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...

Stars redone

SNAFU

While I was excitedly working on the stencils last time I didn't realize (remember) that the paper stencils were pretty much useless and I should've used masking tape instead. As a result the stars I had painted had been smeared and smudged around - incidentally they were all a bit too small as well. Redoing was looming in the horizon, in any case.
So I sliced open a couple of bigger stars from the printouts I worked with the last time and used those openings as templates for making new stencils out of masking tape. After about ten minutes of working I had six pieces of masking tape with star-shaped holes in the middle of each. These would fit snugly on the surfaces and wouldn't allow such smears as the paper pieces did.

A time for pondering

The current state of my project is this. I guess I should paint the thin white inner lines as well, but I'm just concerned of ruining the whole thing (again). I mean, to me they look fine as they are right now. Those slightly smaller Soviet stars on the tail wings didn't end up as pretty as the big ones on and under the wings and I fear they need a bit of touching up. That's why I took the photo so that they couldn't be seen. Aren't I sneaky?

Follow the red star

Rush'n' attack

My busy week led me to a situation where I just noticed yesterday evening that I hadn't got anything done since my last post. Those red stars... Perhaps the full manual approach I considered wouldn't be the most optimal one after all. Not that I was going to attempt to prepare stencils out of masking tape alone, either. My next option? Printing out a couple of sheets of properly sized red stars, cutting the starshapes out and attaching the new mask in place, maybe even facing correctly. Repeat in two different sizes: big ones to the wings and smaller ones to the tail.
Behold, it was all done already and pretty quickly as well. I did my best to get the stars in mirroring places but as long as we're discussing my hand-eye coordination, they may not be perfectly aligned after all.

Not quite

I almost got to start painting as well, but as my modeling time was already ending I had only managed to dig out my two red paints and was pondering on which one to use. Maybe I'll get them painted red this evening? The white detail lines I'll leave for a tiny bit later.

We'll need to cross our fingers. Otherwise nothing'll ever get done. Again.

Fine-tuning the MiG's paintjob

More missing pieces found their places

On the top side the last missing link was the cockpit. After I had checked that the canopy actually fits somewhere I went and painted the visible top parts on the inside with Vallejo's Cold Grey (iirc). Then I cut a piece of transparent plastic to use as the targeting thingamagick. In a perfect world that piece should be a bit rounder on top and have a couple of things plus a black top edge. I really didn't feel like ruining what I had done so I left it this way, simple. After the targeting glass pane had been cured, I glued the canopy in place with some white glue because I feared that the other types of glue would've either a) made a huge mess or b) fogged up the inside of the canopy, losing the transparency.

Does it even fit?

Aiming thingy

Set for good

Landing gear setup without the wheels

Detailings

Now as things were supposed to be mostly done, I started painting some details. Of course I didn't get all done, but I've time and evenings. The nose got a newly coloured tip, Vallejo's Grey Black for the radar equipment. The surface area was decided by gut feeling and the online reference pics, so that it looked fine in my own eyes at least. At the same time I decided not to paint that black patch between the radard nose and the cockpit's front, because some references had it and some did not - my camo pattern didn't seem to require one.
Those ends of the engine nozzles got a quick layer of Vallejo's Oily Steel both on the top and bottom sides of the plane. Later I'll wash them with Citadel/GW's Devlan Mud. I was pondering and I guess I'll ponder a bit more still, if I should apply a brown wash on top of the whole plane or not... At the time of writing I'm leaning slightly on the "let it be" side of things.

At some point I had set cables on the main landing gear, brake lines or something I guess (oh, enjoy my extensive knowledge about (combat) airplanes) is what they are. Then I fixed the paintjob on the landing gear wells with light gray, as the instructions guided me, but later I applied a wash of C/GW Badab Black to make them look both used and less standing out. A raw, bright gray is a bit awful to look at on a warmachine, I think, re: the previous blue pic above.

The wheels I first filed flat on one end, so that this damn plane would sit nicely on its place-to-be. After that I painted them with the aforementioned gray-black, because, as everyone knows, the traditional 0x0-black is a bit too dark to model any sort of rubber surface.

What else?

An unit number or similar needs to be painted on a side of the air intake, judging by the photos. After that a set of Soviet stars on and under the wings and tail wings at least, freehanded with white and red, as usual. I guess someone's going to scream against it, calling it a ruin of a good model. But that's one opinion. Personally, I'm so much more content if I freehand these things, for I've never really liked the transfers, especially as I don't use any laquers/waxes, they always shine stupidly. Oh, and the kit didn't even offer them, so I couldn't use them even if I wanted to.

Flying camo

The artistic license

According to some comments made to the previous post (the one in Finnish) it was clear that the paint scheme I had pondered wasn't utterly ridiculous. And as we're talking about the Soviets, the old saying "big country, big tolerances" works always. So I decided to (ab)use the infamous artistic license and went with the paints I already had in my storage instead of rushing to my royal provider for even more paints. Taking this approach made everything much, much quicker because I don't even have a clue when I'd have the time to go paint shopping...

