Grey Ghost 531

Have you tried contacting the museum? Vermont National Guard Library and Museum

Is "perfect" a critique?

Might be tiedown chains getting ready to chock and chain a jet that's on its way.

I chuck a sewing machine needle into a pin vise. Sewing machine needles are stiffer and harder than regular hand sewing needles since they're made to poke holes in fabric a billion times. (or so)

I saw the title and thought I was going to have to report the post as "political"...

Airbrush main colors, mask and airbrush consoles, detail with a tiny brush, chip and fine detail with Prismacolor pencils and wash with artist's oil paint thinned with Turpinoid. I use the pencils to chip by sharpening the tip up fine and then using a pecking technique make lots of tiny dots that merge together into convincing chipped areas. I use silver for bare metal and a color called "Willow Green" to mimic zinc chromate showing through the topcoat. The color is kind of between yellow and green zinc chromate and after a wash can pass for either. I also use it on the exterior to show wear

Nice job. What kits did you use?

He's got it correct. The turrets fold down over the ammo bays, there's enough room for them even though it doesn't look like it in his photo. I just looked at the picture in "Magnesium Overcast" to confirm.

I got one from Roll Models a couple of months ago.

Huh. That actually sounds like a good idea to me. I'm sure most of the fighter pilots will be pleased to not have to drive tankers around in a circle. The stabilization available to an autonomous tanker should make plugging in easier and the lack of a pilot, seat, control interfaces, support equipment, etc. should increase the gas load relative to take off weight.

I was a weapons loader in the VT ANG on F-16As, I think we had the ADFs by then. We were tasked with east coast air defense and standing alert at the time and the full-timers with F-15Cs had that niche sewn up over in the sand box so we didn't have/get to go. I retired before GW II.

They don't give that away! You have to pay for it.

I saw a label on the back of some equipment that said "decomposition prohibition". I think they meant "do not remove"...maybe.

The dust effect of your weathering is nice. Over all color looks a little too brown to me but if you wanted it that way it's fine. One thing I do on armor is try to differentiate accessories by painting them a different shade or color, like the bucket on the left rear and the gas can on the right front. I'd paint them a different color or tint of the base color and also paint the straps a still different color. A dark pin wash around the wheel's detail and the hitch and other likely spots would make it look more complex and less uniform. Over all, a good job on a soft detail kit. I have it in

and the odds against a winning number are still 1 in 300,000,000.

I had some luck with the stiff variety of Academy decals by mixing Solvaset with Future. A lot of work, but I wanted to use the VTANG decals in the F-16 kit. If that wasn't the issue, I'd have trashed them.

Just out of curiosity, did you ever play Sid Meyer's game "Civilization"?

I was there with the maintenance detachment three times. We brought two jets, two crews, about 20 maintenance types with one officer, one S-4 guy (supply) and a few ops guys. I was at El Toro and Top Gun was still at Mirimar so if we needed anything else it was only 90 miles north.

Probably to impinge on as many potentially adversarial air defense nets as possible. Just like everyone has done always.

They should have spun it. A little icing, make the radome a pointy elf hat, the intake edges pointy elf ears, the stabilators little elf boots, fill in some details: there you have it, politically correct elf cookies!

Okay. You're right, but it still sounds wrong to me, I'll go back to my cave now. And to mitigate the thread-jacking: I saw something posted on FB about Russia dropping what the article described as "mini-nukes". The video showed what looked like an FAE explosion. That's some pretty good precision guided munitions right there.

MCAS El Toro was actually a pretty crappy base: poor chow hall, crummy barracks, horrible E-club until the new one opened in '79 ( I think they sprung for a half-decent club because the rules were you could drink on base at 18 while in town it was 21) Gym was crappy, too. But...no one cared. It was in the middle of Orange County, CA and no one stayed on base unless they had to. Newport Beach and Huntington Beach were less than 20 miles away.

Joyless Grammar Nazi here: saying something has "quality" means nothing. You have to quantify and qualify "quality" before it means something. Something can have good "qualities" or bad "qualities". It's like saying outside has "temperature" or your car has "color", you don't really know anything yet. Whenever I see the teacher's union spouting "we need more pay so the kids can get a 'quality education'", I think, yeah, right. Why don't you get yourself a HIGH quality education first.

You're holding your airbrush much the same way that Brett Green does over on Hyperscale, except he has his index finger under the airbrush too. And, you can't argue with the way Brett does it with all the books he has on building models!

Ask the customer and suggest "none" and a price break on the reduced amount of your time and effort. It would be a shame to spend the time for it all to be invisible until the model fell from the ceiling and broke open like a piñata!