Marvel Onkey

Seems to me that it would be a lot less confusing just to give all the aircraft different names...

Is it just me, or is the effect of all of the work and research into making the plane blend into the sky in different lighting conditions somewhat compromised by painting a great big shark's mouth on each nacelle?

Thanks for the answers guys; amazing aircraft and incredible flying, it's hard to credit that more of them didn't hit the ground or the drink- one sneeze from the pilot and it's goodnight Irene.

Forgive the stupid question- was there anything about the Buccaneer that made it particularly suited to flying at very low level?

Now that is what I call a stash!

Thank you, that makes sense. It has just occurred to me that kills belong to the pilot not the airframe, so Ginger Snap and Lanakila could be displaying kills the pilot made prior to flying recce missions I suppose.

Do the red dots on the fuselage above the wings of Spitfires PA 892 and MB 946 signify missions flown? They surely can't be 'kills' on a recce bird can they? I was surprised to see 12 kills recorded on the nose of 'Ginger Snap', I'd always assumed all recce planes had the armament removed to reduce weight.

Poor gunner. Talk about heaping insult upon injury- not only are you being sent to war in the hopeless Defiant but they're dressing you like a clown while you do it...

I like a metaphor as much as the next man, particularly if that man is the recently knighted Professor Van-Tam; on the other hand people using management speak to make their topic and themselves seem important really causes me to grind my teeth. Some of the examples that particularly set me off: 'Forensic' as in "we need to have a forensic look at this". Me: "Are we investigating crime or do you mean that we need to look at this in detail?" 'Deep Dive' as in "next time we'll take a deep dive into this topic". Me: "Are we going to sea, or do you mean we'll look at it in detail? 'Granular' as in "the report goes into granular detail". I accept that common usage is for 'granular' to be synonymous with 'detailed', it's the unintended tautology that causes me angst. 'At pace' as in "We'll need to complete this project at pace". Why can't you just say 'quickly'? Someone has already brought up the use of 'myself' when the speaker means 'me', that also sets me off...

Max Hasting's Overlord is a perfectly good general history and benefits from being very readable, Cornelius Ryan and Stephen Ambrose are very good on individual and small unit stories; Normandy '44 by James Holland is an excellent narrative of not only D-Day but the whole Normandy campaign, Anthony Beevor's book is very good. John Keegan is a world renowned historian and Six Armies in Normandy is a fine book, but he is a bit of the declinist view of British history which you may or may not subscribe to; Carlo D'este meanwhile has a not particularly balanced point of view best summarised as "the Brits were useless, Monty was rubbish, the US won the war on their own etc etc..." which may cause the more anglophile reader to throw his books across the room.

That's a good point; although most of my paint effects are inadvertent and the matt coat covers a multitude of sins!

I am definitely not a highly-respected modeller, at best I'm a ham-fisted kit assembler who only sporadically completes one; but I've also stopped using a gloss coat before decals, These days I prefer a gloss coat after decals so I can correct my weathering mistakes without damaging the painting or decals (weathering is my worst skill), then a matt coat over everything at the end.

Is it me, or are some of the panel lines pretty clear on the red and white 'Columbia' in the background?

Buy the tester pots of emulsion maybe?

Dare I suggest that in extremis you could model it as a vignette with a figure stood right in front of the pump who might just co-incidentally be obscuring some of the bits that are hard to get an image of...

