ARX-7R - Arbalest Reframe

DISCLAIMER:
BEWARE OF SPOILERS.
THE FINAL PART OF THIS ARTICLE, AFTER THE PICTURES, CONTAINS SPOILERS OF THE FULL METAL PANIC MANGA.

I mean they are pretty old and very easily guessable "spoilers", but fuck, there's always someone complaining right? There's your disclaimer.

Hey there, what's good? This is Skar.
Today I'll present you one of my latest works, ARX-7R, Arbalest Reframe, a custom Arbalest of mine. This idea wasn't inspired by anything, I just bought a pretty lame 1/48 Arbalest from Aoshima and it was pretty terrible. Finally got onto fixing anything and idk, felt like adding some weathering and minor color changes to represent this model's "rebirth".

Enjoy the picture spam and, like I did with Perfect Nu, I'll put the very minimal backstory I came up with to explain the somewhat different color scheme.

So, basically, in an alternative universe, Arbalest's remainings after battling against Leonard's Belial (Full Metal Panic!) were collected by an indipendent military corporation.
They fixed the base frame almost completely, adding some red and black details to represent their faction.
The only thing they couldn't fix was the Lambda Driver system, which is now extremely unstable and unreliable, it only activates in cases of mere luck. Like this, it is almost your average M9.
Which, let's not forget, it was still generations ahead of any other mass producted Arm Slave at that time.
So that explains why collecting its remaining and rebuilding it completely was worth it even without the Lambda Driver, for an indipendent military corporation: they still have a feat of enginering that can pretty much own any other Savage on the place.