Pleased to finally finish another model I've had kicking around for years.
This model came in pretty good condition: There was some minor warping which I was mostly able to fix. Very straightforward to build and paint.
Loaded for bear:
I hope that's not a broomstick painted black:
Death from above:
I know some people choose to build their attack aircraft without scary shark mouths on them. Those people are wrong.
I 3D printed up some racks of flares to put behind the landing strut. I don't know if this aircraft, or any other aircraft in
40k for that matter, can have flares or chaff but it seems like a ground attack bird like this would have them.
the base:
The weapon mounts are magnetized because, jfc, why wouldn't they be
SMILE, YOU SON OF A
The available weapons:
OK, time to start talking about the guns.
About a week ago, I just about had this thing in the can, and was googling pictures of it to show to my coworker. Lo and behold, I see one with autocannons.
I don't think this could take autocannons when I bought it, or maybe I just didn't know that. I would definitely have done autocannons since thematically, this is a gunship, not a missile boat, and I'd always rather have more bang. \
I went onto ebay. I found some autocannons from the heavy weapons bros. I bought them.
About 3 days ago, I was looking at the autocannons and trying to figure out how to mount them to fit my now-almost-finished Avenger. I realized I would have to model and print some of the little strut things the guns hang off of. I googled Forge World autocannons, and it turns out they make some aircraft autocannons... or rather, they did. They are out of print and there were none on ebay.
After looking at them some more I decided to try and model some in Rhino3D.
Turned out it was quite simple to model them; it took about an hour.
The print came out pretty not great. There were 2 problems: first, the barrels were kind of weedy. They looked to be scaled correctly in Rhino, but in the real world, they looked fimsy.
The bigger problem was I oriented them poorly. I did them at a 30 degree angle and had supports running the length of the barrel. Combined with the weediness of the barrels, that led to an unpleasant "hump" at the base of every support, making the top of the barrels look bumpy.
Well, no big deal. I scaled up the barrels and the drum:
and reoriented them in the slicer:
I was much more satisfied with this print, although it wasn't perfect. I had rivets along the backside of the drum that had all floated off, due to this orientation they became unsupported islands when their layers came up. I could live with that, though.
Here are the first prints on top, and the beefier v2 models below:
I think the barrels might have been a hair too long, but I am happy with them as is.
Meanwhile, the autocannons I bought off ebay just arrived in the mail. I am dumb as all hell sometimes.
Finally, here are the pilots before I glued the canopy on:
The paintjob on the pilots is also pretty not great, because A.) I'm a mediocre painter and B.) I didn't try very hard as the cockpit was fogged up and I was sure you would barely be able to see them, anyway. Turns out after painting the inside and outside glass of the cockpit with some Future floor polish, the cockpit became substantially cleaned up. Ah well, I had committed to "good enough" at that point.
The decals are from a 1/48 F16 belonging the local Illinois/Iowa ANG. I probably should have gotten some with a slightly higher contrast, but I liked the idea of using my local ANG's stuff.
I'd like to mention that from some angles, it looks like the decals have silvered over in spots. That was a failure of photography, not decal technique: I scuffed the edges of the decals to show wear. They look correct in person but in pictures, it looks like bad decal application.
Except for the kill hash marks on the front left cockpit, that one totally was a failure of decal technique and it did in fact silver up.
All in all it was a blast to build, and not so bad to paint since almost all of it was airbrushed. I don't think I have the patience or inclination to paint little dudes anymore, but it's OK because I have a ton of vehicles in my giant pile of shame.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oops, almost forgot. I also printed some iconography. I got the models for these off of Thingiverse.
Apparently the pilot and gunner exhibit a certain moral flexibility in terms of who they fight for. In theory, I can stick one of these on the hull to switch between factions if I ever play this on the tabletop. In practice I am so unlikely to do that I probably won't even fix the little bit of curling two of these prints display at the edges.
. Only suggestion is the yellow looks a little flat and then over-sprayed the middle, if know what I mean (probably the photos, in real life prob totally different).