Pfffft

After I had masked the cockpit canopy parts I took and airbrushed the whole thing with Dunkelgelb (yes, you read correctly). I paid extra attention to the nose where some of my special blue mix had wandered to. For some reason those odd extra shadows wouldn't really look proper - or fit in my plans.

When the previous layer of paint had dried properly I airbrushed a bunch of "looks fine"-kind of green lines to break the form a bit, especially around the wingtips. As I was working on the tail I remembered to protect the rest of the model from overspill with a piece of plastic (I was this close to shooting the paint when I noticed my very potential mistake).

A prime example

Finally all the pieces were set up well enough for me that I felt it was high time to proceed to the painting station. Before anything else I masked the still open cockpit shut and then covered the whole piece with Vallejo's gray primer. In these photos the model's on my hands so I could show the size/scale to a coworker of mine. And why take practically the same pics twice?

Cerulean blue

My model has no official, real-life counterpart, so the whole paint scheme was going to crawl out of my sick mind. Instead of painting the underbelly of my MiG boringly light (gray), I wanted something different. Therefore I mixed up a batch of Vallejo's Magical Blue mixed with white and gray trusting my gut feeling for the amounts, then I thinned it down some with the same manufacturer's thinner and let go. I do feel it ended up quite neat.

Camo pattern

The other side is going to get something else completely. I believe I'll skip the boring grays again and go for a more down to earth colour scheme. Perhaps it'll end up being tank red and green or even the legendary Dunkelgelb. Everything is still open to discussion, at least until I start paging through my Model Air containers.

A milestone of sorts

A few years of muttering by myself

Oh my... This blog of mine turns three right about now. Of course the time I've used (and will keep using) completely irrelevant, I just happened to notice the event a few days ago. That's why I'm commenting on this occasion in my usual weird way. I guess I should warn already that there may be some ramblign ahead, even more than usually.

The insufferable difficulty of prediction

When I started the whole blog, I said something like this: "Sometimes I get a fuckton of stuff done in a rapid pace and sometimes a fifteen minute task ends up being delayed for six monhts. Based on that, I assume that my posting will follow a similar pattern". Apparently I was partially correct: my projects still advance at an unsteady pace, but the text I've managed to keep churning out at a steady pace and maybe even at a consistent, if low quality.

[ORIGINAL IMAGE MISSING AFTER n+1 YEARS]

As I was preparing myself and my improbable readers (I really didn't expect anyone to actually read anything) for a more or less slow fading away of the blog. In my first post, no less! "Of course you can try to guess if I manage to make more than ten posts". I guess I was keeping true to the "you can't always win, but you can, however, always lose"-approach. At least I wasn't loading too much pressure or expectations that most likely would've killed my excitement at blogging.

The style

My writing style or the lack of it hasn't changed much over the years, I believe. Either it means that I'm already perfect or as retarded as before. Of course it's possible that I've managed to improve on myself over time, but I feel that the text is and has been like myself from the beginning. I'm afraid that I keep overusing the same words and phrases from post to post and title to title and I work to avoid it. I just can't go and crosscheck all the existing content before I hit the publish-button.

The theme

The Blogspot style or layout hasn't really changed at all. Pretty early on I realized that I could actually use the html-headers and mostly I've done so to avoid the problem of a mountain of unformatted plaintext. The theme has been this way and I thought of customizing it a bit, at least to make a proper title image. Being totally incapable of drawing anything by hand or 'puter I just haven't got to it really. Once I tried an idea of merging a blueprint-style picture with a photo of a model of mine, but that didn't go far as my attempt at vectorizing a pic from the Sturmpanzer's instructions got ruined somehow. Maybe I'll get to restart and actually even finish that kind of a project one of these days.
Something like this is what I envisioned, somehow. At least I liked the idea.

"Content"

Avoiding insane walls of text has at least been one of my goals. As well as using at least one pic per post, as Jussi Linkola's reference once said somewheere - if I remember correctly. Even if I haven't had a perfectly fitting image to offer. I haven't always been able to do that for a reason or another, but hey, that's life again.

Scale models

Most of the projects I've documented have, of course, been related to scale models. That's what this heap of weirdness started from: I started writing down my thoughts with "work in progress" photos in here so I maybe wouldn't bother my family members and coworkers with crap they couldn't care less about. Based on the taglist I've apparently completed nine models in three years. It could've been way worse and hey, I've done other things, too.

 

[ Sturmpanzer | FlaK | T-65C | SdkFz | MAD | WHM | Königstiger | Jagdpanther | M-10 ]

Miniatures

Remembering old models aside, in the last five years I've accomplished shamefully little in the miniature front. Besides the BattleTech introbox I haven't had the time to touch my 'Mechs. Many a year ago I ordered a Star of OmniMechs, some 30 Elementals and ended up with a missent BattleMech for my Warrior's targeting practises. The Hellbringer and Summoner variants I had started, at least one of them had the feet dremeled open for better posing and I guess I had basecoated something. I think.

