Gunpla Build - High Grade Gundam Astray Red Frame Inversion (Part 1)

A couple notes about this build. First, check out all these runners!

That’s quite a hefty stack for a High Grade. That makes sense given that this has both a Flight Unit and a ton of weapons, but it’s still an impressive sight.

Second, take a look at the decal sheet:

These are foil-type stickers, and as far as I can tell most of them are used for the sword and sheath.

In terms of painting and detailing, my plan is to do a gloss coat on this model, with maybe a bit of matte coat for the grey bits.

On that note, I intend to do the bare minimum in terms of panel lining and painting. In my opinion, doing too much recoloring takes away from the point of these palette swaps (though I’m willing to be proven wrong).

Shield

I don’t know why I thought this shield would be complicated, but I did. In truth, it’s only a couple of pieces:

This is a rare instance on this kit where most of the surface is matte rather than gloss, thanks to that big grey piece in the front. I think it helps (or will help) add some nice contrast to the finished model.

Upon finishing, my first thought was “this looks an awful lot like the Strike Gundam’s shield”, but I wasn’t sure if my memory was simply playing tricks on me. It’s not like I can recall the exact design of the Strike from memory.

Thankfully, I got my kid a Strike Gundam action figure some years back¹, and I kept all the accessories. Let’s compare:

Looks pretty similar to me. I guess that makes sense, considering the Astray prototypes were based on the Strike (and all the other G-Project mobile suits). But I never expected it to be that blatant of a ripoff.

Beam Sabers

I didn’t touch these up, or even top coat them. Feels like a waste of spray paint, especially considering the can is so small.

The beam effect parts are the “flat type” blades, which is always a welcome choice.

Gerbera Straight

The Gerbera Straight is the centerpiece of this model kit. It’s what “makes” the Astray Red Frame, which means it has to look good.

And if this was a Real Grade model kit, that wouldn’t be a problem. The blade itself would likely have some sort of chrome plating, like the Real Grade Exia’s many swords. I imagine they’d even figure out a way to make the handle color separated.

But this is a High Grade model, and that means certain compromises can and will be made. And that in turn means that we, the builders, have to make some extra effort.

Now to Bandai’s “credit”, the kit does come with a ton of color correcting foil decals for both the sword and the sheath. They’re a huge pain, as you have to wrap them and fold them around the finished parts. It’s very easy to get it wrong, and even if you get it right, the decals may not stay on without a bit of help.

And yet, some of the decals have intricate colors and patterns that wouldn’t be easy to hand paint. For 95% of builders, the decals are probably the better option.

Now for the build …

The sheath is made out of two halves, with a tiny red bit that goes on top. You’re more than welcome to remove the seam lines (I tried), but the piece is so dark that you’re not likely to notice them anyway.

Here is what it looks like with panel lines, but not any decals:

There’s not much painting to do here; the most difficult part of the process is mixing your paints correctly in order to match the shade of red used on the model kit (for the record, the color I came up with doesn’t even come close to matching, but it will have to do).

Now here it is with all the decals:

There are precisely four decals here - one at the bottom, one at the top, and then the two red stripes in the middle. In my experience, it’s possible to make these thick foil decals look fantastic, but it depends a lot on their size and shape, the surface to which you apply them, and your level of patience. For example, the SD Sgt. Verde Buster Gundam uses a foil decal on its head, and because it’s applied to a (mostly) flat surface, it looks excellent:

However, the sheath isn’t nearly as flat. I tried really hard to tamp these decals down to make them look flat and flush, but in the end they don’t look nearly as good as Sarge’s head. Oh well.

Two additional things to notice here:

1. The decal at the top of the sheath does not wrap around back. This makes sense, since you won’t ever see that area when the sheath is equipped.
2. The sheath attaches to the left hip of the Astray, meaning it’s oriented so the sharp edge of the blade faces up. Apparently that is historically accurate, so good on Bandai for that attention to detail.