It isn't too difficult; although I only do 1:72 at which scale it's fairly easy to give a reasonable impression of the effect- at 1:48 it might be harder to make it look exactly like the real thing. Finish your camouflage coats first, then add the mottle. I suppose you could varnish the finished paint job first so you could remove the mottle if it went wrong, but I usually take some brave pills and crack on over top of the finished paint job. My method for adding the mottle is a bit like dry brushing- I use a small stippling brush (mine comes from a Humbrol set of varying sizes): dip it lightly in the paint, then dab it end on onto some kitchen towel to remove most of the paint, then dab it end on onto the plane. Much like dry brushing the trick is to build up the amount of mottle little by little, not going too heavy, just dabbing away with tiny amounts of paint until you get the effect looking sort of right all over the plane. The hardness of the bristles of the stippling brush seem to give the right sort of effect. I find it helps to stop adding mottle sooner rather than later, leave it for a bit then come back and view the overall effect- it is easier to add a little bit more in places if you think you've under-done it. If you've over-done it you can always tone it down a bit by using the same technique but dabbing on light blue rather than dark green (but it is best not to have to do this, it doesn't look quite right).

Four FW-190s in a Mosquito? Were they all destroyed on the ground? If they were destroyed in the air then that's some flying isn't it?

I use E-Z line, available in a number of varieties- very forgiving to use- easily fixed with a tiny bit of CA and it's slightly stretchy so doesn't spell disaster if you accidentally catch it when handling the model afterwards. Pretty sure I got mine from Modelling Tools who are members of this forum (and very helpful too), but as the BBC would say, other suppliers are available. I note that the Modelling Tools website suggests there's a temporary supply delay http://www.modellingtools.co.uk/ez-line-31-c.asp The one I have at the moment is a touch overscale for 1:72, but not so much as to be glaringly obvious to the layperson.

Well thinned paint, and only make single brush strokes (i.e. a single pass with the brush). Don't go over the same area again until it is dry, even if you missed a bit- takes a bit of self-discipline to forestall the natural instinct to make multiple brush strokes but it really helps with avoiding brush marks.

I'm no expert, but I try very hard. All my modelling is on the dining room table, so enamels and and airbrush are a non-starter for me. I'm moving away from Humbrol acrylic paints, I find them to be not the best for brush-painting, not necessarily because it is hard to avoid brush marks, just because of the grittiness. I find the little pots that come with the starter kits more grainy than the regular stuff, but with both I find that even when thinned a lot and stirred excessively I still get little gritty lumps in the paint that have to be polished out, which is a nuisance. I haven't settled on my brand of choice to replace my Humbrol though- the jury is out between Revell Aqua and Xtracrylics. I find Vallejo model a bit thick for brush painting larger areas, difficult to avoid brush strokes even when well thinned- it is brilliant for small figures though (I only do 1:72). Tamiya acrylic again I like for figures and small details but I find it dries too quickly for brush painting larger areas, but that might be me. Whatever paint I use it gets a good dollop of W&N Flow Improver as a thinner.

I don't 100% agree- I find some new decals will behave nicely using this approach, others need a bit more encouragement to conform to the surface they need to bed down into, even ones from the same decal sheet. As with most things it's down to trial and error and developing an approach that suits you. Otherwise Black Knights 10 steps are exactly the process I follow. I don't use decalfix for fixing decals, in the past I've had it react badly with underlying Humbrol acrylic paints so now I use Microscale decal solutions which I get on better with. As an aside, I do use decalfix sometimes as part of the weathering process- see the Humbrol youtube channel for a useful little video on this technique.

In several of his books James Holland states that the HE 112 would have been a better bet for the Luftwaffe than the Bf 109- it's clearly something he believe. All historians are influenced by their own underlying beliefs as they interpret history to a certain extent; to me this is one of Holland's little foibles.

I like to include figures in my models; there are some very nice ones around, but some are quite expensive. If you search on Hannants website for 1:72 figures there are a number of different options come up for varying costs that will give you an idea of what's out there- as well as the options others have noted above. The Revell figures are good- they are technically out of production but as noted above they come up on EBay fairly often for a reasonable value. The Airfix figures have some nice poses and a nice mix of pilots and ground crew and WAAFs standing around to allow for different scenes, but the aforementioned nasty soft plastic does make it a swine to get paint to stay on them.

Anyone with a small baby knows why the KGB used sleep deprivation as an interrogation technique...

So in this instance the old maxim of it being good if it looks good is a long way off the mark...