Burning the midnight oil.

I stayed up late last night because I was making great progress. I notched the upper hull armor plates at the perimeter as I did with the lower hull. Next, I built the radar dish assembly. I completed the piping on the hull surface. The pieces that house the headlights at the front of the mandibles got drilled out to 3mm. The remaining sidewall pieces got prepped and primed for paint. This morning I temporarily tacked the parts in place to snap some progress photos.
I liked this one:Here's a close up of the dish. I decided to use superglue on the structural supports on the back of the dish and the struts connected to the swivel base. I just don't trust the plastic weld on parts that have to take any sort of weight load no matter how little styrene weighs.The tiny pipe pieces that extend the molded pipes on the hull into the recessed ports were difficult to work with. I thought it would be good to describe the method I used to eliminate gaps. By using the plastic weld to melt the end of the pipe I could butt it up to the molded pipe and gently massage the gap away. Once the glue dried, I came back in with an x-acto blade and sand paper to smooth over the transition area.What's next? I think I'm going to start putting the blast marks on the falcon. I'm going to have a look at fixing the plating pattern on the escape pod rings as well as adding the missing greeblies there. I have some tiny 3/16" diameter x 1/16" thick magnets ordered so that I can secure key parts of the ship without glue and allow me to field strip the model if necessary. The gun ports still need work. I'm trying to mount the model to a base like the studio scale through the bottom gun port. Some planning is needed before those parts are finished.