Battle of Hoth AT-ST – 1

Here’s the first part of my documentation of the Hoth campaign AT-ST build I did. This is the lovely Bandai 1/48 model kit, to which I modified rather heavily to be able to house the electronics for gun sounds and lighting chin cannons.

The electronics came pre-built in a Jango Fett blaster pistol keychain I got online. This gun happens to have a very close sound effect to the AT-ST guns. I got the idea from Tagamo Modelworx who added it to his model on YouTube. See the bottom for a link to his video focusing on that.

When I took apart the keychain and examined the model I decided that I didn’t need to sacrifice the interior to have the added effects like the other builder did. I was going to attempt a more integrated scheme.

Here is the circuit board from the keychain. I cut the wires from all of the external parts so I could rewire or replace them.

I put in a battery holder for the coin cell, as well as putting in a plug for the LED, putting in a different button, and I also replaced the speaker with a larger one.
Here is the board installed into the cockpit frame using scrap styrene to give support.
And now with the other half of the frame to hold it all together.
When I put the backplate on, here is how things fit.
Port