trade federation landing craft
The C-9979 transport is the landing craft preferred by the Trade Federation. This immense ship can carry 114 AAT droid battle tanks, 28 troop transports, and 11 MMT battle droid carriers. It is armed with two lasers on each wing and four more mounted in turrets. The Trade Federation doesn’t like to waste credits on sentient crews so the ship is run by 88 specially programmed droids. It didn’t take many of these transports to establish an armed force strong enough to prevent any native resistance on Naboo.
I’m always looking for people to show my designs to, and what better place than a science fiction convention. At one of these cons I ran into a small flock of Star Wars fans. I made a few figures for them and they were all very impressed. Later that day I was challenged to make Taun We. While I was working on that figure I took a wrong turn and ended up with a design which looked a little like the Trade Federation transport. I just happened to be near the same Star Wars group so I asked their opinion. What followed was about 20 minutes of “the wings should be shorter”, “can you make them narrower?”, “they shouldn’t be so pointy” and so on. This is the final design I ended up with. I guess you could call it a group effort.
The man pictured here is Alan Ruscoe. He played Lott Dod and several other masked characters in the prequel trilogy. Lott Dod was one of the representatives of the Trade Federation to the Galactic Senate.
