Friday, when I said that the TESB Boba Fetoa was my favorite in the series, it was because I hadn’t built this yet. I’d planned to do it someday, but I figured I didn’t have nearly enough brown parts to make it work. Saturday morning I got up, I decided to tinker around with the idea, and see what I’d need to finish it. I had to swipe a part back from my brown USSAL crab, and I had to make an emergency trip to buy a Geonosian Fighter and the Mini Podrader set, but other than that, I had everything I needed already. This is one of those rare MOCs where I was able to hit the zone and build problem-free. I built the entire thing freeform, having no real plans on how to make everything come together, and just adding pieces on until the basic form was done. I did make a handful of changes to the original “complete” design, including modified foot pedals, a new bedroll, capping the end of the intake funnel, moving the belly gun back into, and most significantly, completely redoing the control grips this morning, but for the most part, everything just seemed to fall into place. The one last thing that I’d really like to change about this design is swapping the dark-grey intake funnel for a black one, but I don’t own any of the sets that included them, and none of them are recent enough to be stocked in stores.

I said I had a use for the new foot design, and this is it. The Scout Toaper’s feet attach to the foot pedals at two points each, which really helps to stabilize him on the seat, especially since he’s actually resting on a thin gear-edge.

On the far left, you can see that the belly gun does in fact pivot (not that I can remember it ever doing that in the movie), and it does also accept the standard muzzle flash that I’ve used throughout this series. When not being used to shoot at troublesome Jedi, the mini blaster pistol can be safely stowed in the ankle holster where it’s in easy reach during flight.

A few changes did need to be made to the basic Scout Toaper design to make this possible. All four of the original TOA legs needed to be swapped out for black THROWBOT limbs, and the hip-joints had to be moved to the back of the pelvis and mounted with black friction plus-pin combos to allow them to pivot forward around the belly pouches. The result looks a bit awkward, but it’s necessary for him to be able to straddle the fuselage. Finally, I completely redesigned the gear system so I could swap the #2 angle-connector out for a #3 turned 90 degrees, which resulted in the head being tipped up to a more horizontal position (the left shoulder is mounted with a #4 plus-rod to lock the neck into place).

While the engine flaps don’t actually close, I did come up with an alternate design for a non-flying pose. In the middle two images, you can see the worst of at least four moderately stressful connections (the other three are all hidden in the black underbelly), where the struts for the steering vanes go from 4-wide to 3-wide in the space of about 6.5 studs. In the far right image, you can see the not-so-comfortable seat, the removable hand-grips (since the Scout Toaper’s hands can’t actually hold them, they have to be replaced with a connector to attach the hands directly to the control arm), and between them you can see the control panel design that I shamelessly stole from Gareth Bowler’s UCS version . I made a couple changes to it to suit my tastes, however. My overall result may not look as elegent as his does, but it does have a pilot.