Okay, for this GB I shall be adding to my FAA-goes-American timeline with a Hasegawa 1/72nd Grumman F11-F1 Tiger painted up as a Grumman-Hawker-Siddeley Tiger FGA.1 of the Fleet Air Arm.
Physical changes will be minor:
2 x 30mm ADENs instead of the 4 x 20mm Colts
Possible modified wing fold
Possible bigger drop tanks (Lightning/Starfighter)
Rescribed nose to make a bigger radome
Sounds good. Don't see many Tigers on here !
Didn't realsie the kit was that old. Built one as an Aeronvale aircraft a few years ago and it was an enjoyable build :thumbsup:
Looking forward to this
Quote from: NARSES2 on September 28, 2016, 07:01:42 AM
Didn't realsie the kit was that old. Built one as an Aeronvale aircraft a few years ago and it was an enjoyable build :thumbsup:
Looking forward to this
Yep, 1981 according to Scalemates: https://www.scalemates.com/kits/331197-hasegawa-d017-grumman-f11f-1-tiger Must admit, I thought it was older actually. It's that 1983 boxing too: grey plastic not bloody blue!
Yeah, nice selection, a Tiger was my first completed whiff. I personally think it's one of the best looking fighters to have flown. I've got one in the stash, i might get around to a Super Tiger conversion some day (lightbulb moment, off to Colin's suggestions page again).
I wonder if there'd been British Tiger, they'd have been better performers due to knowledge of the sapphire and it's afterburner?
Quote from: Mossie on September 28, 2016, 01:35:59 PM
Yeah, nice selection, a Tiger was my first completed whiff. I personally think it's one of the best looking fighters to have flown. I've got one in the stash, i might get around to a Super Tiger conversion some day (lightbulb moment, off to Colin's suggestions page again).
I wonder if there'd been British Tiger, they'd have been better performers due to knowledge of the sapphire and it's afterburner?
Well my background story has the Brit ones Avon-engined so there's plently of scope there for more power. According to it's Wiki page. an Avon-engined Super-Tiger was offered to Germany, but there's no mention of it in the Ginter book, which otherwise talks a lot about export efforts. It's written by Grumman test pilot 'Corky' Meyer and you get the impression from his 'excessive politeness' about Lockheed that this and several other failed attempts are still a sore point... ;D
Good box art.
Quote from: Mossie on September 28, 2016, 01:35:59 PM
I personally think it's one of the best looking fighters to have flown. I
Definitely one of the nicest looking jet fighters for sure
It's a damned shame it got hobbled by the engine problems. The J-79-engined Super-Tiger was excellent. According to Meyer, it initially won the evaluations for Germany, Canada, Switzerland and Japan.
It lost out to the Starfighter in Germany and Japan due to politics and Lockheed's chicanery.
It lost to the Mirage in Switzerland due to different politics and chicanery (fun fact: the Swiss defence minister's brother was a manager at Dassault...)
It lost to the Starfighter in Canada because Lockheed offered local production deals and offsets that would employ more redundant Canadian aerospace workers sooner that Grumman's longer-term proposals.
I do find it funny in an ironic way that he offered it to the UK on the very day the 1957 white paper was announced!
Obligatory parts layout shot:
(https://www.minds.com/archive/thumbnail/629135013870313491/xlarge)
What a great looking aircraft the Tiger is. :thumbsup:
I've never bought or built one, shame on me.
Not had a chance to do any work on this today, but I have found a few thought-provoking things.
Firstly, the height to the top of the fin was only 13' 2.75" and since the only wing fold was downward folding tips, that means it would have fitted into the problematic 14' hangars on a number of British carriers. My backstory's already written and doesn't take advantage of that, but it's there for somebody else. Regrettably, it doesn't work for the Skyhawk, which was 15' tall (although you might be able to do things about that).
Secondly, I've been thinking about the wing fold. The standard Tiger had downward folding wingtips that reduced it's span from 31' 7.5" to 27'4". By comparison, the famously non-folding Skyhawk spanned 26'6". This is a nice, simple solution since the folding tips don't include any fuel or control surfaces. On a big USN carrier being 10 inches wider than a Skyhawk is hardly a problem, but on small RN carriers, the Skyhawk would already be non-ideal and the Tiger would compound the problem.
Since the Tiger's undercarriage is fuselage-mounted, it's very tempting to move the fold point further inboard, however this creates some significant redesign issues. The Tiger's thin wing is notably simple, with a full span integral fuel tank, and full span, one piece slats, flaps and spoilers, all activated by jacks near the wingroot operating through mechanical linkages. An inboard fold is therefore going to involve:
1. Splitting the control surfaces, with all the extra aerodynamic testing & development that implies,
2. Carrying a fuel pipe across the fold or losing the outboard tankage (60 to 100 gals),
3. Carrying the mechanical linkages across the fold or fitting secondary jacks outboard and carrying hydraulics across the fold.
