Did someone say Super Star Destroyer

At the start of 2025 I found out I was going be on a course from work. It would last from April - June.

This was it. This was my chance to start my first model kit. I could put in an hour or two every evening, take my time, plan it out and finally get my feet wet.

The conundrum? Which kit will I choose? Everyone says to do a bunch of easy kits so you can make mistakes and learn from them. Yea, fuck that. Nothing against car, airplane, boat models, I just have no interest in them. I wanted to make the models that I wanted. So what do I do? Buy a car model, build it gain experience, make mistakes bla bla bla and be bored out of my skull doing it. Or, throw caution to the wind and build one of the Star Wars models I had procured. That's exactly what I did. Well, sort of.

I was kind of limited with my selection. Don't get me wrong, I have a fair few kits, but I haven't bought any painting equipment. This is probably the largest investment in all of this. Roughly £100 for the compressor and another £100 for the airbrush. Then there's the paints, thinner, cleaning stuff etc. So there's around £250 I still need to drop to get painting.

I did have one model that was pre-painted and pre-built. Wait, hold on. What's the point of that I hear you asking. Well, it's a model I bought to practice lighting without worrying about building and painting.

It'll be nice and ease I thought, oh was I fucking wrong!

Here is my build log for The Executor, Super Star Destroyer for Star Wars: Armada by Fantasy Flight Games

*Disclaimer*

I started this blog after I completed the model, so I'm writing from memory depending on the pictures I've taken.

I got my hands on one of these on the bay. To date, this is the most expensive model purchased (full price breakdown at the end).

The large box contains the model, two clear stands and a bunch of stuff to actually play the game.

The model is approx. 60cm in length and 20cm in width. It's very detailed for a table top 'mini'.

Here's some close-ups of the city section.

Step one, take the model apart. Now this being a table top model, it's not designed to be taken apart easily. After scouring the internet, I found a series of videos by BLuE Squadron on YouTube. He basically does what I wanted to do. Great! That means I won't have to fuck up the model as much.

In all honestly, it wasn't that bad. Not much damage, if at all, to the model. I used a combination of a hobby knife and a set of spudgers (from amazon) to extract the panel sections from the bottom.

*Don't forget to wear eye protection*

Taking these out exposed small philips screws. There's seven or eight in total.

This was fairly easy, got it done in roughly half an hour.

The top city section can be further taken apart into smaller sections.

The model can be broken down in approx. 32 separate pieces. Here's a few more pictures showcasing the detail.

So now everything was broken down, it was time to start with the lighting. I had two options; one (the easier option) - afix strip lights in each section and the sides of the super structure or two (the harder option) - drill holes and thread fiber optic strands through. So obviously I went with the second option and did I hate it!

Now, as I was breaking the model down I was 90% sure I wanted to go down the fiber optic route. It wasn't a last minute decision. First thing I learnt was that you need to have some sort of plan. Don't go into a model build without an idea of what you want to achieve.

I had bought a dremmel tool from Lidl for drilling, sanding model kits. I actually got it months earlier, now was the time for it to come into use.

Maths time

Film Executor length - 19km = 1,900,000cm

Armada Executor length - 60cm

Scale - 1,900,000/60 = 31,666.66

Therefore the scale of the model is approx. 1/31,666.

So, in order to have 'windows' to scale, they would have to be really small. The smallest drill bit that would be feasible to use would be 0.25mm.

I brought a pack 10 of these (amazon).

It was clear after the first two holes that the Lidl dremmel was too fast, even on the slowest speed. Instead of drilling the plastic, it was melting it. I later checked the slowest speed is 10,000 rpm. Way too fast to use on plastic.

I spent a while to pick and order a new tool. I ended up buying a mini dremmel (amazon) with the slowest speed at 3,000 rpm which was perfect.

A few more holes drilled with the mini dremmel, snap! Few more holes drilled, snap!

I went through that pack of 10 in about 40 minutes.

