David Hingtgen

Neutral grey plus a little purple? That's pretty *darn* close to Dark Ghost Grey. FS36320. Heck, that's basically the original WWII formula that it came from. 1 part white, 1 part black, and a touch of the new (1943 compared to 1941) "purple-blue" pigment. (You can make ALL WWII camo colors from black, white, and 1 of the 3 possible pigments---never more than 3 ingredients)

Sorry, just finished college a few months ago. If only Iowa taught aeronautics.....

Ok, I'm up to about my 3rd set of sprue nippers, having spent 8 to 17 bucks each for various brands, and none have been quite good enough, IMHO. (latest pair is the sharpest ever, but most mis-aligned) They're always mis-aligned by *this* much, thus making a truly flush cut impossible. I have read that the $30 ones from Tamiya are quite good, and am wondering if anyone has them. Or any other recommendations for ones that are very precisely aligned. And narrow would be good too, "bent" ones don't help much, they're still simply too big to fit between the main sprue "stalk" and the part many times. Also would like recommendations on the newer bent-tweezer-style nippers, and if they are sharp and precise enough to make them superior to a "careful X-acto". ::edit:: Title got cutoff somehow, should read "Willing to spend $$$$$ if they're good"

Yeah, but when good guys and bad guys fly the same plane (Desert Storm, Iraqi and French F1's) being able to get an optical image (vs IR) can sure help. Even if it only adds 1 more mile to the "positive ID" range. TISEO came about on late F-4E's I think, never read much about it. Got my F-4 book out at the moment, so might as well see what it says. ::reads:: Introduced on Block 48 F-4E's, which is also the block that introduced manuevering slats. Closed-circuit TV, multiple magnifications for target ident/acquire. Yup, looks like it's the predecessor to the F-14's TCS. Especially considering they're both made by Northrop.

You know, I keep thinking "F-14's have a nice high-magnification camera, just for long-range BVR identification of bogies". It's very simple, so why aren't we putting it in more planes? I read they can identify most any plane at 10 miles, many larger fighters at 20 miles, and 747's at 70 miles. A nice zoom-lens solves a LOT of ROE problems for fighters.

No, I'm saying that the Revell F-14D is inaccurate enough, that that is what it would be like (using a Hase w/F-16 engines). It'd be like every other inaccurate attempt at a GE-engined F-14. If you want an F-14 with GE engines (like Shin's), a Hasegawa B or D is the only way to go, period. (Though I do plan to graft on the back end of a Hase D onto a Fujimi A to make a "Fujigawa" F-14B--don't know if it'll work, but I'm sure going to try) If you want Shin's F-14, you have two options if you want the "major external features" to be accurate: 1. Take an F-14D, but use an F-14A/B cockpit/seats. 2. Take an F-14B, but remove the ECM bumps from under the wing gloves, and add the F-14D's dual chinpod under the nose. Other late F-14 features are basically squadron or aircraft-specific, like the ECM bumps on the glove shoulder, and dorsal antenna configuration. (B's and D's tend to have a noticeably larger, more triangular forward dorsal antenna, just behind the cockpit) The "shoulder" ECM bumps are very common, but not guaranteed. (They are often listed as a B vs D thing, but it's untrue, I've personally checked at airshows)

I just saw those yesterday---I will buy any and all models they make of Fei-Yen or Angelan. Just gotta hope they do them, and not 100 Temjin/Raiden variants. Wave already did a bunch of them.

I was at the hobby shop today (needed paint for my SR-71) and noticed just how many types and brands of glue there were. So my question for wm_cheng: What glue(s) do you use? I noticed Micro-weld had the consistency of water (it's rarely in stock, so maybe it sells out quickly). I've always gone for the thicker ones (Testors MM in the black container), as I like a minute or so to VERY precisely position parts, but then of course it takes a while to set and is bad for gear doors etc, as they like to fall over the moment you let go.

