This is the Hermetic Angel, a racing speeder from the Star Wars universe, flown in the waning days of the Old Republic. I developed the idea after seeing the truncated astromech droid in Episode II, when I began to wonder how the droid had felt about being decapitated. I imagined a diorama in which, to save weight, the builders of a speeder were trying to remove an astromech's head, but the droid was resisting the modification. When the racing contest came along, I decided to set my diorama in the pits of a space race, in which the droid had taken the previous year's trophy hostage in order to resist being truncated.

The Hermetic Angel

In order to negotiate the complicated light-speed straightaways, interplanetary cornering, and orbital chicanes of Malastare and similar competitions, the speeder has a pair of heavy duty Incom sublight engines, a highly responsive Kuat hyperspace drive, and a set of powerful reaction control thrusters and lifters, all of which the pilot must coordinate in tandem with a specially-outfitted astromech droid accommodated via a streamlined hatch in the aft fuselage.

The Model

The model is a 1/72 scale kit-bash using a Hasegawa F-4 and pair of P-38's, an Airfix McLaren F-1, the spare parts from a Fine Molds X-Wing, and some styrene rod and sheet material. The decals were cobbled from these models and from stock decal film in various colours; simulating sponsor decals without English wording was very hard).

I was trying to suggest the colour scheme of the F-1 McLaren Mercedes of recent years, with their black-and-aluminium pattern highlighted by orange. I painted the model in Humbrol sprays and Citadel acrylics. The base is a picture frame with the glass covered by stucco-patterned doll's house wallpaper.