An intro-Omni

Attacking these long-forgotten and long-ignored metal miniatures is the next thing I'll go for. My newest two tank models can wait for a while, I believe. I really can't comprehend how my 'Mech processes ended up starving but I can always claim that my Scheduler was in the interruptible mode... cough.

Games

There hasn't been much about games here, earlier more than lately, I think. With my way of gaming there's absolutely no way I could keep a gaming blog up and alive, but that hasn't been the point, anyway. Playing through a game is a project among others. Most likely I'll keep this sort of posts on the sidelines, as a rarity, like before, depending on what I play and when. Of course that applies to everything else in my hobby blog: depends on how I feel at any given moment.

Other, please specify?

Clearly the most different of my projects is the super-awesome spacegame prototype, or whatever the hell you want to call it. At the same time it's the most irregularly worked on and even more irregularly reported about.

As I've said before, making a game has been an idea for who knows how long and I work on this beast more or less randomly. Sometimes I work a bit on a bunch of consecutive days, sometimes for long runs at a time (especially if there's an interesting problem or just plenty of progress), sometimes I don't even remember its existence for months. I trust I end up writing something about it soonish, depending on how that QuadTree implementation of mine progresses and becomes useful. Maybe.

A lie, a bigger lie, ...

According to the Blogger's stats ProjectMumblings has been red about 5k times, it has 173 posts (10 comments) and one official follower. It's absolutely shocking! Mostly I'm wondering where the hell did all these pageviews come from to a silly blog that I've never advertised or even mentioned much anywhere...

There you see, generally there's an upgoing red trend (from the beginning) but lately it's diving pretty steeply, as the blue line shows. Where does that traffic come from, anyway? I haven't the foggiest, except that some visits are from different image searches, as the Traffic Sources list claims. Strangeness.

Hangings aka Pylons II

Picturelessness

As the entertainment factor of "filing just a bit more there" and other methods of playing time approached zero without any limits, I raised my poor hands and glued my custom-made pylons on the wings. As everyone and their neighbours already know, I'm far from being a perfectionist and again we see it: It's "good enough for me", especially as I've never seen an example in the nature. Besides, what does a tracked retard like me know about these magnificent flying machines? ;)
To make the whole plane look a bit more uniform I brushed these new pieces with Vallejo's gray primer. Had I left them white and stained with marker lines, they'd haunted me day and night, so maybe this gives me some sort of peace of mind. Next up: priming the whole plane, in a couple of runs.

Wiring

I've kept working on the pylons I advertised - and kept in the dark - the last time. Mostly I've filed off excess waves and tried to achieve some sort of proper shape to them. Still, I don't dare to display them, maybe later when I've attached them to the wings and they've been at least basecoated. Or, more likely, when the ground attack equipment is also attached...

Wired madness

While googling for a variety of reference pictures I stumbled upon a photo of the front landing gear and a couple of cables snaking around the bottom. I guess they're some sort of brake lines or something, the hell if I know, but the main thing is that it seemed like a quick and simple detail. So I cut out a couple of short pieces of tiny metal wire (I've been told it's meant to be used for flowers) and glued them to a place where no one will ever really get to see them, thanks to the wheels.

As I was already fooling around with the wires I decided to set up the electric cabling for the main landing gear lights. To cover the shiny ends I cut small pieces of Tamiya's masking tape for protection and used white glue to attach the lamps to the hatches. Maybe using white glue was actually pointless for these pieces as the potential foggying up wouldn't be a real problem, anyway, but... when a thought is set, there's no way around it.
Somehow I expec that my masking will end up being a stupid failure and that the lamps will only end up a huge disappointment within a couple of project steps.

After taking these work-in-progress photos I glued the AA missile launch rails to the innermost points. For some reason I had decided that the order of weapons should be missiles first, then the single-serving heavy rockets and the rocket pods last. Why did I decide to do things this way? To provide maximum coverage for the heavily sown rockets, of course. Someone smarter can now feel free to correct me and point out my potential stupidities, but this is where my Mig is heading, despite the audience's pleas ;)

Hangings

Errrrr

As I'm really not familiar with any of the (semi)modern air warfare vocabulary, googling took me a moment. No matter, as I had accidentally built some launch rails instead of pylons, I ended up staring this pic from an Eduard AM set:

So, those topmost dark gray pieces seemed like the pieces I think I saw in photos of real (and model) planes. Once again I sliced off a handful of pieces of plastic at a decent looking scale, then I mengelefied those so they'd maybe remind someone of these pieces. In no way I dare to show any photos here, at least not yet . We'll see later if they end up looking better with a bit more cutting, slicing and filing or if I just end up hiding them in their proper real life places between the wings and their rocket pods.

[14.8.2013] edit: The proper names of those pieces are, as I was educated later on, launch rails and pylons respectively. Now the names are proprely edited into the text. Sorry!