Some Vympels

A missile set

My sprue contained six lumps of missile, of two variants. Four of those came with a pointy end, two of them with a blunt one, those were the only differences between them. I decided to make this missile painting subprocess a bit easier for me by painting as much of them as possible while they were still attached to the sprue.

The bits were not fully formed yet, I was to glue two large-ish canards to them still. At this point I was thinking if I should carve the rocket engine openings or not.

Primed

There wasn't much to say about the priming of these bits: I primed them white and left them to dry. My plan was to continue this way a bit further by painting them white and then cut them off for fine-tuning, fixing and detail painting.

Please refer to...

Judging by what a quick image searching brought up, I could just paint them white and either leave it at that (a very easy solution), or add some highlights. Somewhere I saw the canards done so that an opposing pair was white, the other pair black or dark grey. Or the leading edges of the canards were white while the rest was dark grey. Some wing versions weren't dark grey but more like unpainted metal, or so they looked like to me. Some, many in fact, missiles also had black bands here and there, but they looked like they'd stand out a bit too much in this scale.

These pics above made my mind: I'd use the second picture as an inspiration for the nose cones and the wings, otherwise it'd obey the first one. I started by basecoating the set of missiles with insignia white (VMA 71279).

I hoped they ended being visibly different from the primed ones

The next time I got to paint I started with the pointy four and painted their radomes with light grey (VMA 71276 USAF Light Grey), the rounder two I left as they were. Had they been camera-guided, I'd built lenses on them but enough of the photos I'd seen always showed the R-27s plain white.

Next I painted the tail wings and the canards of the full set with a metallic paint (VMC 70865 Oily Steel). This first round didn't leave them as clean as I had wanted to, partially because of the noticeable age of the paint and the thickening this had caused. Maybe I'd touch them up with some steel or chrome later on. Also the missile bodies themselves were going to need a bit of fixing with off-white, but that was going to need doing anyway after the missiles were detached.

Detached

When the paint had gotten properly dry I cut the sextet off. I cut the attachment points off from the front end and cleaned the back ends flat. Then I retired for the night, thinking what I'd do to them the next evening.

For the missiles the next step was clear: I searched for my drill and first made a hole into the bottom of one missile's rear end with one of the narrowest drill bits, thinking that I'd open it up a bit with the old xacto knife. With bits this small it was a bit too dangerous, so for the next missile I switched the widest drill bit, which was still narrower than the diameter of the missile itself. This large bit worked just fine and I used that one for all the remaining missiles.

I couldn't use the large bit to improve the first missile, for the hole I had made was too far off-centre. The same misalignment issue plagued my full missile set, but I didn't let that bother me. Now I repainted the most offensive parts of the missiles, still with the insignia white (VMA 71279), then after all did the heat-seeking missile's tips with the light grey (VMA 71276) and the insides of the rocket engine openings with just plain black (VGC 72051).

Vympel R-27R

On my palm I now had four sharp-nosed midrange air-to-air missiles with a semiactive radar homing R-27R missiles. In the real world these four-meter-long sticks, being a few centimetres narrower than a sheet of A4 paper and weighing about 250kg with an almost 40kg warhead. Their velocity was a respectable (according to Wikipedia, unconfirmed) 4.5 Mach.

Vympel R-27T

The final two missiles were model R-27T, meaning they sported an infrared homing module and they were recognizeable by their round nose cones. These missiles had only half of the range, 40km, compared to their radar-seeking counterparts, but the rest of the specs were naturally the same as the only difference between the R and T variants was this sole module.

The layout

Just for the fun of it I laid out the missiles' layout under the plane. I thought that the R-sticks were going to be loaded near the centre of the plane, next to the engines and the T versions a bit further from the engines, below the wings. Not that I thought that made any actual difference for real.

Removing the bandages

My paintjob got an overnight curing again before I tore off the masking tapes. I was surprisingly confident that everything had gone well and that the tapes would not be taking half the paint with them. It was a bit unusual.

While I was removing the other tape bits I also poked the edges of the canopy masks with the tip of the xacto knife, then took them off by hand. None of those had leaked anywhere. Not a single piece of masking tape had gotten too stuck onto the painted surfaces. This was a really successful moment in the project!

Only now I reglued the missing engine exhaust nozzle back, because now it wasn't going to make me work more with the maskings. That was as far as the rest of the plane was concerned, as the nozzles still needed some looking at.

As if completed

Right now my Flanker was, in principle at least, completed. Of course it was missing its teeth, the weathering and the markings. But as a plane it was done.

I found it really good looking already. Adding the sixpack of missiles was going to affect the look in its own way. *cough* of course I managed to knock a sensor thingy off of the right side of the plane, because why couldn't things just go smoothly from start to finish?

Like clumps of slush in the winterlessness

White on grey

My detailings were going to be very simple and done quickly. I painted all the targets with the gently off-white (VMA 71279 Insignia White), because it felt nicer than pure white itself. The nose cone I painted by blasting away from the airframe. Maybe I should've thought of protecting my camo paintjob by adding a second lenght of masking tape, as one could never be too careful with the overspray.

The cover of the aerial refueling system I painted from pretty close up, with small circular movements. Maybe I managed to avoid puddling this time too. Again I should've spent a tiny bit more time and materials on the covering things, just in case.

Can you imagine that had this been a tank I was painting, I wouldn't have considered doing any masking this lazily and hazardously? I just realized this silly detail while writing this post, a detail that may have been painfully obvious to the rest of you for years.

The tips of the vertical stabilizers I painted, like I planned the last time, with a piece of paper held behind the target area. It worked pretty nicely.

Detailing preparation

Tape!

After the camo was done the airbrushings for this project were pretty much completed already. I wanted to highlight a few parts, using the previous post's reference image as inspiration. Quite a few pics I had encountered the tail wings had either on the inner or outer side a longish light grey or so rectangle running along the leading edge. Based on a feeling I decided not to do any of that on my plane.

Three (or four if we wanted to do some semantic nitpicking) things remained in my plan. The nose cone that covered the front-facing radar, next to which I could've also painted a darker rectangle up until the canopy front, but I didn't really like the way it looked in my mind's eye so I opted out of that too.

Both the tail wing top tips I decided to pain, both from inside and outside. Some variance existed in the photos I had seen, many with only one of those - maybe that depended somehow on the rectangles I chose to omit mere moments earlier.

The most curious bit I encountered was the refueling slot, that I can't recall touching in any other but the N/AW A-10 project a few years (5) ago. On an impulse I decided to implement that little bit on the Flanker.

Nosy

Masking off the nose cone I did with about half a dozen strips of masking tape. This did not provide me with a perfectly round edge, but it was just good in my opinion.

VStabs

The edges on top of the vertical stabilizers I simply cut off with pieces of masking tape. I recognized the need to dynamically protect the rest of the plane from the overflow already at this point. Most likely I'd just hold a sticky note behind the target chunk while spraying.

Aerial refueling thing

The fuel door was traditionally weirdly shaped. I protected its four main edges first and then added little details to the shape with another four diagonally aligned pieces. I didn't try to follow the shape perfectly, because with my skills I'd needed to do that with the x-acto knife just like with the canopy frames. The issue was that I simply didn't dare to risk ruining my precious paintjob with an evilly sharp knife!