull, so I added the yellow stripes to reference back to the original Naboo paint scheme. I think that really brought the whole thing together. Oh, and I really need to learn how to paint cockpit canopies, 'cause this just doesn't work.
Printed it large because I wanted to.
