By John Lester - images & text © 2006

Scale: 1/72 - about 5"/127mm long when built

Parts: 17 resin plus one clear vacuformed plastic.

Instructions: 2 pages with assembly guide and reference photos

Decals: ALPS-printed waterslide (JBOT)

Molding Quality: 9 - trivial flash/pour stubs

Detail: 8 - adequate for the scale

Accuracy: 9 - looks spot on to me

MSRP: $45.99 USD (~$52.74 CAN/ € 37.99 EUR) (postage paid; add $10 more to addresses outside US/Canada) available from SciFi Models

Overall Rating: 9 - at long last, a decent kit of Chricton's module!

The late, great sci-fi epic Farscape has been off the air for a couple years now, but that hasn't lessened my desire to build ships from the series.

Image: Instructions

Image: Decals

At long last, Sci-Fi Models has come to my rescue with a 1/72 resin kit of John Crichton's module.

What You Get

The kit is comprised of 17 resin parts, one clear vacuformed piece of styrene, decals and instructions. Deployed landing gear are provided, as are optional parts for the drive mods done after Chricton was aboard Moya for some time. Casting is very clean; there were no pinholes, bubbles or other flaws on my kit, and only minimal flash and pour stubs to clean up. A fully detailed cockpit is provided with separate seat and side consoles. It looks properly busy for the scale and should paint up convincingly. No pilot figure is provided, but those are easy to fin in this scale. One clear vacuformed piece of plastic is provided for the upper canopy glazing; decals are provided for the black-tinted side windows.

Instructions are simple and include stills from the series by way of reference for decals and painting. Decals, by JBOT, include all the markings for Chricton's module, plus what I presume is the name of the shuttle ("Collaroy") that carried the ship into space in the premiere. Handy, that.

It's a small model - necessarily so, as the 'original' was carried into orbit inside the payload bay of a Space Shuttle. At 5" long, it's comparable to a Colonial Viper in 1/72, but quite a bit wider.

Assembly and Finish

Assembly should be a breeze - I may even be able to emulate the prolific Allen Ury and have this built inside a month. Parts fit, from what I can tell just taping things together, looks to be excellent. The resin is nice and clean, with no heavy release tresidue to affect paint or glue adhesion (though I'll still give the parts a quick scrub with dish soap and a toothbrush). It would be nice to have two canopies provided in case my fat fingers make an error, but that's a minor nit. My only other concern is that the landing gear will not be up to the task of holding the model against gravity for long - they are pretty petite and resin likes to bend over time. If I were to build it gear down, I'd mount the model on a stand. However, I think I'll make use of the extra decals and display the ship at the moment of launch from the Space Shuttle, just before the radiation wave hit and Chricton got shot into a wormhole ...

Conclusions

One word: Yay! This has been one of my personal 'grail' kits since I started watching Sci-Fi Friday in the last century. I'm tickled that the kit I've finally gotten is as nicely done, and affordable, as this. It doesn't look overly difficult to build (even the vac canopy is a very simple shape to cut out)and has plenty of options to boot.

Recommended!