It's very relaxing
Ok - no huge great shakes on the building front.
I decided to get some pieces built and, as is normal with me, I started with the weapons as they have to be made and painted prior to being put on the machine anyway - so if I make them first, I can prime them with the rest of the aircraft
So I got the missiles made that this bad boy carries - and she carries plenty.
First off, there were no letters on the sprues to identify the sprues - which seemed odd as the instructions had a sprue letter-number combo. Thankfully, at the beginning of the instructions, there's a graphic that shows the sprue letters...so I stuck a piece of paper on the sprue to easily identify it
Next, the
R27 ETFrom WikiAA-10 Alamo-D, the infrared-homing extended-range version, Weight 348 kg. Missile can be used at 20 to 27000 meters altitude. Effective kill range: 2 to 52.5 km head-on, 0.7 to 12.5 tail-on. Maximum range: 104 km. Maximum allowed vertical separation: 12 kmAll the missiles had tags from cutting from the sprues...
...so they needed a bit of TLC (sanding with an UMP Fine sanding stick)
Then it was the turn of the
R27 ERFrom WikiAA-10 Alamo-C, the semi-active-radar homing extended-range version. Missile can be used at 20 to 27000 meters altitude. Effective kill range for a target at same altitude: 2 to 65.5 km head-on, 0.7 to 16.5 km tail-on. Missile cannot be fired at altitude less than 3 km against a target with background earth, if launch range is less than 6 kilometers. Maximum range: 117 km. Maximum allowed vertical separation: 12 kmAnd the
R77From WikiThe Vympel NPO R-77 missile (NATO reporting name: AA-12 Adder) is a Russian medium range, active radar homing air-to-air missile system. It is also known by its export model designation RVV-AE. It is the Russian counterpart to the American AIM-120 AMRAAM missileThese had a nasty sprue piece holding them - between the "propeller" section
And when cut off the sprue, I had to deal with this
And finally the
Kh-31From WikiThe Kh-31 (Russian: Х-31; AS-17 'Krypton') is a Russian air-to-surface missile carried by aircraft such as the MiG-29 or Su-27. It is capable of Mach 3.5 and was the first supersonic anti-ship missile that could be launched by tactical aircraft. There are several variants, it is best known as an anti-radiation missile (ARM) but there are also anti-shipping and target drone versions. There has been talk of adapting it to make an "AWACS killer", a long-range air-to-air missile[/]