1/100 Master Grade Jegan Type-D

Mobile Suit: RGM-89D Jegan D
Release Date: April 2019
Series: Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn

Start Date: May 23, 2026

I just love UC grunts, Sonic.

The Master Grade Jegan is a relatively modern kit, but the design dates way back to Char's Counterattack in 1988 - making it almost 40 years old at this point. In CCA the Jegan acts as the ultimate evolution of the GM, the mass production "good guy" suit from the original Mobile Suit Gundam. It's put in opposition to the Geara Doga, which has the same relationship to the "bad guy" Zaku II.

However, the folks in charge of Gundam really, really like the Jegan, so it shows up in a lot of other media. In addition to its initial appearance in CCA, it has variants that appear in Gundam F91, Unicorn, Narrative, and the Hathaway film adaptations - spanning 30 years in the UC timeline's chronology. And it's for good reason - the Jegan's design is awesome.

One of the most under-discussed aspects of the Jegan is that it feels like a true synthesis of the mobile suit technology that existed before it in-universe. Obviously the head and visor recall the GM, the primary inspiration point - and the shoulders are a re-proportioned take on the Nemo, a side evolution of the GM featured in Zeta. But the legs are shaped exactly like the Zaku's, only missing the signature Zaku piping. The skirt (or lack thereof) is another interesting choice - it gives the thighs a lot more visual real estate, and when viewed head-on, the borders between the crotch, thigh, and side skirts recall the outline of Zeonic skirting. Finally, the shield is also interesting - while not quite matching any prior suits, to me it looks a lot like the Zeta Gundam's shield. These underline the evolution of themes in U.C. - the thin border that separates entries where the Earth Federation is a flawed bulwark against worse factions, and the entries where the Earth Federation is the worse faction - and the lack of principles that guide weapon development in that world and ours.

This is the Type-D variant, which was a Katoki redesign featured in Unicorn - first as lineart for the light novel in 2006, then in the OVA series in 2010. It makes minor changes to the waist, shoulders, backpack, and head, but is otherwise identical to the original Jegan in appearance. I prefer this design, but all Jegans rate pretty highly for me. You can see how they compare below:

Since this is a very monochromatic color scheme, I plan on trying something new with the paint - shading. In previous painted builds, I simply applied a consistent coat of color to the model, and that was that. This time I'm going to try varying the shade to create more depth and visual interest. It's a common technique for airbrushers and I'm comfortable enough with my process to take a stab at it.

Progress Update 1: Snap Building

I was surprised by the size of the box - this is the same size as the ν Gundam ver. Ka, just a little shallower, even though this is a grunt suit. I guess CCA-era suits are just built big.

I'd never seen Unicorn, so I wanted to build and watch at the same time - hence building it on the coffee table - but I could not split focus at all and just ended up watching and building separately.

The first evening's progress. This isn't a particularly in-depth build (which I really welcomed after the crazy part interations on the Fat Cat 001) so I couldn't powered through, but breaking it up still feels nice.

Inner frame and weapons complete. This kit has no frills as far as gimmicks, but it's still very posable here - all the joints are doubles, and the hip can separately swivel both hip sockets, which not all kits are capable of. You can tell that it wasn't quite designed to be built as a standalone inner frame - a lot of joints require the armor to hold them in place (see the seam running down the crotch) - but it looks nice anyway.

The only part that I think is bad on this build is the rifle. They do try to hide the seamline with a separate handle piece, but it's still a pretty bad join. I'll probably have to use putty since the pieces aren't really meeting that well in all places. But, I'll accept that for minimal processing on the other pieces.

Half-complete armoring up. Another pleasantly smooth build process here, with nice large panels and great fitment.

And the armor is complete. Super fun build and very relaxing coming off such a complex previous kit.

There are a couple of areas I'd like to address in the parts sorting. They did cut a few corners on certain pieces - the left waist piece has a nice frame-colored back panel, but the right waist piece doesn't. Additionally, the yellow bits at the tips of the feet show through the top. This is pretty easy to fix in both cases though, and may just need to be masked and painted separately.

Progress Update 2: Surface Prep

Normally, I do surface prep in a kind of rolling fashion, where I prep as I put parts onto clips for painting. But this time, I was waiting on a big order of paints and primers that I wanted to use, so I took a Saturday when the whole family was sick and worked through all of my parts at once on the kitchen table. This took a long time but was mostly just absentminded work that was kind of therapeutic and enjoyable.

Only a few parts needed real fixing. The rifle seam didn't quite close with Tamiya extra thin cement, so I went back and added some Mr. Putty R to the seam. This putty flows a bit out of the tube, but you can also add lacquer thinner to water it down even more, allowing it to easily fill small gaps like this.

The chest vents are separate pieces from the chest itself, even though in the anime there's no seam around this part. I think they did this to more easily support other Jegan variants with different chest vents, like the Stark Jegan and the never-released ECOAS Type. I think the panel line here kind of messes with the flow of the chest, and I accidentally gouged it a bit when trimming the parts of the runner - so I decided to use putty to make this a continuous panel as well. I used masking tape to keep putty off of the inside seam there - it's a lot harder to clean that up than the outside seams.

After sanding, these look good, but I fully expect to do some more putty/sanding operations after priming and really inspecting the parts.

One problem I realized during the snap build was that these vernier thrusters were not disassemblable. The yellow interior piece fits into the gray exterior, but there's no way to push them apart afterwards since the back is totally enclosed. Luckily, I did realize this early on, and only assembled 2 of the 5 before deciding to keep the other 3 separated.

So what I did was I took a very small drill bit and put a hole through the back of the verniers, going until I started getting yellow plastic shavings. This created a hole where I could then use a thin skewer to pop the yellow part off. Since the hole is on the back, this should be invisible in the finished model.

And parts preparation was complete. I organized these by color and now they're actually ready for paint.