Night Swallow's beak

The quad hidden in the beak

The typical armament of a Me-262 was a set of four 30mm MK108 autocannons with a relatively small ammunition load. This was, again, the first time I saw these things in any scale instead of little holes on the nose cone.

The cannon department

At least the beginning was simple. Between the cockpit's front plate and the fuel tank space we had an armoured wall and the gun area's baseplate that got glued into it. To the front end of this setup I glued the next wall that was the base of the actual nose cone. If my memory served me correctly the nose cone then contained the gun camera or at least its lens, and in this model the antennas of the radar were installed here. Then, on the flipside of the baseplate the walls and the mounting point for the nose wheel was built, as I was going for the standing model instead of an in-flight one.

Around the central cylinder I glued the lower ammo feeds for the cannons. At this point I had to fish out the paintbrushes and paints, so I could get the paintables done before installing the cannons that would be blocking out a lot later on. 

I left the front half unpainted as it was only going to receive some weights to stabilize the model. I also tried to avoid painting the things that were going to get stuff glued on to, like the installation points of the cannons and the spent casing chutes. While I was at it I also painted the cannon's front wall that had holes for the guns to poke through.

Everything was painted green except the ammo feeds that I painted with black grey. In the back wall there were also those four blocks that needed to be black.

The model one-oh-eights

Rheinmetall-Borsig's autocannons numbered, like I said before, four in total. I painted them all in Black Grey and then drybrushed with Cold Grey. When the paint was dry I pushed them into the front wall and started gluing this crow's nest into the baseplate. This was a lot more confusing an operation than what it probably sounded like.

 

When the cannons were stiffly in place I glued the ammo chutes in. Based on a quick read I didn't find any super detailed description of how these actually worked, so I boldly assumed that the fresh ammo feeds were located by the core of the plane and the spent shell casings were ejected outward, making the left/right cannons mirrors of each other. My justification for this was that the bottom of the hull had the paired ejection ports, or so I believed, and they were located on the outer side of the hull, not evenly spaced.

I painted these new casing ejector transporters also in Black Grey but left their drybrushing much lighter so they'd stand out differently. Then I glued in the lenghtwise-running support bars and painted them in Black Grey with a heavier Cold Grey drybrushing than the cannons, despite the instructions recommending metallic steel. 

Finally for the weaponry post I glued the ejection ports into the bottom parts of the airframe halves, and painted them olive green as instructed. While I was at it I also painted the more or less visible insides in Black Grey and drybrushed with Cold Grey. Repetition ad infitum.

 

Before sealing the airframe halves I glued and puttied (Vallejo Liquid Putty) a screw next to each of the spent case ejectors. Dry-fitting showed they fit in perfectly, and the cavities were completely sealed in the next stage. This, then, raised the question why did the instructions tell to paint the outsides of the ejector chutes green in the first place...