Defenders of the Great Lakes, Part I

[Gary]

Heeee's Baaack

Cool man, as always.

[anthonyp]

And I would have post more last night, had a family emergency not come up (my 90 year old great aunt fell and broke her hip last night, and I was the closest relative).

Glad y'all like them!  I got into an obsessive/compulsive mood the last two months, and this is the result.

I'm a little disappointed in the VFA-209 F/A-18A+, but that's becuase I realized I didn't actually finish it (I still had to paint the gun port and anti-glare panel ahead of the cockpit).  That, and I could never get a certain decal right that was on the side of the A-4 at the Selfridge Air Park, so it just looks unfinished to me (it's actually one of VC-12's A-4's, but I just absorbed that squadron into VFA-209 in my world).



I've got one of the aggressor scheme F/A-18's under constrution, but I haven't progressed beyond main fuselage assembly.

Also wish I could have found more pics of VP-93's planes, just so I could see what was on their tails.  Usually, Orion tails are decorated with all manner of artwork and colors, and I wanted to make the P-7 and P-8 tails equally expressive of the squadron's personality.

The KC-28/MD-11 Tanker was a fun one to build.  The outerwing refueling pods began life as the outer wing pods mentioned in my P-7's background text, but they just didn't look right there.  They were two old jammers (I forget the exact model) that I cut up and mounted on pylons.  They fit perfectly on the 1/200 MD-11.  The tail boom is really sprue, some snipped antennae, and a little contour putty to make the weird little bump at the base of the boom.

The S-3 turned out pretty good, considering it's the high-vis, low-vis version on VS-73's markings.  The tail markins were actually blue and white on the S-2's used by the squadron, and I made those the high-vis markings.  I couldn't make them plain old medium grey or dark ghost grey over the base light ghost grey on this model.  It'd look too bland, even for me, and I love shades of grey on planes.

The Gripens were fun builds, especially the Wild Weasel version.  I forgot to mention all the mods I did to it, including putting a modified jammer pod in the middle of the tail, and placing an ALQ-199 on the ventral pylon under the intake.  I added an old F-16's LANTIRN AAQ-14 pod and pylon under the other air intake as well.  The thing was just fun to build.

All of them were fun to build, even with my little quibbles.