Sub-compressors are still compressors. (Usually called "boost" stages and GE is fond of them, but still compressors). And all the locations and appearances still look like compressors. Especially #50. You could show that drawing to every aviation fan you find, and 100% would say it's the first stage compressor/fan and they'd all agree that's NOT what a turbine looks like. The turbines of each section would be well aft, and hidden. You could draw an arrow to where they are, it's fairly obvious on the drawing. IMHO, it both looks like (according to the drawing) and makes sense (how jets work, regardless of whether they run off kerosene or flowers) that it should be: 22. Low-pressure compressor. 50. High-pressure compressor. Or booster compressor, if you want. Might be better for a "thermonuclear reaction turbine". And then somewhere around #46, would be the actual turbine stage(s).

A big factor is how the power is used. An EA-6B, doing barrage jamming like they often do, is emitting all its power over every frequency, in every direction, with every amplitude and pulse pattern it can, trying to mess up whatever it finds. Thus any PARTICULAR radar emission will only be jammed by whatever small percentage of the EA-6B's total power happens to be on the same frequency going the same direction, etc. If you don't know exactly what to jam, where, you're wasting like 99.9% of your power on "worthless" frequencies and directions and thus the "correct" emission is only getting less than 1% of the power you're putting out. If a fighter with a powerful radar goes to pure altitude/vector mode (generally the simplest, but highest-power and range mode for an air-to-air radar), that will overcome most jamming, unless the jammer can quickly determine what frequency and direction in which to concentrate the jamming. Which of course, is a whole other part of ECM etc---identifying threats and other emissions so as to know what you should emit, where. The quick summary comparison is a machine gun---spraying thousand of rounds a minute around randomly is pointless if 99.9% of your shots are missing. Better to fire like 200 rounds, that are aimed well. PS---if mainly BVR was expected to be how fighters fought in the near future, the ATF wouldn't have been required to be as agile as an F-16, nor have the best thrust/weight ratio ever. They would have said "as powerful a radar as you can, with lots of upgraded AMRAAMS". Sure, there'll be lots of BVR engagements, but they sure expect to have their fair share of dogfights.

"Forward dorsal" is fine. You'll note the dictionary definitions don't have naval/aeronautical usage in them.

And the counterpart: if you have enough power, you can burn through the jamming. That's basically how the MiG-25's radar works. And also why its hard to defeat an F-14 radar.

Just a note: most Desert Storm Tornado strike missions flew with terrain-following radar turned off. Pure skill, low-altitude high-speed flying. (Very few planes can do that as well as a Tornado).

Just hope they make it an F-15A, and not a current F-15E.

Update: 1. The yellow decals look fine when put over blue. I think a big part of it is the very "aqua" color of the decal paper itself. Still decidedly not *Blue Angels* yellow, but about as good as you can get without layering multiple pale yellow decals over each other. Good enough. (And painting the yellow is not an option, unless you happen to have a very large "US NAVY" mask for the wings, mirrored, and tapered to fit an F-18 wing) 2. Still will have to mix some paint to match the decal's applied appearance, to paint the wingtip launch rails. 3. I did take a pic, showing the applied decal color and how well the airbrake fit, but accidently deleted it off the memory card itself, not my C: drive. Oops. (And it featured everyone's favorite flower-covered placemat, too) As for QF-18A's: Well, we haven't run out of QF-4's and QF-106's, but they only number in the dozens. F-15's, even early A models, are generally too big and valuable to make into general-purpose drones, they'll probably be kept in reserve, at least most of them. Air superiority fighter, and a heck of a good one. F-14's won't do at all---they are generally flown until they're ready to fall apart. No hours left on the airframe. Any F-14 available isn't really fit to fly. And the maintance cost is so high. Any F-14B/D is generally kept in reserve in good condition. You never know when we'll need a REAL fleet-defense fighter again. F-16's---any F-16A can be converted to an F-16 ADF, or the F-16A MLU, which is what many NATO nations are doing. Modified F-16A's are VERY capable planes, and we can always sell off what we don't need. F-18A's however, have no real update program, and are frankly very limited in capabilities. F-18C vs F-18A is like F-15E vs F-15A, for what weapons it can use, and nifty stuff like FLIR, LANTIRN, etc. F-18A's are little more than a small A-7, technology-wise. Neat cockpit and radar, but the weapons systems are still 1970's. And they're cheap, available, LOTS of hours left on the airframs, and easy to maintain. By far the best candidates for the next line of drones. But so far, AFAIK nothing at all has really been done or studied about it.

