One thing you can give credit to George Lucas for – he sure knows how to market his products. First seen in the Empire Strikes Back (if the box art is to be believed), the TIE bomber was a fascinating variant of the Twin Ion Engine spacecraft of the empire, designed to launch weapons against capital ships. Featuring a twin pod system, the right pod featured a cockpit (with either one or two pilots, depending on the blueprints you look at) while the left pod featured rotating weapon dispensers. Each pod had it own twin ion engines, but the ship featured no defensive armament to speak of, needing TIE fighters to protect them during their bombing runs.

AMT’s new kit is in the popular 1/48^th scale, which matches other AMT products in this line, and the detail is quite good.

Beginning assembly with the cockpit, you are offered decals to mimic the rather enigmatic panels disbursed throughout the interior. The kit also features a pilot made of no less than five parts, which might be something of a record for a 1/48th scale figure. All of this fits comfortably into the right pod along with a control stick. Before assembling the two fuselage halves, I would recommend painting the interior of the bomb dispenser pod black as I did. Although AMT offers a clear “hatch” for launcher, I could find no references that even suggested that there was ever such a hatch for this opening. Therefore, I dispensed with this piece on my model.

There are a just a few spots that can use some putty work, most notably along the fuselage seams and the sensor “thingee” under the fuselage. There are also four pin marks on both the solar panel “wings” on their inner faces which might prove visible on the finished model, so I filled and sanded these as well.

Although the paint scheme is actually quite simple, I chose to airbrush the fuselage, wings and wing covers separately to make the masking job easier. Even so, masking and painting were relatively straight-forward as it all entailed straight lines.

AMT chose to include two clear sprues, one clear and the other red-tinted, the red one to permit the ion engines to demonstrate what are clearly red LEDs on the studio model (a feature their TIE fighters curiously lacked), but if you want to have a bit of fun you can also use the red-tinted cockpit cover to emulate the red interior lighting sometimes seen in the movie shots. I chose the clear one to more closely match my previously-assembled TIE fighters for consistency.

I did some light washes with black oil paint, and then a little light dry brushing to make the details pop a bit more. That, and a modest amount of hand painting and it was done. Simple, yet so iconic!

All in all, there are no real challenges to this build, and it makes a quick and simple addition to anyone’s Star Wars collection. I can’t recommend it enough.

My thanks to AMT for finally filling this gap in the Star Wars vehicular line, and to IPMS/USA for a chance to add this notable critter to my SF collection. Happy modeling all, and may the force be with you!