I'm not sure whether getting the span down to around 18' is worth all that redesign, but then again, it means you get, roughly speaking, four aircraft in the space formerly occupied by three.
What do you think?
Don't worry about the height most British Carrier hangers were 17'6 to accommodate the likes of the Walrus and later Sea Otter amphibians used in the COD role. Only the Indomitable and the Implacable/Indefatigable of the later Illustrious class had the low hangers as they had double stacked hangers which is why despite being the newer carriers, they served in the non flying training roles.
The width issue is mostly due to the Aircraft lifts, the ones on Illustrious being designed around types that swept back their wings. They enlarged it on Illustrious post war for her trials carrier role to allow the newer types to be tested.
The Light Fleet Carriers of the Colossus, Majestic and Centaur classes should all be OK for Tiger use, and the Fleet Carriers of the Audacious class and the modernised Victorious would be OK too. New designs like the Malta and CV52 were also OK as they were designed in mind with the larger heavier US types.
Quote from: Thorvic on October 03, 2016, 02:06:19 AM
Don't worry about the height most British Carrier hangers were 17'6 to accommodate the likes of the Walrus and later Sea Otter amphibians used in the COD role. Only the Indomitable and the Implacable/Indefatigable of the later Illustrious class had the low hangers as they had double stacked hangers which is why despite being the newer carriers, they served in the non flying training roles.
I've only got them operating from Centaurs in my backstory. I just mentioned the height in case anybody else wanted to use them in a different backstory. You could get quite a lot of them onto an Inflexible!
Quote
The width issue is mostly due to the Aircraft lifts, the ones on Illustrious being designed around types that swept back their wings. They enlarged it on Illustrious post war for her trials carrier role to allow the newer types to be tested.
The lifts on the Centaurs will fit them fine. I was more concerned about the total number of aircraft that could be carried, since those carriers were pretty small. If you line Tigers up side-by-side, then reducing the folded width from 27'4" to 18" gets you 33% more aircraft. On the other hand, that's a very simplistic view of deck/hanger spotting.
Done a bit of undercoating, minor assembly and modifying. Scribed a new radome line further back and filled in the old one, and carved off and filled in the upper gun muzzle fairings 'cos this one's supposed to have two ADENs.
The AIM-9B Sidewinders in the kit are rubbish: noticably short and underspan (the latter not even in proportion with themselves) and no launch rails, even though the box art shows them. Ironically, the earlier F-9 Cougar kit has much better (but still not perfect) Sidewinders and has launch rails moulded into the pylons. Unfotunately I can't nick the pylons because they're a different and distinctive shape.
Why do manufacturers do this? It's as if they go to imense effort to get the sexy aeroplane bits right but then dash off the nasty killing-people bits as quickly as possible because they can't bear to look at them for long.... :banghead:
More modern kits have better 'winders in them, but the trouble is that most of the ones I've got are of later aircraft with later, and visually different, models of AIM-9. Think I've already robbed most of the decent AIM-9Bs (round nosed) I can find in the stash....
How about the earlier, WWII type 'Grumman Fold' as used with the Hellcat and Avenger so that the wing twists and folds flat alongside the fuselage?
The wing tank connections could be self sealing. Believe me, I'm a hydraulics engineer.... ;)
Quote from: PR19_Kit on October 04, 2016, 09:12:37 AM
How about the earlier, WWII type 'Grumman Fold' as used with the Hellcat and Avenger so that the wing twists and folds flat alongside the fuselage?
The wing tank connections could be self sealing. Believe me, I'm a hydraulics engineer.... ;)
Hmmm, it's a swept wing and there isn't a ton of ground clearance. That means the leading edge will have to go down, which means the 'twist' pivot would have to be quite far forward. The 'fold-back' pivot is then going to have to be at an angle to avoid the wingtip being too high. That's quite a complicated pivot that has to take most of the structural loads but still fit into a very thin wing. The advantage of a simple fold is that it can be a 'piano hinge' with a simple joint on all five spars.
The loss of fuel in the outer wing isn't such a big deal actually. I'm replacing the 4 x 20mm guns with 2 x 30mm ones, and done right, that creates a bit more space for an extra fuselage tank(s) that would get most of it back.
There is a way I can have my cake and eat it. I can say that in the initial version, the RN took the view that since a folded standard Tiger was only a shade wider than a Skyhawk, it wasn't worth the effort of redesigning the wing, particularly since it was nice and simple and seemed to work well aerodynamically. However later, under pressure to sail bigger and bigger air groups on the small carriers, they introduced an updated version with an inboard wing fold because they were desperate for space. Whiff backstories don't have to improve on reality: they only have to make interestingly different mistakes.... ;)
What about going with Red Tops or even Blue Dolphin if its got radar
Quote from: Thorvic on October 04, 2016, 10:42:43 AM
What about going with Red Tops or even Blue Dolphin if its got radar
Doesn't really go with the 'buy American for the Navy' theme though does it? Also, Scimitars had Sidewinders.