Watched trailer. Overall, loved it. Nitpicks: 1. Well at least they got rid of the F-14's ailerons, but still forgot the tailerons. Surprising, considering how heavily they featured and showed the Hornet's tailerons. (Namco seems to alternate every other game in if they "remember" that the Hornet has tailerons) But nobody ever gets the F-14's, despite the whole "if it doesn't have ailerons, and the spoilers can't be used when the wing's swept--how do you expect it to roll when the wings are swept?" Also, the nice long head-on shot in the beginning of The Final Countdown clearly shows the stabs moving differentially like crazy throughout the approach. 2. Going off of the above one---finally got tailerons on the Hornet again, but they're used too much. You can clearly see it during the "vertical climb, than a modified hammerhead" the Hornet does about midway through the trailer. The h.stabs go like 90 degrees apart from each other! When used differentially, they move a lot less than when together. This applies to all planes, not just Hornets. (I think it's a stability issue, you'd start inducing kind of a barrel roll, rather than a pure roll) Just waiting to see what "high-end" planes we get.

Yes it's a Blue Angels kit, and is thus molded in blue. (The wrong blue, BTW, it's very "teal") The odds are good that I actually won't go past this stage, as the decals are more brown than yellow, and there are NO other 1/72 Blue Angels decals available. It'll probably just be a collection of spare F-18 parts for other kits. Though it will give me a chance to test out various methods/sequence of assembly. I'll do an actual "decal on blue" test tonight and see how it looks. Better to find out now if the decals will look ok, than after I've built the kit! Rant time: my biggest gripes with Hasegawa/Fujimi decals: 1. "White" that is printed as ivory/beige, and thus unusable. (Especially annoying when "true white" decals are also printed on the exact same sheet). 2. Yellows that are way, way too dark. Orange/mustard may be opaque, but I'd much rather double-layer 2 sets, than have the totally wrong color.

F-16/F-17/F-18 story wouldn't be a bad parallel for the YF-22/YF-23. Though IMHO it's been too long. If the navy were to pick the YF-23, they'd have done so by now. Or maybe a certain someone tried to REALLY influence them to spend the money on Super Hornets instead. At this point, YF-23's might have been cheaper! Generally, re-engineering something costs way more than building from scratch---it took 5x as much work to make the P-51 RR-powered, than to design the plane itself---and making a Super Hornet took far far more work than making the original Hornet) Gotta wonder about Super Hornet design costs (plus a lot of time and money to fix the problems they found, which cut into its range). I personally do NOT like modifying planes much at all. Do not mess with a design, problems very often crop up. YOu can't just add 5 or 10% here and there, angle this, round that, and expect it to still work with all the original parts. Re-engining or adding canards is about my limit for "good mods to do". Feel free to add new parts, but don't start "re-sculpting" the basic components of the plane.

Hey, I'm only a few months out of college. Give me a year before I can afford my own place(finally!) And I often photograph on those vinyl placemats, for they are soft and won't damage models.

Hmmn, all pretty much the same angle, and taking pics at 3AM never gives good results. Sorry for the quality, but here's what a Hase 1/72 Hornet looks like in basic mock-up.

I took a few pics of my main dry-fit a few nights ago. Comments before the pics: 1. I say install the wings last. They fit great, and the fuselage side parts will determine exactly how they sit. If you do them early, it might force the later attachment of the fuselage sides to be like 1 mm too low. 2. V.stabs fit fine. 3. Overall, all the wings/fins line up amazingly well. One of the hardest things in most planes is to get everything lined up and square, with the right dihedral and all. The Hase F-18 kind of "self-aligns" if you just move everything as far as it'll go. Like, make the v.stabs as vertical as you can--and that'll be the right spot. Make the wings as "high" as you can, and that's the right spot. 4. Still haven't decided whether to attach the fuselage sides after the upper and lower fuselages are together, or to attach earlier to the lower fuselage. I'm leaning towards the latter, to assure the gear bays are correct. But I still wonder about the "upper edge of the fuselage side, to lower edge of upper fuselage" seam... 5. Maybe I'll do one side one way, and the other side the other, and see what's best. (I THINK it'll work that way)

