Bouncing and leaping

Plenty and quickly

Fueled by the project's advancement I got carried away and worked on it a bit more than usual, ignoring my other hobbies. I still try to explain in short what I got done.

The noble skill of waging war

Because the plane's paintjob was pretty much done, in my opinion, I moved on to the parts that go bang. To give myself a better idea of how they should look like,  I googled a bit for real-life examples.

• R-60 missiles got a bridal white paintjob with a red tip for the seeker head.
• S-25 OFM single packed rockets against hardened targets I decided to leave blue (the pack itself) and the tip ended up dark gray with a Badab Black touchup.
• UB-32M-57 rocket pods I painted dark gray all around and then I washed the tips with Badab Black as well.

After these six pieces were done I glued them on/under their rails and pylons. At some earlier point I had decided that my Ground Attack Plane's self-defence missiles would be in the centermost hardpoints, the heavy rockets to the middle ones (hoping they'd be more accurate that way) and the sow death -rocket pods to the most distant ones to provide ample coverage for the rockets.

This is how I saw fit to set my plane up, at least it sounded practical to me. If and when someone knows better, please feel free to point fingers and laugh a bit, as long as you educate me a bit as well ;)

The baseplate

What now as the plane is just about done and all? When I was building my Imperial T-65 fighter prototype project, I got a couple of mdf plates and thought that as I'm already out of my comfort zone I could take another step and build a stand for my jet.
This idea of mine is not a recent one, I just didn't dare to voice it yet. The plan is simple: a Soviet plane is standing on a more or less mistreated concrete-plate airfield somewhere in the Soviet Union. My mental image comes from Operation Flashpoint but I managed to find a real-world example (from current day Estonia):

There you go. Just choose a nicely sized plate and arrange 1mm polystyrene plates on top of that in a nice way. Of course it'd been way too boring (and easy and effortless) to just align them straight. Oh my, no! They'd be rotated at a random angle and the plane would stand on them, aligned to the base, for practical reasons.

First I set the place for the the main plate, the largest one, that'd set the baseline for the other pieces' alignment and shapes. Then I sliced off the overhanging junk.

Then the rest of the plates were set up to fill the rest of the surface area. That one piece on the top right did not end up being a single piece, I was just testing the layout at the point I took the photo. After the pieces were precut I still made some adjustments to the gaps and whatnot.

I really couldn't leave the plane off my setup yet, I just had to see it on its place. Maybe someone'll complain that the plane leaks outside the base but not me. This is the way it was going to be. The base is not important, the plane is.

The last photo shows the mistreated plates glued on their places. In the bigger gaps and slots I applied some white glue and sprinkled some Woodland Scenics' gray ballast. Whenever I'm done with the painting I'll add some random tufts of grass / hay and stuff like that. This airfield hasn't been too well kept in the last years, but who cares as long as the plane flies and the bombs explode...