Val Ground Attack Aircraft

The premise is a group attack aircraft used by the Val Forces. There's a lot of attack helicopter influence in this thing. I used Pegasus' T2 Aerial Hunter Killer kit in 1/32 scale. It's seen in Terminator during the flashback battle scene. Anyway, the idea of the build is to use the HK as the base for a Val ground attack aircraft. The idea is to give it a cockpit for a pilot and slap some guns and missiles on it.

The Pegasus kit is surprisingly well detailed. The pieces are rather sturdy and can almost be snap-together. The instructions can be vague at times. Overall, it goes together quite nice. It comes with a display stand to pose it in flight. This won't be used but the pose actually bites me later on....but more on that later.

So let's get started.

To be honest, I took a bit of a gamble on this kit in it being big enough to hold a cockpit. I got lucky and it even as a recessed area that is perfect for the cockpit opening. If you look at the scene with the AHK, you can see what looks to be an opening for a cockpit. Anyway, the recessed section will work well as a guide to cut an opening.

I worked out the basic cockpit tub placement. Here is where a problem reared its head. You see those open places on the fuselage sides? I needed to go ahead and get the fuselage assembled so I could setup the cockpit, especially the sidewalls.

So while I pondered that, I went ahead and assembled the engine units. Nothing difficult here.

I then went ahead and assembled the tail assembly, under-belly gun, and grappling arms/landing gear legs. The tail was easy. The gun was basic and was really loose. The big problem was with the arms/legs. The kit is designed to be posed in flight. It has four grappling arms/legs for landing gear. Pegasus molded these folded...for the whole in-flight thing. I expected they would be positionable...but they weren't so I had to rethink some stuff, including the underbelly gun. The gun assembly hangs really low. If I build it on the tarmac the landing gear will need to be really high. More pondering ensued.

Not to get behind, I went back and started assembling the fuselage side. The instructions can be a bit vague but everythign went together.

I was able to start working in the cockpit tub. The rear panel came from the spares. It was from an old Monogram P-61 Black Widow that I had in my aircraft spares box. It was perfect...well close enough.

So with that moving ahead pretty smoothly I turned back to the arm/leg assemblies. My plan was to do something like this but this seemed over-engineered for landing gear and it limited the space underneath the aircraft.

So I started thinking...why over-complicate it. I decided to go with a simple landing gear assembly based on real world helicopters. I tried a set of skids, but ended up going with a wheeled assembly like on an Apache. It was a stronger setup and works with a recess nook on each side of the fuselage. See paintbrush added scribblings.
You can also see an early canopy design.

Back to the cockpit. I used a seated German figure as a stand-in, mainly to make sure the seat height was good. The original idea was to have the cockpit opening wide, with the yellow marked area as part of the opened canopy. I duped that idea because the cut would be too wide. The fuselage top is wider than the lower fuselage so there's a problem there...you can see it in the picture.

I started rethinking the canopy. Those pieces are from the aircraft spares. The rear glass is actually a front piece and vice versa. The idea was to make the smaller rear section slide back. I decided to just make it raise and lower. That way it self-explains this thing closes in flight. I did cut off about 1.5cm from the long canopy piece.

Time for the landing gear. The wheels are from the spares. The main gear arms are curves sprue. The support arms are extras from the StuG spares box. By the way, the circular deals are the mounts for the leg/arm deals. I was thinking about trying to use them for the weapons mounts.

The stance is about what I wanted. The rear support...I was going with a tail-dragger design but I liked how it looked sitting level. This would become more of an issue as the tail design changed.

So time to start on the weapons. I dug out some stuff from the spares boxes. The guns are 1/35 2cm flak. Four of the rocket pods are 1/35. The two are 1/48. I had two 1/72 Mavericks. I also had some 1/48 and 1/72 Hellfires, but they aren't shown...which is only mentioned because I used them. The four pointy missiles are Soviet and maybe 1/72. I think they came as options in a Mig29. The AHK's belly gun. The rest are from Hasagawa's 1/48 Aircraft Weapons Sets. I think they are practice weaponry but it doesn't matter because I didn't use any of them.
So the trick is to take this and work out a reasonable weapons loadout that looks like it should be on the AHK.

Back at work on the cockpit. There was a good bit of trial and error on this bit. I deleted most of the WIP pics I didn't use. The general idea was to add detail to the side walls. Most of this came from the spares. I'd actually change some of this later by adding out different controls.

With the cockpit coming along, I decided to nail down some of the weaponry. I went the attack chopper path and went with a nose gun...or guns. The AHK kit has a pair of spotlights on the nose. I used these as mounts and scratched up part of a gun assembly to fit them to them. And yes those are British helmets...from an Airfix figure set at that.

At this point I had tried a few weapons mounts and hadn't liked them. I had given up on them and was going to settle for the thing just being armed with the dual nose guns.
So I decided to go ahead and paint. I went with a pretty simple scheme of gray underside to green top. I was going to mottle it with black or a darker gren but decided to keep it a two-color scheme.

Drybrushed the exterior and did some painting to the cockpit. You can see the new controls in this shot. Funny thing is you won't see much of this with the fuselage all assembled.

I scratched up a base for the rear canopy section...frame and lift mechanism. I should have edged the bottom of the front...might do that at some point. The four arm/leg mounts were left on. The two front ones were capped using some round things I had in the spares. The rear ones were turned into thrust vectoring things for control.
For the rear landing gear part, I used the underbelly gun support arm. I cut the gun and used a pair of return rollers for wheels. Scratched a mount and attached them to the arm.

At this point, I considered the build done. All I needed was some markings, so I took a few days off to let it simmer. As is, it really needed some more firepower than just the pair of guns. So I decided to give the external weapons another go. I ended up making small winglets and went with smaller scale weapons to not overcrowd the area between the fuselage and engines. I played with a few wing shapes ad settled on this one.
I used the Hellfires for their size. And I used a pair of weapons mounts from the Hasagawa set to mount them. The rocket pods were originally mount on the bottom of the mounts but really hung too low. They were touching the ground. So they were moved up to the tip of the winglet.

I mounted the winglets and dug up some decals. They all come from one of the old Tamiya Modern Decal Sheets. I kept them simple. The circle thingys...I don't know what they were intended for. I lost the call out sheet for that decal set along tme ago. The markings on the engines were modified Korean script.

And there she is....ready to unleash heck upon Soviet forces. Hope you enjoyed the chaos of this fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants build.