Except that, like all-non Hasegawa F-14D's ever, in any scale, it's missing one of the key "I'm not an F-14A" features. The rear fuselage. Revell did something that's still "incredulous" to most of us modelers. It's clear they intended to do accurate F-14A/B/D's, based on parts breakdown/options. And like Hasegawa, they split the rear fuselage to allow for completely different back ends, rather than just "nozzle-swapping" like most kits. However, on the "F-14D-specific" sprue, they included the back end parts of an F-14A! And so it's just like most F-14D kits. We hope that when they come out with the new F-14A they include an F-14D back end with the F-14A nozzles, so you can buy 2 kits, swap parts, and everything's fine. Or they might "correct" the F-14A, and give an F-14A back-end with F-14A nozzles. Or in summary: if you're going with a Revell F-14D, you might as well just buy whatever F-14A you want, and swap nozzles with an F-16 kit. It'd be just as accurate, and nicer-looking, if you use all-Hasegawa parts. (If you're going for Shin's) I still don't know why most every review says it's accurate, when it's just as inaccurate as nearly every other kit out there. More like "accurate, except for 1 of the 3 main F-14D features". PS--most Hase 1/48 F-14D's come with VF-11 Red Rippers low-vis markings. Just to help you look. In 1/72, the current release is VF-2 Bounty Hunters---easy enough to find on-line, rare in shops. Basically--if you find a Hase F-14D, buy it. 90% of what they release is A's, then D's, with B's being the rarest. (I *so* should have bought that VF-101 F-14B I saw like 2 years ago at my local shop--now I'm desperately looking for that exact release, I want those decals) PPS--this is a great chance to correct an earlier statement. I had never actually owned a Fujimi F-14D, and just went by the 2 top F-14 sites and 3 best modeling sites. Well, they're all wrong. While Fujimi F-14D's DO include new rear fuselage parts. they're for the F-14B prototype, with F101 engines, not F110's. So it's still wrong for any real F-14A+, F-14B, F-14D. Closer than an A, but for the amount of work it takes to add in the new parts, totally not worth it. My current plan: Fujimi includes nice deeply scribed lines inside to slice off the entire back end of the engines. Exactly where the Hasegawa F-14D parts start. Yes, it'll be expensive, but I plan to make most of my F-14B's and D's by combining Hase engines and rear fuselages, with the other 90% of the plane from Fujimi kits. I will however try a 100% Hase F-14D, and see just how bad the fit really is on Hase's. If it's not "headache inducing" I'll probably build a few, to keep cost/waste down. Also, the pile of Fujimi F-14 kits I have is a factor. (Hey, Fuji F-14A's are cheap on Ebay--and I plan to order a few sprues of "replacement" parts from HLJ---I'm going to see how much I can order--if I can, I'll order like a half-dozen Hase F-14D "rear fuselage parts" sprues, and just do it like that)

If you gave the YF-23 new intakes, it could be a nice SR-71 successor. It is VERY sleek, very stealthy, with very powerful engines. Make the weapons bay a fuel tank, add a camera, and you've got a nice spy plane. Mach 3.2 continuous? No. Mach 2.8+? Definitely. Also, it could probably be navalised a lot easier than the F-22 ever could have been. The YF-23 already had the F-18's landing gear, and a HUGE wing for slow approaches. It was definitely big, but the tails are extremely low, no worry about hangar-deck height, versus the F-22's massive fins. Folding wings and/or nose are rarely a problem.

Yeah, but the military loves big, new, expensive, complex, technical projects that make an F-22 look cheap and low-tech in comparison. "Why build new fighters, when we could spend 100 billion trying to make a really fancy pen-light to burn-apart orbital missiles?"

The ABL-1 is flying. I don't know if it's flying with a WORKING laser yet, but there are most certainly USAF 747's out there with laser turrets in the nose. But they've definitely got a ways to go before an actual "shooting down a missile" test. A few years at least. Guidance/control/tracking system is everything, far more difficult than the laser itself. The big question is if the guidance system really can track a missile going that fast, long enough to destroy it---the laser isn't a "bolt" like in Star Wars, it needs several seconds of continuous contact to destroy the missile---NOT easy to do----a missile only a few feet across, miles away, moving at Mach 20---to KEEP a laser beam tracked on to it while it's moving (and the 747's moving as well). Heh heh--it's an iodine laser. "Kills germs, and ICBM's!"