1/350 scale CVN-90 USS United States Stealth Aircraft Carrier

[seadude]

It gets worse. 

Earlier this afternoon, I tried putting on the US national insignia roundels for the Orange Hobby F-35's and the X-47's. Do you think they'd stay down? Nope. I tried about half a dozen times to put roundels on aircraft. Every single time I laid the decal on the aircraft surface, it either shriveled up and/or broke apart.    And the decal sheets were protected for the longest time in small ziplock bags prior to being used. And what makes things even more worse is that these are low visibility light grey roundel decals. This is the only color that will work on my F-35's and X-47's because my aircraft are painted a dark grey color. So I need light grey decals. I searched through all my spare decals at home and have no alternatives. Not sure where I'm going to get 1/350 scale light grey US national insignia roundels from.

As far as the other aircraft go like F-18's, V-22's, E-2C's, SH-60's, I hopefully should have enough roundel decals for those. Most aircraft are painted in a lighter color scheme which means the roundels they need will be slightly darker.

[seadude]

There are some times where I feel like I should just give up on this project. This is one of those times. 

I did a test with putting just the US national insignia roundels on two F-18's and nothing else. To say it looks like crap is an understatement.
I wished the roundels were "slightly" bigger, but what you see on the aircraft below is all I've got to work with.
There is a website that makes aftermarket airwing decals here:
https://davidsscalemodels.com/decals/1-350-air-wing-decals/?srsltid=AfmBOoq4ZB4quZMZGzIVXKR7dZO8VSNB3MwuvTdp6X4rvjwQHOMKsK8q
.............but at anywhere from $25-75+ per sheet, that can get to be quite expensive.
As I said before:

I'm not planning to put a bunch of squadron markings, numbers, etc. on the aircraft. It's just too time consuming, the decals are too small for my eyesight, and since my carrier is a future ship 20-30+ years from now, it's hard to say what squadrons would still be active or discontinued from service. So the only major decals that will be put on will be the U.S. roundel on the wings and/or sides of all the aircraft. I suppose that will probably make the aircraft look "cheap, plain, and boring", but that's what I'm going to have for my carrier. And buying sheet after sheet of aftermarket decal squadron markings really adds up. That's money I don't have right now.

So if I only put the national insignia roundel on all the aircraft and nothing else, that REALLY will make my aircraft (and the whole model ship display) look cheap, plain, and boring. So........what else can I do? What alternatives are there? Taking a carrier model to a contest with an empty flight deck is going to look pretty damn pathetic.
Though I have seem some people do it. The second picture below is from the IPMS Nationals that I went to last year. Somebody built a Gerald Ford carrier, but only added about half a dozen aircraft. I suppose I could do something similar, but it's still going to look pathetic.

The other option is the last picture below that I mentioned and showed previously on a past thread page. But this time, I could build and display the carrier, but leave the flight deck empty. And only put a small display of 9 or so aircraft in front of the carrier to give the impression of what types of aircraft the carrier could carry.

I'm stuck.
Not putting on a lot of decals on all the aircraft makes them look cheap, plain, and boring.
Not putting a lot of aircraft on the flight deck or only a few makes the carrier look cheap, plain, and boring.
What other options are there?

[Old Wombat]

I can only suggest that you go slightly crazy & blind getting one to three of each type painted & marked up appropriately & spot them on the deck for greatest impact.

Say one each of the E-2C & CMV-22B, two each of the MH-60 & MQ-25, & three each of the others.

Squadrons don't matter, it's a what-if, use your favourite squadrons, because, guess what, no-one else is going to know what squadrons are going to be in service in 20-30 years, either!


Just try to stop stressing out about it! Remember, modelling is meant to be fun!

[seadude]

 Remember, modelling is meant to be fun!

It is? Well, I didn't get that memo. Whoever is in charge around here of passing out memos and forgetting to give me one needs to be fired!

[seadude]

Painting of the grey color for the carrier flight deck has been done today. Supposedly, Vallejo spray can paints are both a primer and a paint. So when it comes time to do the masking of the flight deck lines, I'm hoping the grey will not pull up when I peel the masking tape off. As for the larger white/yellow flight deck lines, I haven't decided yet if they will be hand brushed, spray can painted, or painted using paint markers. I don't expect to do any flight deck lines until maybe late June.

[kerick]

That looks great!

[seadude]

In other news..........

Now that the flight deck has been painted, what's next?
I'll probably work on touching up painting the flight deck edge catwalks first as there's some areas that need to be repainted the ship hull grey color. After that, then I'll do touchups on the flight deck itself for missed spots.
Next will probably be painting the large flight deck white and yellow landing lines as shown back in Post # 515 on Page 35 of this thread. Some of those lines are a bit thin. I think trying to spray can or hand brush paint them might be too "extreme". Shown below, I went to a store and bought the following paint marker. I'm going to do some tests tonight and tomorrow on some scrap plastic and see how well it does. I think one of the nice things about paint markers, especially the ones I just bought, is that they have small/fine tips to allow you to paint/draw thin lines. The small package I bought had white and black colors. But I only need the white.
After painting the main white/yellow flight deck landing lines, then the next thing will probably be painting the 4 aircraft catapults. After those are done, then I need to paint some smaller details on the flight deck which I'll explain later. After that, then I think I might be able to move on to adding decals to the flight deck. And then after the decals, well, I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

[seadude]

Did some testing earlier on a scrap piece of plastic with the white Sharpie Creative paint marker. Painted a spare piece of sheet styrene with the same grey as what the flight deck was painted with. It may look black in the picture, but I assure you it is Panzer Grey.
The paint marker works pretty much just like a regular colored marker in that you just "draw" where you want paint to go for lines, letters, etc. There's no priming/pumping/shaking (like what other paint markers have) of the Sharpie Creative marker in order to get paint to the tip of the marker in order to start using it.
The best way to get the lines below is to start/stop exactly from end to end. Do not start/stop in the middle or anywhere else. Now the lines below are nice and straight only because I used TAMIYA masking tape to help create them.
BUT............the lines aren't perfectly white. I had to do at least 4 passes for each line with the paint marker to get the lines to look as they are in the pic below.
But if you look very closely at the thicker white line, you may be able to see that coverage of the white is still not perfect. You can barely, just barely, see the dark grey peeking through the white. So in order to get complete white coverage, I'd probably have to do a 5th or 6th pass with the marker. Even the thinner white line isn't perfectly white either.
The other nice thing about this paint marker is that the paint is a flat and not gloss. Something which I'm happy about as I needed flat for the flight deck. The other thing about these paint markers is that they dry pretty fast. Usually under 15 minutes.