Top view. I'll describe the specific changes in more detail below.
Front view. Here, you can see that the four engines (two on each side of the cockpit) have printed decals. This set did not originally come with any decals so I made my own. I was able to find a pic of the new decal set that Lego makes for their new X-wing (set #9493). I took that into photoshop and resized the engine decals to the proper scale and printed them out on address labels. Then I just cut them out and stuck them to some 2x2 round white tiles.
Close up of the the backside top. I used tile pieces to make the top surface smooth and small angled pieces along the edges to get the sloped shape. The piece behind the cockpit next to R2-D2 is hand painted to look like the back of the canopy. Oh, and I also put R2-D2's head on a turntable piece so that it can rotate.
I used this unfinished scale model X-wing for reference. Here's the top details.
And the Lego translation of top details. I think I got pretty dang close. Here, you can also see the hand painted back canopy piece.
Back view.
Back view. I tried to get this section as close as possible. When the flat light grey disk is turned, the wings separate into the X shape. I also replaced the translucent orange pieces on the ends of the thrusters with translucent pink/purple ones, which I think, is more accurate.
Another view of the back. Here, you can easily see the sloped pieces I added to the main body. The edges were previously sharp 90 degree angles, so this is much smoother (and accurate).
I also added sloped pieces along the edges of the engines. The original model did not have anything there, but the movie X-wing did have them, as you can see in the back view pic of the reference model. And I'm not sure if the X-wing had them in the movies, but the original Lego model had lights on each wing. I decided to keep those, and incorporated them into the sloped pieces. They're the translucent round pieces on the ends of the white slopes.
Sloped pieces were added to the bottom of the wings as well. However, Lego apparently changed the angle of the slope just a fraction, so the pieces don't all line up perfectly.
The tips of the guns were originally cone pieces. I replaced those cones with bars. And actually, I did that change around 4 years ago, and now the new Lego X-wing has the same thing. Got that one right. haha
Now the thrusters were completely rebuilt from scratch. The original model had much thinner thrusters coming straight out of the back of the engines. However, in the movie, the top thrusters were raised and came out the top section of the engine and the bottom thrusters were lowered and came out the bottom section of the engine...
So I designed them like this. Now, they plug into the center of the engine, but lift up/lower a bit. Thus coming out the top/bottom section of the engines.
I also added these printed pieces from the original Lego Clone Wars Droid Fighter (set #7111). The interior of the engines could be seen on the inside of the wings. So I thought these pieces represented that quite well.
Now, here's the underside. As you can see, it's quite smooth with nothing jutting out.
The original X-wing had a lot of kibble pieces on the bottom. I replaced those with these various sloped pieces. A much smoother look. I also added the two landing gear pieces on the back. In the movies, you can see this landing gear as Yoda raises the X-wing from the swamp on Dagobah.
I decided to leave the landing gear in. However, I replaced a few of the pieces. The hinge piece is now a plate, so it's much flatter. And the leg of the landing gear is now two hinge arms.
And of course, due to the hinge at the base, it folds perfectly into the bottom of the ship.
Remade a fairly famous pic of Luke getting into his X-wing.