By now I started to get pissed off. This was taking alot longer than what I had anticipated. I decided to order several sets of 0.25mm drill bits (aliexpress). I had to wait roughly 2 weeks for them to arrive. In the mean time got my hands on 100m of 0.25mm fiber optics (ebay). I was pretty sure 100m would be enough.

Drill bits arrive and I start drilling. With a combination of the slower speed dremmel and a lighter hand, the holes were coming out pretty decent. Sorry, I didn't take any pictures at this point, I wasn't expecting to start this blog at that time!

I cut down the fiber optics to roughly 10cm or 20cm strands and thread them through the holes. I started with the top city section as that would be the most visible.

I fucked up a little here. That green tape you see, I already had before starting the model, not sure where or when I got it but I though it would be good to hold the strands together. It was good, a little too good! When it came to removing it, it pulled some of the strands back out. It was a pain in the arse to thread these in the first place and now I had to do a fair few again.

It's sometime in May now so about 4 - 5 weeks into the build, and there's been frustrations. The dremmel issue, drill bits and having to thread and re-thread around half of the fiber optic strands. Anyway, I continue with the drilling and threading. Some sections are easier than others. I drill alot of hole in the city sections only to realise I can't thread the fibers into almost half of them. Why? Either because there simply isn't enough space or the walls are too thick for the fiber to go in. Either way that's quite some time I spent drilling which was wasted.

Ok, so now we're at the end of May(ish), about 6 - 7 weeks into it and decide to start fixing each bunch of strands to a light source. I covered a 5mm pre-wired LED with heat shrink tubing (amazon) and threaded the fibers into the the open end and zip tied them into place. 

As you can see on the right hand side, the top section ready to be fitted with the LEDs.

And here both sections.

This seemed like a good idea, the heat shrink would double up as light blocking as well as securing the fiber optic strands. Well, that didn't happen. Maybe I was using a too large diameter of shrink tube or it wasn't shrink properly, I don't know but the fibers were coming out. So now I'm more frustrated and on top of that I've realised I made a major fuck up.

Since I had cut the fibers down to 10cm - 20cm, there wasn't enough space to lay them down with the LED in the trench space. With the model being so thin, especially the front portion, I had to do something different.

In order to have all the fibers fit, I had to remove them all, re-thread longer sections (around 45cm) down the trench and have the LEDs in the center portion where there is more space. I was fucking annoyed at this point. I had basically wasted around 30m of strand. I gave up at point.

I gave it a few weeks (mid June now) and came back to it. Laying down the new fiber and securing it in the middle portion. I ditched the LED in the shrink tube plan and decided to cut some 5mm styrene tubes (ebay) to about 5cm in length. The LED fit perfectly inside, and threaded the fibers into the tube.

This worked out quite well, I added the shrink tube over it for light blocking. I used PVA glue to secured the fibers to the plastic, but it did hold well. I ended up using wood glue which was a much stronger bond.

Then came the next big fuck up.

For the engines, of which are 13, I had drilled 0.5mm holes in the ends and threaded through 0603 SMD LEDs and glued them in place. There is hardly any room in the engine sections so I figured these would be great. I didn't have to grind out large sections of plastic to accommodate the other pre-wired LEDs. With the engines done, I put them all back into the lower section and went to test them to make sure none of the wire were being pinched. Bare in mind I had not attached any resistors at this point, I used a 9v battery to test them. Why use a 9v battery you ask? I have no fucking clue. It blew the 13 engine lights. I wanted to chuck this fucking thing out the window. That was it, i walk away from it.

July now, around 8 - 9 weeks in, and I tell the missus I've had enough with this shitty model. This was meant to be fun and it's been nothing but frustrating along the way.

And to be fair to her, she told to me to persevere. I had spent so long building this up in my head and to throw it away at the first hurdle would be silly. You read that right, she told me to continue. Ha, I'll keep that ace up my sleeve for when she complains this is taking up too much space.

