This week the Omnissiah has been with me and thing has gotten taken care of. I have finally broken through some of the blocks I have had on the build of the Opus Magna and its flight wing. Already in my last post I showed that I solved the problem of the folding wings for the fighter. I have now added the tail section, using the tail plane with the angel from the Nephilim kit and the stabilators from the storm talon. I think it worked out fine. I also started on the intake cowlings. They are not completely done yet as I need to add the lower part. But as they are curving in beneath the intake I needed to get the top part fitted before doing this. Once that is done I will build the nose. In my first take I made it as long as dimensions (max length to fit in the elevators) allow but I think that in the end I will cut it back a bit to match the intakes.
This weeks main build has however been what will be the fighter bomber. I have had the main shell built (storm talon/hawk with Nephilim tail) for some time but had not really sorted the location of the engines. I wanted to leave the wings as free as possible to be able to mount as much ordinance as possible without it colliding with the engine pods. This meant that neither the talon nor the hawk mountings were feasible (this would also make them to wide for the elevator). The storm talon is however a great kit as it contains an extra sprue to build the storm hawk. This leaves a great deal of extra parts to play around with. First I built the storm hawk engine pods and tried them out in a variety of positions but could not find any that looked good, so I left it for some time. Instead I built the wings, based on the storm hawk wings with the cowling cut of. I used the Nephilim stabilisers as wing tips and added a mid section that also incorporated the hinges for the wing folding. I also fixed the tail section up with the Nephilim tail plane and the storm talon wings as stabilisers. I was really happy with the profile. The I vent back to the problem of the engines. In the storm hawk build there are some small engines that can be mounted beneath the model that sort of looks ok, but they are a bit small and the intakes are not well defined on the model. i guess that is the two side grills on the front. So in the end I decided to bite the bullet and make room for the larger engine pods in the same position, i.e. tucked in under the main body. This really was a point of no return moment as there is no coming back after cutting most of the underside away.
Once I had made room for the engines I realised that they are to long and I cant bring them enough forward to compensate. So in the end I had to cut the pods down with about 8 mm, which made them just the right length. It also gave me some pieces that I can use for the intake cowlings. All in all I am stoked about how it turned out. Now I just need to finalize some of the details.
As I am building four of each of these aircraft I can not build them all at the same time in case I do something very stupid. So I am actually building one prototype of each model first, that I call a pre production model (will probably have some markings once painted to represent this). Once I am happy with the modifications I go back and do the same modifications to the reimaging three models bringing them up to the same point. Then I go back to the preproduction again and keep adding things until I think they are ready.
I am really happy with how the flight deck is starting to fill up. Once these are done I have another four storm talons to build and a Valkyrie. With all of them on deck at the same time is will be full.
