Back when the show was new, I got hooked on the Babylon-5 series. I even had every episode on video tape. When they became available, I upgraded to the DVD versions. I was not alone in liking the show. Many members of the model club to which I belong were also really into it. After Revell released the Starfury models, the club held a contest amongst ourselves to build the kit and see who could do the best Starfury model. My models did not win, but I still had a blast building them.

I purchased a couple of these kits when they first hit the market. With the exception of drilling out the laser cannon barrels, they are built right out of the box.

I read the "building a better Starfury" review on the Starship Modeler web site and just did not feel the work was worth it. My real love is aircraft, not sci-fi or spacecraft, and I wanted the builds to be quick and easy.

All the major color patterns on the ship are masked and painted using an air brush and Model Master enamel paints.

The lightning bolts were particularly challenging because I wanted to maintain the white border around them. The main gray overall is Dark Ghost Gray (F.S.36320) with a few odd panels painted in Light Ghost Gray (F.S.36375). I liked these colors better than the gray that the instructions called for.

The decals from the kit were ... well ... poor. Like all the reviews I have read, my example did not react well to setting solutions, not even the powerful solutions like Champ. I ended up thinning down some clear lacquer and applying so it would run under the decals and minimize the silvering. This was only a marginal improvement, though.

I had very little trouble constructing and painting the kit. The poor decals presented the most trouble of the whole project. The real challenge was in figuring out how to handle the model once all the big "paddles" were in place. And then, how to keep it mounted on the cheesy display stands that came in the kit (the members of my model club were more interested in how I got the stand to work than the actual models).

The markings of this ship are not from any Babylon 5 episode. I wanted to go out and create something unique, so I designed my own markings. I came up with a story for it that goes something like this:

The ship is "Blue 3" of the 15th Deep Space Recon Squadron (DSRS) assigned to the "Olympia", one of the large galactic rim exploration ships. After nearly losing a ship near a strong gravi-magnetic field, the unit's commander decided it was time to make it so the ships showed up better on visual scans. He sponsored a competition within the unit to come up with better high-visibility markings for the ships.

The competition was fierce, but the victor was this set of markings, inspired by the tail markings on the RF-101C Voodoo aircraft of the 15th TRS / 18th TFW in the early 1960's from which the 15th DSRS draws its lineage. The ship's pilot, Lt. John Ramous, is the creator of the markings and is a descendant of a pilot that flew in those ancient Voodoo aircraft. Lt. Ramous could not resist also adding some spice to the markings in the form of a pinup picture and his girlfriend's name on the right side of the craft.

The black and yellow markings dramatically improved the effectiveness of picking out the ships with visual scans and have on two occasions been instrumental at recovering lost ships. The markings are so successful that the 15th DSRS has petitioned Earth-Dome to officially adopt the black and yellow markings for all Deep Spaces Recon Squadrons. Earth-Dome has taken the matter under advisement, pending further studies.