Introduction by Metal Slime

NRX-005 Baund Doc III

The NRX designation here indicates a development projects of the NITA laboratory. Most of which consisted of transformable MS/MA, that this Baund Doc, Psycho Gundam, and other similarly Psychomu system equipped projects, are part of. The data gathered from the prototype No.1 were used in producing other variants in the series. These are intended to be piloted by the "Enhanced Humans", and to be combined with the specially designed "Combat Programing system".

The Kit

This is a 1/220 released by Kotobukiya in 1986. The design is based on the original Baund Doc by Makoto Kobayashi "GAMPH". Its basic elements and style seem to have been taken from Kobayashi's earlier creation "Shyan". Looks like he's very fond of the design, since it also make an appearance as a character in (a totally non Gundam related,) Dragon's Heaven.

To make the design suitable for TV animation, this original design was cleaned up by Kazumi Fujita, and appeared on the Z Gundam series as the Baund doc we all know (and love?).

When the kit was first released in early 86, people were swarming around the shop to get hold of it, the shops had to limit the number of kits each person could purchase, for fear of some people stocking them to purposely drive the price up. It has since though, been reissued quite regularly among Kotobukiya's line of Gundam kits, up until around 1994 when all the Gundam licensed were pulled and given exclusively to B-Club.

Construction

This is a very small kit with very fine detail. I even had a hard time differentiate which one is flash, gate or actual detail of each part! The texture on the shoulder has unfortunately been interrupted in the middle by mold line. Not a problem. A paste of putty solved this in no time.

The very small contact area of each piece ensure that an enforcing brass rods are a must. I used 1mm diameter brass rod throughout, to connect most parts together. There's also a side benefit of enabling me to alter the model into various pose before deciding on one, and glue it fixed. For the base part, I opted for a beefier 1.5mm rod, so that it doesn't sway too much. This particular spot is left unglued just so that I can rotate the figure around the base. Same goes for the right hand's connecting joint, it was left rotatable.

And then, there's the peripheral stuff. Plenty of propellant tanks are included, but these are optional (even though they're featured in the design). Thus under the skirt, there are no pre-routed port or location to stick these tanks. Just a flat surface. Taking cue from the illustration from an old Newtype magazine, I place all of them in random order, avoiding symetry of any kind. Installation of the tanks is pretty much the most time consuming part of the entire piece, because not only each one of them required a brass rod, the location to be drilled under the skirt also have to be guessed (and I made a few mistakes along the way). The 2 little anthenaes were to be cut from plastic sheet. The instruction provided the drawing to be used as a template. No biggie here.

One thing I've never really get into is attaching small pieces that have little to no contact space. It's just tedious. And the Baund Doc has no shortage of those. In addition to the anthenaes and tanks, there are also those little claws, and the little spike on the back. Since the claw has no need to support any significant weight, I simply epoxied them onto the socket, saving myself some menial tasks of drilling and inserting rods.

Detailing

Every kit could stand a little detail-up. Even one with this level of detail is no exception. I did the usual of installing light crystal. And in this case in an almost gratuitously generous amount. With 2 small green ones go to both monoeye (guess that makes it no longer a "mono"eye then). 2 on the front of the skirt, and the other one on the shield.

I can't really remember if the kit comes with springs for the left shoulder. In any case, those are 2.5mm size and I curled them into that shape with thin wires underneath.

Paint Scheme

The coloring here followed closely to the illustration seen in the pages of Newtype. I'm particularly fond of having a bold ontrast between normal surface and the metallic area. Thus, the metallic part is intentionally made a bit shinny (which it most likely does not look this way at this sort of scale).

In the propellant area, wash is done using light brown, so that it does stand out from the almost-black coloring of the piece. Most of the wash though is done with artist oil paint, raw umber to help enhance a bit of an organic feel, but the larger vents and panel line are all black. I like it this way. I think It providess some sort of dynamic on all these dizzying detail.