TX-130 Saber class Fighter Tank

Star Wars Legion unit expansion kit 

The Subject

The Saber class fighter tank was a fast, light infantry support tank used during the early portion of the Clone Wars as part of the Republic Military clone forces.

The tank was only seen in the games Star Wars Battlefront II and Star Wars Rebels: Imperial Heist.  This is offered as an expansion to the Star Wars Legion tabletop game as an expansion.

The Model

The kit is made by Zarkus, and is listed under that manufacturer as a 1/32 scale kit.  Other figures in the Legion line are listed as 1/47 scale, and the size of the Rex figure does appear to be about right for the latter scale.

This was an easy build, all seams are along panel lines (I wish all manufacturers did this!) and construction was rapid.  I did leave off some key bits to make painting easier, which was out of sequence.

I had not seen The Clone Wars series when I built this kit, it was part of a group build for anything science fiction and the kit was handy at our local game store.  Why does that matter?  Well, it seemed odd to me to have ground forces that were not camouflaged in some manner.  Troops in white armor on vehicles painted white with bright identifying colors seemed out of place.  So I chose to paint my model in a desert scheme with a base of Panzer Yellow with Olive Green and Red Brown disruptive pattern.  The visible interior colors are a Grey Green color.

After watching the series,  I now know who the Clones are, and which “side” they were on for at least most of the series.  Not having that knowledge I had based my scheme on a WW2 Panzer…

I did add antenna wires, some wear marks on the metal, a wash, and on the lower half of the tank I added a pastel dusting of a red-brown powder to give the appearance of dust being blown up by whatever repulser system was used to make the tank hover.

Summary

Being my first attempt at an armor subject since I was a pre-teen, this was quite a bit of fun.  Now that I have seen the Clone Wars series, to the end, I understand the accuracy of fire of both Droids and Clones was so poor, everyone just walked around with big targets on their bodies and it was volume of fire that was the issue, a la Napoleanic Warfare of massed armies waking toward each other.  Color makes sense.