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The Cabin construction…
There is a choice of control panel that seems to be between the ‘L’ version and the ‘DAP’ special ops. version with more CRT’s. Once again there seems to be a little ambiguity in the instructions about which should go where, but as ever the internet ‘walk around’ shots give plenty of detail such as this. I used Tamiya ‘clear’ blue and green paints flooded into the CRT’s to give the correct look, and the ever-useful cocktail stick for the knobs and switches.
It was time, I decided, to do justice to the figures. The pilot and co-pilot fitted together with no issues, other than the fact that I had decided how I wanted to display the aircraft at this point. It was I decided, going to be hovering a few metres above the desert, and there was going to be a ‘threat’ coming from the port front quarter. This translated into the co-pilot pointing to the left, and the laser designator also pointing in that direction, more of that later.
I found a left ’pointy’ arm, modified the hand so it resembled a flight glove, and after adding microphone cables, fitted the figures to the seats…but they sat too tall, so I had to take quite a bit of buttock off to make them sit realistically. They looked a lot more comfortable with the weight loss, and after painting gave the effect that I had been after.
The door gunner was a problem, as I wanted him to have his visor in the down position, looking purposeful. As the head had the visor up I fashioned a visor from extremely thin plasticard, stuck it in, dry-fitted the earlier mini-gun in position and fitted the whole together in a pose that looked good. After painting, I couldn’t wait to get the whole cabin together to see how it looked with figures!
The canopy glazing, although nicely detailed on the outside is completely smooth on the inside. Now on a fast jet canopy you can just about get away with the lack of internal framing, but this sort of size of glass area, the lack of that framing show massively. There is no anchor point for the cables and tubes that run up from the cockpit to the roof, and something needed to be added.
