Sleeve-ranks and more assembling

Adding the rank bars on the coverall sleeves

Yet again I ducked for the rank markings of the Luftwaffe for these ranks I pulled out of my sleeve. For simplicity I decided that the first guy'd have a single set of moustaches on his sleeves while the other one had a moustache underlined by a horizontal bar. Both'd be white as I really didn't feel like making a mess or multiple passes with yellow, if I really didn't need to. The white paint would also stand out a bit better, I thought, as the coveralls and the bibs were already yellowish and yellow, respectively.

Pictured: some flying colonel, who's being blinded by a misleadingly bright future

As a foundation I painted grey-black rectangular blotches on the sleeves and later I attempted to paint the tiny, tiny white  blobs on them. The radio operator got the single moustache so he was an Unteroffizier (which translated to a sergeant? Weird shapecount, considering that the other armies and branches usually have used three somethings for sarges, but who am I to complain?). The pilot then got the underlined moustache, becoming a Herr Leutnant, a lieutenant. Nothing too fancy but maybe even believable, I hoped.

No, you couldn't recognize anything there, but they are there and that mattered the most.

Employing some factory workers

At this point the instructions told me I had two options. Open dive brakes or closed ones, wingtip hardpoints loaded with either a pair of small bombs each or single external fuel tanks. Rather surprisingly and shockingly the Project Mumblings took the divebombing option in a divebomber project.

From under the masking tapes a pair of almost good-looking landing gear pods emerged. One of them was going to need a tiny bit of puttying, but they were quite an improvement from the last time I had seen them.

Next I glued the tail stabilizers with their diagonal support bars. Those settled into the airframe beautifully! Afterwards I tried to rererecheck that the damn wings were set straight, but that's what I've always done and always there's been some criticism afterwards :p

Under the aiframe I installed a couple of antennas and other things. Those identical hook-like things were to be glued on, with a glue specifically sold by Zvezda, so there's another case of "no glue needed", again.

Moving on, I assembled and painted the radio operator's MG and attached it to the rear glass piece. At this exact moment I realized I was just about done with the whole assembly part of this project. Before getting to that I thought I'd make my canopy masking subprocess a tiny bit easier by painting the frames from the inside. But nope, the plastic practically refosed to take and hold any paint on its surface. Gnaah.