bianfuxia

When it was time for me to leave China after many years living there, I was lucky enough to have a shipping allowance. On my last trip to my favourite hobby shop - a very hard to find place tucked away with no signs inside a residential compound on the SE corner near the third ring road - I basically went a bit crazy and just grabbed a bunch of stuff like a guy in the supermarket during a Zombie Apocalypse when the Zombies are literally in the fresh food section and you're in the cereal aisle and you grab what you can and run.... My booty included this. And now nearly four years later I built it OOB as a precoloured kit (a) because it was fun and (b) because I did the same recently with a Hasegawa kit of the Japanese Shinkai 6500 submersible. Shinkai 6500 reached, you guessed it, 6,500 meters down and was the record holder until the Chinese came along. And you can bet a hugely important part of the design brief was "go deeper than 6500"! The Jiaolong (pronounced roughly Jee-OW looong) set a record at 7,000 meters in 2012 which was then the deepest ever reached other than by a bathyscaphe which is a different type of deep-sea craft - the main difference being that Trieste, the famous bathyscaphe that went to the bottom of the Marianas trench in 1960, was not independently maneuverable. Like the Shinkai 6500 kit I did earlier this year in the Japanese GB this one lends itself to a quick build with OOB principles. It's neatly pre-coloured and pretty close to the pictures available online. So...on it goes as a fun quick build. In about three seconds you get to here:

I now have an airframe: Started here with the intakes and the pre-painted intake ramps: Once i got those intake ramps inside the air intakes I moved along to here: And then to the worst part of the Hasegawa F-15 - getting a decent fit of the nose part to the main part of the fuselage.

Yeah I think this is doomed to tail-sit whatever I do to it. There's not much room up front for weight and the tail section is quite small in diameter. I will most likely just use a little tail prop or stand to hold it up I think.

Think this, but scaled down to 1/144: The YUH-61A "UTTAS" - Utility Tactical Transport Aircraft System - was the prototype that did not win the contract for a helicopter to replace the famous UH-1 Huey. The Sikorsky UH-60 came out on top and went on to serve multiple militaries for decades. Anigrand released a 1/72 resin kit of this chopper but also a 1/144 version packed as a "mystery kit" with one of its 1/144 large aircraft. Generally you get three such mystery kits with the larger model. I was generously given this by another Britmodeller and I am not sure which kit it came from. The kit came with transparencies which I think are in another box somewhere. I started this one this week and managed to break off the tail section and gave up there for today! Hopefully this will be a fun build!

Well...that's good enough for me. We'll save you a seat in the Millennium Falcon!

Stop teasing us and sign up already

BOOM! Beaming you up from those coordinates now, sir.

I feel like you.....really want to sign up for this GB! All you gotta do is say, "Open the Pod Bay Door, Hal"...and you'll be welcomed into the safety and warmth of the Starship Groupbuild.... (just sayin')

Also - you already signed up earlier this year!

Yes - a snowspeeder is totally eligible! Sure enough they fly nap-of-the-Hoth, but Hoth is what, a billion light years above the Karman Line? Welcome aboard and I see the Imperial Fleet came out of Lightspeed too early so they're preparing a ground assault ..may the Force be With You!

This is so cool. You know, between you and @trickyrichwe could be GO FOR LAUNCH... And we could add a line to the song: FIDO - Go! GUIDO - Go! ENZO - Go! RICHO - GO! GO! GO! Now keep the chatter down in this room.

not much danger of disappointment there, I'd say!

Fujimi did an SMT in 1/72. I built it this year after finding it on eBay.

Speaking of loadouts, I could use some guidance. I have googled A LOT and not really come up with anything that's just simple and clear. My F-15E in this GB is from the 03 era and I want to have a mixed load of various laser guided bombs. I quite like two things - the mixed load of various different ones, and also those monster big ones (GBU-24). I have really struggled to find any pics other than two of other models (which I already linked in my thread). Has anyone got a good go-to source? I wouldn't ask unless I'd already spent hours googling and google imaging. It doesn't help that so many images seem to be of DCS screens! I've got the Hasegawa LGB set so I'm not short on paveways of different sizes, just clueless about what to do with them!

Not much greased lightning yet I'm afraid... But I have moved things along a bit. for this one you have to cut out the instrument panel coaming and replace it with a newer part appropriate to this era of F-15J. You can see the older part in two pieces there after I cut it out of the two fuselage halves. The newer bit is way better - (a) because it's a single part with one less join line to manage and (b) because it has a bit of detail on it. Here it is next to the same area on the Strike Eagle I'm doing at the same time.