The Airborne Aircraft Carrier Begins...

[proditor]

Yup, I threatened to do it, and I'm just barmy enough to make good on that threat!  I got a Revell ATB from the place not to be named and then I started rifling through my 1/700 box of goodies.  

I still have no camera, but hey, we whiffers are nothing if not inventive, right?  So I threw some of the initial airwing on the scanner along with a shot of the instructions showing what I'm intending to do.  Hopefully the camera will arrive before too much longer as there is no way the model is fitting on my scanner.  

The bigger planes are going to have their rudders removed and get F-23 style canted ones.  The littler buggers are just going to be cleaned up a bit.  They'll be the F/A-26 Peregrine and F/A-27 Shrike respectively.  The other thing in the pics is the VLS tactical land attack missile system that you can see in the drawings.  Basically big ole nuke launchers (Conventional missiles if needed of course).

On the plans, the circles are upgraded anti-aircraft/ABM lasers, a generation beyond the ABL.  The squares on the wings are VLS.  I'm thinking of cropping the wings and putting on lift devices like on modern airliners, but I'm not sold one way or the other as yet.

[Captain Canada]

Woah !

That'll be one big mother feckin' bird !

Where are you gonna land something that big ? I know...on an EVEN bigger airborne carrier !



Neat idea....and good idea to use the scanner !

[RP1]

Cool!  Air Carrier "Justice"!!

I am reminded of the "Ring Raiders" toys I played with oh so many years ago...

http://www.virtualtoychest.com/ringraiders...ingraiders.html

Their main base was a MASSIVE double decker deltawinged thingy.  I remember a Fokker DR1 being launched... the ground crew just LET GO and the slipstream did the rest!

RP1

[cthulhu77]

Awesome !!!!  Can't wait for more pics !!

         greg

[noxioux]

Holy cow!

[Spey_Phantom]

Cool!  Air Carrier "Justice"!!

I am reminded of the "Ring Raiders" toys I played with oh so many years ago...

http://www.virtualtoychest.com/ringraiders...ingraiders.html

Their main base was a MASSIVE double decker deltawinged thingy.  I remember a Fokker DR1 being launched... the ground crew just LET GO and the slipstream did the rest!

RP1

A couple of years ago, at a toyshop, they had several revell "ring raider" kits, including the EF-2000, Viggen, F-19,.....

unfortunatly, the shop is now gone and i dont know where to get those aircraft anymore.

back on topic: The idea of an airborne carrier is great, ive seen some great airship conversions in "Ace Combat 3" on the old PS1 (i really loved that game, still got some UPEO aircraft in my collection 1/144) it carried F-16XFU, F/A-32, SU-43, XFA-36,....

link: http://lejora.tripod.com/upeo/

to me, the game was the best AC game ever made B)

please post some pics of the carriers progress    

[Davey B]

Rock On!    

[gooberliberation]

this is going to be  good....    

[proditor]

It's so far out there that I'm having fun just planning this sucker.  As a side note, both of the planes were from the same "base", just different manufacturers.  They were made from F-15s.  The shiny silver-grey ones are Tsukuda, the normal grey ones, I don't recall unfortunately.  Just a little snippin' and cutting and we have the beginnings of our airwing.  And since the Tsukuda offerings are, well to put it bluntly, crappy, they look different enough that it is hard to tell they were both F-15's at the start.

The Missile launchers are the ICBM launchers from 2 George Washington class Submarines by Skywave (Scramble! set).  I just cut them free from the subs, cleaned them up, filed them down and they are now waiting patiently to be glued in place on the wings.

The plans show the above view with the recovery deck and 4 catapults nicely, but the underside has 3 bomb-bays, each capacious enough to swallow a B-1 with it's wings swept with no problem...

So, I'm going to use the mast assembly from the USS Ticonderoga (4 uprights) to make a recovery "trapeze" a la the parasite program of the 50's.  I figure that if done right, and with enough redundant computerization, it's not going to be much more difficult than hooking up with a tanker.  So that means that in the best case scenario, it would be possible to launch up to 7 planes at a time.  4 from the top, 3 from the bottom....The recovery strip would normally be used during slow cruising to recover planes not adapted to the trapeze.

Last bit, if I can find them, is to install some refueling lines at the wingtips.  If I can pull this off, there will be 4 birds on the catapults, one on the recovery strip, one docking below, and two off of the wingtip refueling stations.  It looks awesome in my head, now to see if my hands can translate it all.

[Joe C-P]

You da MAN!

B)