Havn't got any Blue Dolphins and my understanding is that the AI.23 radar (which it's supposed to have) couldn't illuminate for a SARH missile without a lot of modification.
I want to add an extra pylon to each wing inboard of the existing ones. There's space for it and some Super-Tiger drawings show six pylons. Loadout will be four Sidewinders and two tanks, with the tanks on the middle pylon. I don't know why the Tiger didn't have inboard pylons as standard (there's room, even accounting for the u/c door). My best guess is that it may have been related to jettison clearance for the tanks vis-a-vis the low-set tailplanes: the real-life wet pylons are just outboard of the tailplane tips.
To be honest it was the time period, AAMs were the new big thing, so missile loads were minimal, plus load capacity was somewhat limited for the earlier generation aircraft, more weapons came with more power and less aircraft replacing the previous generation so would have to deliver more bang for the buck.
You could go with Sparrow of course, that's what the Navy wanted a day/night fighter with radar and radar guided missiles as tail chase winders are not great when flying CAP to protect your ships.
Didn't Super Tiger have the over fuselage pylons for winders ? (can't see those being popular with pilots having a missile fire behind the back of your head !!)
Quote from: Thorvic on October 04, 2016, 02:29:10 PM
To be honest it was the time period, AAMs were the new big thing, so missile loads were minimal, plus load capacity was somewhat limited for the earlier generation aircraft, more weapons came with more power and less aircraft replacing the previous generation so would have to deliver more bang for the buck.
Well the preceding Cougar could carry four Sidewinders plus two tanks, so I can't see them settling for any less than that. The Skyray could also carry four Sidewinders, and the Cutlass and Demon could carry four Sparrow Is, so four missiles wasn't an unusual loadout by the late 1950s. An AIM-9B only weighed 155lb so all four of them plus launch rails were under 1000lb.
QuoteYou could go with Sparrow of course, that's what the Navy wanted a day/night fighter with radar and radar guided missiles as tail chase winders are not great when flying CAP to protect your ships.
Yeah, thought about that. There was a Sparrow option on the Super Tiger (G98J-2), but it also seems to have had a bigger radar in a longer and wider radome, so I suspect that a radar you could fit in the standard Tiger wouldn't have the power to properly exploit Sparrow.
QuoteDidn't Super Tiger have the over fuselage pylons for winders ? (can't see those being popular with pilots having a missile fire behind the back of your head !!)
Yep, two in tandem that extended upward on trapezes for firing. To fit them in, the canopy would have had to be changed from sliding to side-hinged. The Super Tiger prototype had the original sliding canopy though, so the forward dummy missile had it's nose cut through at an angle and the front section moved backwards and upwards with the canopy, which makes for some very wierd photos... ;D
My main objections to the spine missiles are:
1. Got to be awkward to load, particularly on a carrier.
2. It looks horrible... ;D
The Super Tiger was also tested with two Sidewinders mounted on a pair of belly pylons and a 1000lb bomb on the centreline. Both look a bit sketchy from a ground clearance point of view, and the Sidewinders don't have any 'look up' into turns from there, but Grumman seemd convinced and it worked on the Starfighter....
Could you go for a "buy American with British mod's" & fit over-wing Sindwinder pylons? :unsure:
Quote from: Old Wombat on October 04, 2016, 06:27:15 PM
Could you go for a "buy American with British mod's" & fit over-wing Sindwinder pylons? :unsure:
You could, but I don't see the point since there's room for an extra inboard underwing pylon. Overwing pylons are quite awkward to load, although they'd be easier on the Tiger's lower wing than the Jaguar's high one.
Quote from: Weaver on October 05, 2016, 03:23:20 AM
Quote from: Old Wombat on October 04, 2016, 06:27:15 PM
Could you go for a "buy American with British mod's" & fit over-wing Sindwinder pylons? :unsure:
You could, but I don't see the point since there's room for an extra inboard underwing pylon. Overwing pylons are quite awkward to load, although they'd be easier on the Tiger's lower wing than the Jaguar's high one.
Is there room for a centre line tank ?. I wouldn't worry about the weapons load its no different to the Scimitar or in fact the Sea Harrier 20 yrs later. You might want to look for the Hasegawa A2A set for the early winders and possibly adaptors or nick em from a harrier kit.
