The Worst Model I've Ever Assembled

2024-09-04 28mm-SF / Starship Troopers / Hobby /

This thing... this thrice damned bastard of a model...

A model that lives in infamy.

"It was a bugger to build as well... Never have I used so much glue and so much activator. Never have I managed to use a whole reel of Greenstuff on one miniature as well..." - rob_alderman on Lead Adventure Forum

"After spending five hour trying to pin the thing together my frustration reached a breaking point. I haven't looked at it since." - Michka on Lead Adventure Forum

"I built one and it was nothing short of an uphill battle with the first casualty being the skin on my fingers and the second being my very mind itself. The Brainbug was the most poorly executed kit to ever be made by Mongoose for the Arachnids." - Wolfprophet on The Miniatures Page

"This miniature is an absolute pain and has been an albatross around my neck for at least fifteen years. The brain bug is five solid hunks of metal which don't remotely fit together. Mine is more Milliput than metal." - Barks on Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge

"...anyone who has assembled the brain bug is truly a hero of the federation." - Goonhammer

Never has anyone spoken a good word about this model, and anyone that's built one has a tale about it. I am no different. Bought in '07 in a mad scramble to pick up what Starship Troopers models remained now that the game was thoroughly dead and gone, I took one look at the box contents and promptly moved on to something, anything else. A process I repeated for more than a decade. Finally, I'd like to think because of my growing hobby skills but probably more hubris, I decided to tackle it.

The model is 5 chunks of irregular metal. A face, two sides, a top, and a bottom. None of the edges line up. No piece supports any other piece. I have no idea how they intended the model to be assembled.

What wound up working for me was wadding up a mass of crumpled tin foil, rubber band the pieces around it, flood the gaping seams with putty, and do the whole thing over again because it shifted during the night and went all wonky. Second time, it held, though I had to cut off all the stuck on rubber bands. And them trim the excess putty. Fill in some more gaps, trim, sand, and frankly at this point it struck me it would have been faster to start with a ball of clay and just slap the face plate on it and start from there. Because the final model is at least as much visible sculpting by my own hand as the original creator.

It weighs 300g. It's the first model I'd grab if I needed to load a sock for bashin'. It weighs more than the Plasma bug, which is four times its volume. It outweighs a Khador heavy warjack.

It's not my finest paintjob, but for time period I painted it, it was one of my better efforts. I tried to leave a gloss on the face like the slimy model in the movie, but it doesn't quite work. Not that any of that much matters because from 90% of the angles it's just a brown lump. A potato would have worked just fine. I imagine painters of yore felt the same way after finishing one of those Slimes & Jellies models.

And now I want to get rid of it. Make it someone else's problem, and may they never know the pain that assembling it entailed.