Oscar Goldman builds the DMB-87: PART 1

Hi, Oscar Goldman here. I fell in love with Space Battleship Yamato 2199. In particular the smaller Garmillas ships. Sadly, Bandai only made these in a really small “trinket” scale. To be fair, they only made two of the UNCN fighters, the Cosmo Zero and Hayabusa. I was able to lay my hands on a 1/48 scale resin kit of the DWG 262 Czvarke by J.Factory.

I am going to scratch build a "Snuka" from Space Battleship Yamato 2199. I hope you will find it to be as an exciting a build as I do.

The first step is to line up all the reference you can find.

This is a screen grab from episode 20 showing Snukas being launched off the Garmillas carrier Lambea. The DMB-87 is featured in this episode quite heavily in the first few minutes.

This a scan from the Space Battleship Yamato Special Art Book: Garmillas. There are 4 pages of images.

Above is a photocopy I made of the of the hand drawn orthographic projections. These make building the model so much easier than trying to reverse engineer it from screenshots. Beware! These seem definitive, but like all blueprints, they must be treated with suspicion.

This is the Garmillas reference book I am refering to.

There are many, many Japanese books about SBY 2199. It is fortunate that I know someone who may have them all. Above is a scan from one of the later volumes featuring "artwork". The lower picture lays out rear details to great advantage. It is dreadfully important to make sure you find all the reference you can before you start. Again, because you are dealing with entertainment, representations of objects change depending on their function in that part of the story. You will need to be creative and decide what version you will make.

Lastly, Bandai made this swell model as an add-on for one of the carrier kits. The scale is not given. Because of the small size a number of features have been simplified.

The top view orthographic is scanned and resized to 1:1 1/48th scale and printed out. The model will be about 18 inches long. At the top is the J.Factory 1/48 fuselage of the Czvarke as a size reference. Next time I start wrapping my head around all the models curves and start gluing up blocks of plastic.