Now let’s look at the katana itself. Somehow it has even more stickers than the sheath. There is one at the bottom of the hilt and four on the hand guard. Because of the smaller size of the piece, these decals were all much harder to apply. The one on the hilt was particularly tricky, as it wasn’t immediately obvious how it is supposed to fold and bend in order to fully wrap around the plastic.

As for painting, you’ll have to do the following:

• Paint the handle
• Paint the blade itself
• Paint the blade collar

This was my first chance to use my chrome Gundam Marker on unpainted plastic. The result was better than I expected:

I’m not sure I can say the same about the decals. They look even worse than the ones on the sheath. The only silver lining is that most people are likely to focus on the blade than on the guard.

Now that everything is decorated, we have to address the elephant in the room - how well does the blade fit into the sheath? Most gunpla parts are so precisely engineered that even a tiny bit of paint or top coat can change the size of a part such that it no longer fits as intended.

In this case, I think the designers at Bandai accounted for the fact that the blade needs to be painted: even with two coats of chrome marker and one layer of gloss coat, it fits into the sheath with room to spare. Hopefully that means it won’t get terribly scratched up if I take it out too many times.

BuCue Head

The head is made out of two halves, plus some decorative bits on each side. Doesn’t get much simpler than that.

I wasn’t familiar with the BuCue before building this, but I did some quick research and painted this thing to closely (but not exactly) match the image here. It was a simple and fun little job.

But then I realized I should have painted it to match the body of the mobile suit. Woops! I ended up leaving it alone, as I’m rather proud of my work here:

I feel like the beam effect parts are a bit too long, but maybe that’s just me:

Also, I can’t help but think that this is going to look awkward when equipped. There’s no mistaking that it’s just a head mounted on its hand.

At least it was fun to work on!

Beam Rifle

I wasn’t initially planning on doing anything with this. I’ve been putting a lot of work into detailing beam rifles and other firearms, and while the results have always been worth it, it’s also mentally exhausting. I figured I’d take a break with this one.

But then I saw this blurry photo of an Astray action figure, where it has a two-toned rifle:

It’s would be a simple paint job, but one that should pay dividends.

But first, here it is assembled:

It’s nice enough. It’s futuristic looking but not too outrageous.

Next it was time to paint, and then add a gloss coat using my second new Gundam Marker:

This one spits out clear gloss coat, for those times where you need to apply top coat with some degree of precision in a small space.

This is my first time using such a marker, and like with the chrome pen, I feel like I’m still getting used to using it. After multiple coats, this is the best I got it to look:

It’s not nearly as glossy as I expected, and what’s more, the rough edge of the pen tip scratched up the black paint underneath. It just didn’t look right, so I painted over my work and then used the can of Mr Hobby gloss. The result ended up looking … slightly worse.

At this point I’m not going to mess around with it any more. I’ll consider it a lesson learned about how and when to use this new gloss coat pen.

Flight Unit

The Flight Unit counts as an accessory, right? After all, it is meant to be taken on and off:

This is another case where there’s a lot more of the light grey (read: matte coated) pieces than I expected. However, this should be the last time I say that: just looking at the runners, there aren’t that many light grey pieces left.

Here are the bottom wings:

And here is the middle section:

And finally, we put it all together (along with the wings):

These kinds of flight units are common (I think?) among Gundam SEED’s mobile suits. I’m not a huge fan of the concept in general, but this one doesn’t bother me too much. It’s straight and to the point, without being too large or overly stylized. We’ll see if I somehow change my mind once it’s all said and done.

Other Things

This model comes with two different connectors for the shield. One is a “normal” type, while the other one let’s you store the Beam Rifle in the back:

The BuCue head attaches via a literal handle that the Astray holds onto. Weirdly, it mounts sideways, though this doesn’t really matter considering the hands can rotate 360 degrees:

Conclusion

This model has quite a bit of kit, far more than I realized. Hopefully it will lead to some excellent action poses.