As part of the Opus airwing I wanted to have a dedicated air superiority fighter or interceptor. I based the design of this aircraft on the Dark angels Nephilim fighter. I have previously shown this process including the tail swap I used to get the tail shorter. However, I were not happy with how things looked. Originally I wanted something that looked like the thunderbolt or lightning as they look a bit like WWII fighters with a long bonnet and the cockpit towards the rear. This design has also been used in other Scifi settings such as the viper from Battelstar Galactica, the X-wing from starwars etc.
However, the Nephilim has the cockpit quite far forward with a rather long body behind the canopy and a long tail. Initially I thought that I would just angel the wings a bit upwards, swap the tail to so a shorter one add a longer nose and it would look like I wanted... but I nerver rally managed to get the proportions right and it never really looked like the fighter I imagined. So I stalled the build for some time until I finally decided to bite the bullet and move the cockpit. This was something that I dreaded as it would involve a lot of cutting to the main body and once that was done there was no going back.
So I started out with the prototype as usual with the understanding that I might need to get a new Nephilim and restart the process if it did not work out. But I was lucky. I managed to cut the cockpit away from the engine cowlings without destroying any of the details on the connecting pieces. I then moved the cockpit backwards about 15 mm and cut away the same amount on the body behind the canopy. This made the cockpit look smaller and much further back than before (even if it is not that much further aft).
There was still a problem to figure out how to make a bonnet. The lines around the cockpit and the rest of the body sort of tapers towards a point. Adding a long square nose did not lock better in this design than before all the cutting and I was a bit disappointed. Then as I was playing around with the roof scoop that I no longer could use du to the shortened body I accidentally put it in front of the canopy, but reversed with the intake pointing backwards, and it all fell into place. From there on it was not that hard to figure out the rest with the front and side panelling. This new, longer nose also allowed me to mount the avenger gatling and add some visible barrels under neath. I also added some larger las-cannons to the sides of the nose than what is provided with the Nephilim kit, but I am sure the originals can also be used if I need to re-do this more times.
I also added the three arched skull things from the kit to the sides of the nose to make it look like the exhaust ports found on WWII fighters. Not that a jet would need that but I thought it looked nice.
Once I got far enough with the prototype I re did all the steps on the remaining three craft making sure they are all looked more or less the same. Then I added some more details to the craft like the antenna, moving some air scoops etc.
I will leave the models as they are for now, just to make sure I am happy before gluing everything into place. I will also have to figure our how to do the landing gear...