;)
Quote from: Thorvic on October 05, 2016, 04:14:36 AM
Quote from: Weaver on October 05, 2016, 03:23:20 AM
Quote from: Old Wombat on October 04, 2016, 06:27:15 PM
Could you go for a "buy American with British mod's" & fit over-wing Sindwinder pylons? :unsure:
You could, but I don't see the point since there's room for an extra inboard underwing pylon. Overwing pylons are quite awkward to load, although they'd be easier on the Tiger's lower wing than the Jaguar's high one.
Is there room for a centre line tank ?. I wouldn't worry about the weapons load its no different to the Scimitar or in fact the Sea Harrier 20 yrs later. You might want to look for the Hasegawa A2A set for the early winders and possibly adaptors or nick em from a harrier kit.
;)
It'd be so small it'd barely be worth having: 50 gals maybe?
I've considered replacing the standard drop tanks with Lightning ones since they have the same 'vertical keel' shape at the back but ate 260 gal rather that 150 gal. I think the jettison clearance from the tailplane might be an issue though.
And what mod did they introduce to the Sea Harrier immediately after actual combat? Two extra Sidewinders...
I was on the point of ordering a Hasegawa A2A set from ebay, however I think now that I'm going to nick the missiles from one of the other Cougar kits in my stash: they're not perfect, but they're way better than the Tiger kit ones. Would Sea Harrier kits have the right version of Sidewinder (AIM-9B: straight body forebody with a hemispherical nose & plain delta fins)? I thought they started off with AIM-9Gs and then got AIM-9Ls from US stocks for the Flaklands.
I meant nicking the Sidewinder rails from the Harrier, you might get them from a pair of the Airfix Buccaneer with the Desert storm and RN optional parts
Quote from: Thorvic on October 05, 2016, 02:00:42 PM
I meant nicking the Sidewinder rails from the Harrier, you might get them from a pair of the Airfix Buccaneer with the Desert storm and RN optional parts
Sorry, I see what you mean. I was going to cut the rails off the Cougar pylons, but looking at them, I think I might try fabricating them from Evergreen first. Some of the early rails are pretty much a square-section tube with tapered ends.
Quote from: Weaver on October 05, 2016, 01:30:12 PM
I've considered replacing the standard drop tanks with Lightning ones since they have the same 'vertical keel' shape at the back but ate 260 gal rather that 150 gal. I think the jettison clearance from the tailplane might be an issue though.
The tanks that are in the kit weren't used on production Tigers, they were only on development aircraft. The Tiger carried Aero 150 1A tanks which can be robbed from a Skyhawk kit. I think Colin did some tanks for the Airfix Skyhawk at one stage as, IIRC, no kit manufacturer has ever quite got the shape right.
Sorry there've been few updates on this. Nearly nothing happened for ages, then everything happened at once. I thought I might get the Tiger (and the Cougar) done for Telford and I might have (just) done it, but...
They were at this stage:
(https://www.minds.com/archive/thumbnail/642883351992086532/xlarge)
Then I put a coat of Wilko's white undercoat on them, and this happened:
(https://www.minds.com/archive/thumbnail/642883350729596948/xlarge)
I suspect that the paint and propellant in the can wasn't mixed thoroughly because it happened on the first areas I sprayed, but not others. I don't think it's unrecoverable by any means, but I only just had enough painting/drying/decalling cycles left between now and Saturday and now I don't... :banghead: :banghead: :banghead:
Sheesh....that's a drag !
:banghead:
:-\
Been experimenting with this...try cooling the model down in the fridge for awhile before spraying from a can. I've gone from occasional crazing to zero crazing.
Bugger! :blink:
I get that occasionally with my primer. It happens when the can is getting low on paint and I get a bit heavy handed and put on too thick a coat.
The solution is thin coats, 15 minutes apart until complete coverage is achieved.
Quote from: zenrat on November 09, 2016, 01:52:27 AM
I get that occasionally with my primer. It happens when the can is getting low on paint and I get a bit heavy handed and put on too thick a coat.
The solution is thin coats, 15 minutes apart until complete coverage is achieved.
Brand new can, and the room, the models and the can carefully warmed. I think I didn't give it the full 2 mins of shaking before spraying.
Had it happen with Humbrol spray varnish a few times. New can, warmed, shaken etc and for some reason :banghead:
Quote from: Librarian on November 09, 2016, 12:46:35 AM
Been experimenting with this...try cooling the model down in the fridge for awhile before spraying from a can. I've gone from occasional crazing to zero crazing.
Any idea of the science behind that ? Sounds sort of counter intuitive ?
Just the power of bo**ox really. I noticed that when I sprayed in the Winter outside...no crazing. Do the same in Summer and crazing was more often. Just seems to work for me. I do give the can a full five minutes of Rik Mayall wrist action though. Also noticed that traces of setting solution plays havoc with spray varnish (acrylic varnish).
Cheers mate I'll give that a try next time. I know who to blame :rolleyes: