#f-15e Eagle | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

judgeanon · 1 year ago

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Plastic Skies - Model 13: F-15E Strike Eagle "Garuda 1"

Near the end of last year, I bought a sheet of bootleg decals to make my Mobius-1 F-22 Raptor (as seen here!). The sheet had a lot more decals than just the Mobius ones. Some were for planes I had no interest in doing, some ended up in my old decal-less Berkut model, and some inspired the model I'd end up building right after the Area 88 Tiger. After all, I knew sooner or later I'd end up making an F-15. Even if I'm not its biggest fan.

Yeah, yeah, I dunno, I just don't like the F-15 Eagle. I know it's the backbone of the USAF and a fantastic plane and it does everything and the story of how it was conceived is super funny, but there's something about it that just doesn't spark anything in me. It's just... a fighter plane. Much like the Flanker platform, it always felt like the most standard example of Fighter Jet to me, without the cool swing wings of the Tomcat or the sleek small shape of the F-16. There's no such thing as a boring fighter jet, but the F-15 is close.

That's not to say we don't have some history. One of the last models my brother built back when we were kids was an absolutely massive (for us) 1/48 scale Eagle. As with all our models, it was glued together and not much else, and I distinctively remember it losing one of its tail fins somewhere underneath a bed. Still, the thing was huge to us, and I always remember it as the biggest model we ever had. But that's about as much fondness as I have for the Eagle.

Or at least, as much as I had until Ace Combat happened.

Although the Eagle is very prominent in several AC games, the important one for this model is Ace Combat 6: Fires of Rubi--I mean Fires of Liberation, for the Xbox 360. This was one of the very last Ace Combat games I tried during my "I want to play all of them phase", since although PS1, PS2, PSP and 3DS emulation are all pretty good right now, Xbox 360 emulation is not quite there, and has apparently been not quite there for years now. I should know, I tried. But earlier this year, a very generous and dear friend of mine offered me an old Xbox 360 which he'd come into possession and was using to try some cool hacker stuff. And soon, I was finally getting to play AC6.

The game itself is great, as are all Ace Combats. It has a really interesting "large-scale battle" system, where different units are doing their own thing and you can choose which ones to support. It has the first appearance of high-g turns, which I love. It has a killer soundtrack, but that's no surprise. It has a really frustrating boss fight followed by a really amazing final level. And it has one of the most gloriously OP fictional jets in the series. Its story isn't quite as engaging as the PS2 games but I'm very glad I played it. And as seen above, the game's cover star is the F-15E, a plane for which I already had the decals to make.

So as I was finishing up the Tiger, I knew what the next project would be.

This was also going to be my first Academy model kit. Academy is a Korean model kit company that as far as I can tell sits quite comfortably in the middle ground of model kit quality. They make decent stuff for a good price with solid plastic quality, although some reviewers note a few glaring accuracy issues. I don't really care about accuracy when it comes to models, especially not at the price I found this, so I got to work pretty quickly.

The cockpit was the first step. Emboldened by my work on the Tiger, I tried to really make it shine this time, adding those little extra dabs of red to the flightsticks and other touches. Unfortunately, the decal sheets were a bit too wide for the panels, so they ended up getting warped and stretched. It looks pretty bad, but once inside the plane, I figured it wouldn't be visible. And I was right! Althouh what is visible are some of the corners where I skimped or forgot to paint, something which I'm definitely trying to work on in my latest kits.

The main fuselage was a much easier fit than the Raptor, although not quite as easy as the Tiger. The Eagle is a big motherfucker, after all, so putting it together requires a lot of pressure in different spots. Unfortunately, it also resulted in some plastic melting around a few corners, but only in the underside, and only on one wing. It was still a good lesson that made me want to invest in better cement, but it'd take a while for me to actually do it.

I decided the next step would be the nozzles, which is where this particular kit goes a bit fucking nuts. The F-15's thrusters feature external fairing arms for their variable geometry nozzles, which is way easier to explain with a picture:

And if you're observant, you can go back to that first picture of all the model's sprues and see how this kit handles that. But just in case:

The parts in green are the 30 (!) parts necessary to build just the two exhaust nozzles. The parts in orange are Academy offering people who aren't insane a way out, with two fully built nozzles with "turkey feather" panels instead of the arms. Which is very thoughtful of them, but after 12 models, I guess I was feeling a bit insane.