So back to table I went. Decided to replace the SMDs with 3mm pre-wired ones and started to removes plastic to allow the thicker wire to sit nicely. Wasn't that bad but some of the engines wouldn't sit 100% flush when put back on the main hull. Anyway, I continued. Wiring was going good, struggling to fit everything in though. Got to a point where I decided to check if the upper and lower hulls would fit nicely on top of each other.

There was a fairly large gap but I had some excess fiber that could cut down to reduce the space.

And you guessed it, another fuck up.

The section that was causing the most issues was this on;

This houses 3 engines and is sort of the main portion of the lower city section that is visible. I had cut the fibers so sort that they wouldn't all squeeze in the styrene tubing. I was honestly so pissed off with myself. I think I just sat there staring into the abyss.

Not sure where I got the motivation from but I took the section out, re-threaded long strands of fiber and back on again. I've wasted around 50m of fiber by now.

In order to create a circuit, I ended up using something that's used in model railways.

This is a power distribution board by Evemodel. I one wired to the upper hull and one to the lower. What I didn't take into account was again the lack of space inside the model. Now these boards aren't big, around 9.5cm x 1.5cm x 1cm. But I had to change my circuit so I could use one board only.

I did another dry fit, much better than before.

Now I had to start thinking about mounting the model. I had already bought some brass rods, 4mm and 5mm.

The plan was to drill a 4mm hole where the original mounting point was;

And secure it inside the model, threading the wire for the battery down the center. The 5mm rod would then slide over the top, telescopically. Sounded great in my head but in practice. . . . . . . Oh and you guessed it, i fucked up.

At this point (end of July) I had sealed the two hull sections together using thin beads of superglue and alot of clamps. The wire for the battery was protruding through that 4mm hole that I had drilled prior. All I needed to do was thread the wire through the brass rod and secure it in place. One little thing I overlooked was that the two strands of 20 gauge wire wouldn't fit down the inner diameter of the 4mm bras rod. What did I do, I started forcing the wire down. And as I pulled it though, the insulation was getting stripped.

I decided I've come too far to balls it up right at the last moment. I cut my losses and snipped the wire around 6cm from the bottom of the model. I then spliced a longer sections of wire on to that one. The brass rod ideas was out the window.

I hunted around the house and found a wooden batton in the attic, around 2cm x 4cm. I cut a few lengths to just smaller that the size of the model and decided to utilise the clear stands that came with it.

It didn't seem that secure so I screw the clear bases to the wooden frame. The model sat on the pre-existing cut outs. I wired everything up in the cavity in the middle with a switch on the front.

As I was wrestling with everything, I noticed that one of the deflector shield towers had sheared off the bridge section!

There wasn't even any point looking for it its so tiny but it's obvious it's missing on the model. I ordered some milliput (amazon) and made a few tiny balls (gigity) and sausage sections. Sanded to size and super glued it on.

Since the one I had made was slightly bigger, I cut off the other existing one and did the same on the other side.

I had to paint the milliput shield generators so I decided to give the whole upper city section a once over. I created a dark blue/black/grey wash using Winsor & Newton craft paints which I already had. And as little dry brushing to finish it off.

I liked the raw look of the wooden frame but the screws and exposed wire were unsightly.

So I cut some foam board up and hot glued on top of the wood. Not my best job but it kind of brings it all together.

Judge for yourselves. . . . . . .

Final thoughts
If I'm being brutally honest, this project was not a labour of love. Although I wanted it to be. Maybe it was too big a task for a novice like myself, maybe it was the lack of planning, maybe both of those issues and more. I am however, very proud of the final piece. It sits majestically on my bookshelf and only I know how much work went into it to look like it does.

Has this detered me from continuing with this hobby? No.

Given the chance, would I do another like this? Absolutely fucking not!

Cost breakdown

Model - £126

Fiber optics - £36

Consumables - £25

Power board - £6.50

LEDs - £6

Total - £199.50

Time taken

4 months, roughly 75 hours