Cylon Raider

[Smiffy]

Cylon Raider

1:32 scale Moebius Models

When Ronald D Moore and his team were reimagining the television series Battlestar Galactica (BSG), one of the most radical hardware redesigns involved the Cylon Raider. In the original 70s series, the Raider was a flying wing design, piloted by three Cylon Centurions. For the new series, the Raider became a much more sinister looking, bio-mechanical, living machine. The 'head' featured the same sweeping red scanner eye of the foot soldier centurions. When shot, they bled. When killed, their memories and experiences were downloaded into a new 'body'. En masse, their flight movements mimic a large flock of birds, elegantly swooping and diving as one. They were heavily armed, with two kinetic energy weapons (cannons) slung under the wings and two internal missle bays, which can carry conventional or nuclear ordnance.

When series four of NuBSG arrived, the Raiders design had been given a slight tweaking. The 'face' being altered to more closely resemble the more angular head of the Centurion, giving it a more aggressive look. This season four version was known as the Advanced Raider.

The kit

Moebius Models latest kit represents this series four Advanced Raider. It comes in the now familiar top opening box, the illustration featuring an attacking Raider swooping by. The bottom half of the box has a picture of a fleet of Cylon Raiders, with a Basestar in the distance. This can be cut out and used as a background to the finished model, if so required.

The kit itself consists of a very modest 26 parts, moulded on four grey sprues and one separately bagged clear sprue.

The one piece upper wing/fuselage moulding immediately grabs your attention and appears to capture the distinctive shape very well. The surface features a very slightly rough texture, which is actually quite authentic. The surface of the CGI models in the series, often look very rough and pitted. Panel lines may appear a little deep, but again they are quite prominent on the CGI version. Moebius has decided to mould the little double pentagon wing insignia as a raised feature. It shouldn’t be too difficult to sand these off and create replacements with green decal paper though, if that is your want.

If building the kit from the box, then construction should be fairly straight forward. A quick test fit of the main components revealed no major problems. Although care will be needed when joining the lower wing halves to the upper wing. It may be prudent to remove some of the locating tabs here in order to get a better fit and it looks as though some careful filling and sanding will be required around the edges of the wing (similar to the underside join on their Viper Mk.VII kit).

The kit, like the others in their BSG series, has been designed with lighting in mind. Clear pieces are supplied for the engines and the lens for the scanner eye. A two part stand is also provided in clear and this will be familiar to anyone who has any of the previous BSG kits.

The paint chart features a top and bottom view of (what appears to be) an original CGI file of the Raider. Moebius gives some basic colour call outs and some tips on weathering the ship with washes.

Conclusion

I’ve been waiting for this release for some time and overall I’m very happy to finally have the kit in hand. There is a slight disappointment on a personal level that they chose to model the series four Raider, as I was looking forward to building a replica of Scar, who featured in the series three episode of the same name. He was a particularly badly battered Raider. The Cylons “Top Gun” . That won’t stop me from enjoying this kit however and I already have plans to light this with a working scanner eye. Of course the real challenge with this kit will be replicating the beaten, multi tonal silver finish. If done well, then the finished model will be a real head turner.

The next release from Moebius should be the 1/6th Cylon Centurion and then they plan to release the Battlestar Pegasus to the same scale as their Galactica kit. Here’s hoping that a Raptor in 32nd scale will follow soon.

Recommended to all BSG fans or anyone with the desire to build a mean frakkin’ toaster.

Review sample courtesy of

UK distributors for

[BWP]

Thanks for the review.

Moebius has decided to mould the little double pentagon wing insignia as a raised feature. It shouldn't be too difficult to sand these off and create replacements with green decal paper though, if that is your want.

The raised pentagon detail was actually a feature of the original CGI image, so it's "authentic" as it comes.