Admittedly, it wasn't rough sailing. The panels themselves didn't fit as well as I would've liked, and the faring arms required a very delicate touch. Still, I figured it'd all look at least decent once I went in with my beloved burnt iron paint, and sure enough, the end result was mostly fine.

Around this time, I started running into what's become my weak point this far into model building: indecisiveness. It's easy to think that models are "put them together first, then paint, then decals, then varnish, then panel lining, then clear coat", and some cheap kits are perfectly capable of following that order. But the more experienced I get and the bigger kits I try, the more I find myself playing with that order, doing things like painting certain parts of the plane first before gluing, or even fully detailing things like tail wings before I'm even done painting the fuselage.

Which sounds smart and is the way to do until you're staring at four different tasks and you just don't know what you should start on now. In this model's case, one of the biggest problems was armaments.

This isn't even all of it, btw. This is still missing the eight other missiles I also had to paint. Though I will say, as messy as the yellow tips on the Mk 82 bombs are, I'm still a little proud of the way I figured out to paint them roughly similar:

It's not perfect, but nothing is. However, the armaments thing was something that bothered me all the way to the end of the build.

Painting the fuselage was a way different story. One of the reasons why I chose AC6's F-15 was precisely because it's just one big color. No camo jobs, no masking tape save for the yellow bits on the tail wings, just me and my brushes and a newly bought box of Revell Greenish Grey paint. That paint is... an odd one. Looks absolutely disgusting when wet, like the insides of a toilet after eating some very unhealthy food, but once it dries out and especially once varnished it looks... kinda cool? Kinda awesome? It just has way more personality than the usual air superiority grays of most USAF fighters.

The other part of the build that was surprisingly comfortable was the landing gear, since this model only has one door for each gear. Made the whole thing go by in a breeze, and before I knew it, I was already putting in the decals. At least the big ones. Admittedly, they're not 100% game accurate, since AC6 uses low visibility versions of the emblems and such, but they were there and I wasn't not gonna use them.

Panel lining was also shockingly easy for this kit. Although I'm still pretty lousy at it, the kit's panel lines were very well defined and easy to get the paint in. Compared to other kits I've had, this one was very well behaved when it came to this step. Sooner than I'd expected, the whole thing seemed almost ready to be done. I just had to finish the armaments and we'd be all done.

So... yeah. You might notice something missing here. As it turns out, this kit doesn't actually have enough parts to put the 12 green bombs I'd painted besides the Mk 82. They're supposed to go three alongside the edges of the conformal fuel tanks (where the missiles now are) and three on the little chunks poking out of the sides. But for whatever reason, this kit only has four of those little chunks instead of six. And due to some issues with the instructions, I think I also glued the ones it did have wrong.

On top of that, I had some issues gluing the hardpoints with the Sidewinders and Mk-82 bombs to the wings, mostly because hey, protip: gluing stuff that's already painted and varnished is waaaay harder than gluing stuff when it's fresh off the box. But I just had to be a smart boy and get all the panel lining done first... Very frustrating, especially after realizing this, too, isn't game accurate. But it'd never really been my goal to make something perfectly accurate to the game. Like with the Raptor, like with every kit I make, I'll always choose what looks good to me over what looks closer to the real (or virtual) thing.

Eventually, the whole thing was done. Painting the cockpit was tricky but I've lost a lot of my old fears about it these days. And once the whole thing was varnished, I found myself really liking what I was seeing. The long nose, the beefy wings, the shiny engines... Maybe I'd been wrong about the F-15 all this time. Maybe it isn't really a boring jet. Maybe I just needed to let it back into my heart. And although it gave me a real tough time in a bunch of places, at the end it's low-key one of my favorite models so far, and a nice homage to an unsung game.

And it looks pretty cool on the Area 88 base too.

#My Stuff #Hobbies #Journals #F-15E Eagle #Ace Combat 6 #Garuda 1

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