Flanker main assembly 3/3

Not much was missing

Thanks to my timings the third and last proper building session was left with a couple of silly pieces left to install. First of them was the second main landing gear bay door, that didn't want to settle in as nicely as its friend on the other side, even with some gentle violence.

To the both lower outer corners of the engine air intakes I installed strakes that had somehow escaped my eyes in all the photos and 3d models I've ever encountered. Not that I had known to pay attention to such details, which seems to have emerged as the carrying theme of this project.

Thanks to the closed hatches all that remained was the installation of the pylons for the missiles. Of those I got six to glue on, with an interesting layout: two in a column into the middle of the belly of the plane, two under the engines themselves and a final pair under the wings.

Wikipedia was talking about ten hardpoints / pylons, from this model either the inner or outer underwing pylons were missing, but I really couldn't say, which ones. Both wingtips were supposed to be of the  missile-carrying variety, so from my point of view I was missing only two separately installable pieces but as I only had no missiles to put on those even if I had them, it  mattered little.

To my amateur eyes all six pylons looked identical, even though they should be, technically, somewhat different. That's because the typical armament of the plane consisted of R-27 and R-73 missiles, which were mounted on AKU-470 / APU-470 and APU-73 pylons respectively - but as a quick glance at the kit's sprues told me quickly, all the missiles were the same model but with different tips. So that didn't matter much, either. More about this stuff next time.