F-15 Eagle

[Sauragnmon]

I agree with Evan on the design - the Eagle's yes got the nice tight-together engines, but if we're going for broke on a super eagle, AVEN/LOAN is a better option, and bolted to a nice beefy pair of the heavy thrust 110/100's in the bays.  DSI, you're not going to fit in place, just because of the massive design of the intakes.  You'd have to make MASSIVE changes in the design and layout of the aircraft in that section just to find the means to fit DSI's into the Eagle's airframe.  An enlarged spine might be an idea, and if you curve the intakes maybe, you could potentially do something to reduce its radar signature on the intakes somehow.

[anthonyp]

HA!!!  I knew my bugging Evan would bring him back from beyond!  Welcome back!  Now, where's those F-15M's you've been promising?

[elmayerle]

HA!!!  I knew my bugging Evan would bring him back from beyond!  Welcome back!  Now, where's those F-15M's you've been promising?

Slowly in work.  Got a number of raw material kits to start from and I'm trying to match everything up.  Mind you, I've got more raw material kits back home, this is just what I've got in Connecticut.  If you decide to clone those AIM-152's I'll take a set.

[elmayerle]

Stepping back a bit and looking at literary whiffs, there are the Polish F-15s from Larry Bond's Cauldron which would have great potential, esp. since they were modified for air-to-ground as well as air-to-air and in some cases dropped Soviet bombs which had the same lug spacing as NATO bombs.  About the only mods I'd do would be small blade antennas, one each, on the upper spine and under the nose for a radio fit the Polish specifically wanted (their F-16s have such a fit, too - I know, I did the installation drawing for some of the boxes involved).

[KJ_Lesnick]

How much more would the F-15A had weighed if it had the Air-to-Ground capacity had been retained and the radar had retained the Air to Ground modes?


KJ Lesnick

[elmayerle]

Honestly, I don't know for certain though I do believe they did air-to-ground testing with some of the prototypes.  Anything I said would be strictly informed conjecture.

[Jeffry Fontaine]

I do have a picture somewhere of an F-15 in the 70s carrying French (!) roundels during a European sales tour.

That could be interesting if you could scrape together enough Super R530 missiles for one.  It would require at least two Mirage 2000 donor kits to pull off. 


F-15 Eagle at Wikipedia
Hughes (now Raytheon) APG-63 and APG-70 RADAR at Wikipedia
Google search results for "F-15 Eagle"
Google search results for "APG-63"

[elmayerle]

I do have a picture somewhere of an F-15 in the 70s carrying French (!) roundels during a European sales tour.

That could be interesting if you could scrape together enough Super R530 missiles for one.  It would require at least two Mirage 2000 donor kits to pull off.  

The aircraft so painted was the TF2 prototype, 71-291, which has seen so many paint jobs over the years.  THE first Aerofax Datagraph to cover the F-15A/B/C/D/E has both a black and white and a color pic of this scheme.  If someone wihses to do this, I've got a couple Mirage 2000 kits being used for "bits" for various other projects and I could contribute the missles.  On the other hand, I will have a lot of leftover bits from my F-15M efforts and that does seem a reasonable use of some of them.  Any ideas on appropriate serials and such?

[Mossie]

Stepping back a bit and looking at literary whiffs, there are the Polish F-15s from Larry Bond's Cauldron which would have great potential, esp. since they were modified for air-to-ground as well as air-to-air and in some cases dropped Soviet bombs which had the same lug spacing as NATO bombs.  About the only mods I'd do would be small blade antennas, one each, on the upper spine and under the nose for a radio fit the Polish specifically wanted (their F-16s have such a fit, too - I know, I did the installation drawing for some of the boxes involved).

It was mentioned very breifly earlier in this thread, but there was the F-15F Cheetah from Dale Brown's Day of the Cheetah.  It was basically an inservice F-15 S/MTD, I can't remember ordanance being anything out of the ordinary, but you could give it the Dale Brown treatment.  Didn't somebody release a kit of the S/MTD or ACTIVE some time back?

[Shasper]

Dunno about the S/MTD kit (Hasegawa???), but for chase work out at Dreamland the Cheetah flew with a camerapod mounted either on the dorsal or ventral centerline, at another point it was fitted with 12 laser-guided missile training rounds, and then it was fitted with a bunch of mud moving stuff (Durandal?) later on in the book when the US went to take out the Russian airfield in Nicaragua.

[Mossie]

Cheers Shas, I'll have to pick up the book again, I first read it about fifteen years ago.  It was the first Dale Brown book I've read, & the only one I've rated, although his stuff makes excellent whiff fodder.

[Talos]

If I remember correctly, it wasn't a straight S/MTD in the book, but actually an evolved F-15E Strike Eagle (meaning CFTs and the enlarged horizontal tail). I think that F-15F would make an awesome model if there was an S/MTD model kit (or someone crazy-awesome enough to scratch-build those components). As far as the camera pod, the way the book described it always seemed to imply a very heavy and draggy dorsal location, which would make visual tracking of Dreamstar during chase flights easily, I suppose, since they aren't trying to line up the camera while the plane is below the horizon for the pilots.

[ChernayaAkula]

Just found this:



How cool is that? Insanely high amounts of awesome detected!

EDIT: The screen shots at the upper left-hand corner of the pic. Does anybody know which film they're from?

[Taiidantomcat]

Yeah that is just a big chunk of amazing!!  Great find! 1/32 scale too!! Any Idea what magazine that is?

[Sauragnmon]

That is pretty wicked... Canted tails are cool, would have been more wicked if they'd gone for broke and butterflied it with the horizontals.  Might have given some extra weight benefits compared to the mechanical weight for those canards.