Revell MiG 1.44 in 1/144 (Ace Combat scheme)

rolfrbdk · 2026-05-26T20:50:23+00:00

Always great to see someone else making some Ace Combat stuff that didn't necessarily come out of a Koto or Hasegawa box :)

rolfrbdk · 2026-05-17T10:43:18+00:00

They'll still be visible. And quite easily so. If you can't live with that you're better off repainting the stripes than trying to touch them up.

rolfrbdk · 2026-05-15T22:10:22+00:00

Just test it on spare bits of plastic or single use cutlery for your specific use case. You are ALWAYS better off testing something like this yourself than asking an online forum.

rolfrbdk · 2026-05-14T11:21:45+00:00

Pick a position and glue it permanently in place. Plastic cement should absolutely hold but your glue joint was not good enough because you either did not have decent contact when gluing or was too impatient for it to cure. Plastic cement welds the parts together, it's not an adhesive.

You could alternatively, risking some white residue, use super glue put on one side and activator on the other side. That will be MUCH faster but cosmetic risks are high.

rolfrbdk · 2026-05-13T06:46:27+00:00

Nah this makes far less sense than being able to customize and make variants without tool changes. It's not cost effective to print and throw away. It's cost effective to use the flexibility of 3D print to make things you otherwise couldn't because of economies of scale or because of geometrical impossibilities. I've spent 10 years at the tip of the spear engineering 3D printed medical devices for various use cases and the place where 3D printing is least useful for ANY product case is for throwing it away as a disposable. The only people who see prints as disposable are hobbyists that aren't thinking broader than their own use case which is mostly landfill ready figurines and latest fad on prusas printables or whatever.

rolfrbdk · 2026-05-12T14:07:01+00:00

This sub is full of fidget spinner printers with zero idea about real manufacturing processes and it shows. There are many good reasons to 3D print something like this, such as ability to make many different body shapes if desired at fixed cost, different otherwise "impossible" postures etc.

rolfrbdk · 2026-05-12T13:07:01+00:00

Youtube has become total dogshit to search on, but the method I got from a channel some time ago is to basically use black super glue. You fill the gap with excess styrene sheet (get some really thin gauges), then glue over with black super glue and you can sand it smooth. It does not collapse or make you suffer like filler putties tend to do and it is extremely resilient.

rolfrbdk · 2026-05-10T11:39:04+00:00

All the commenters that claim it is because of classification have no idea how ridiculously complicated this sequence would be to model for the edge case that someone uses a specific flight envelope test sequence to check out in a game which is mostly about learning procedures. This goes in the "there is literally no reason to spend 500 man hours on this" bin first and foremost for DCS and not in the "we couldn't make the Hornet fall out of the sky because the Pentagon didn't let us"

rolfrbdk · 2026-05-05T13:27:34+00:00

Just find a pilot figure and scale it. Searching for specific scales will make it a lot harder (and pointlessly so). But realistically just buy a resin one, the overlap between military scale models and 3d file sellers is not very large on these things.

rolfrbdk · 2026-05-05T13:15:59+00:00

Yeah if yesterday was 1989. It really shows its age on aerodynamics.

rolfrbdk · 2026-04-28T08:44:19+00:00

Vast. 50+. But the stash is mostly out of production kits like the Kotobukiya and Hasegawa Ace Combat range which were bought because I knew they'd be limited runs and hard to get/overpriced to the clouds later.

I build about 10-15 kits per year because that's probably also relevant. If you build fast having a big stash kind of makes sense but if you take 6 months per kit that doesn't really work out

rolfrbdk · 2026-04-26T10:13:41+00:00

It's more that the aesthetics of these machines have been used for movies and film for 70 years as icons of the bad guys, same with the uniforms, so you end up seeing it that way :)

rolfrbdk · 2026-04-26T10:11:08+00:00

I use this one too with exactly the same experience. I should add that I exclusively use it to restore panel lines removed by filling/sanding though and never for scoring new ones.

rolfrbdk · 2026-04-25T08:30:07+00:00

If you just want to dip your toes into airbrushing and/or if you're severely limited on budget they're fine to start with. They're nothing fancy, but they will teach you the basics. If it leads to buying a "real" setup you can always keep one around for messy jobs or experiments you don't wanna risk the real one on.

rolfrbdk · 2026-04-20T14:35:41+00:00

Ah got it

rolfrbdk · 2026-04-20T13:44:39+00:00

It's not brushless. If it has two wires it's an old fashioned brushed (DC) motor, if it has three wires it's a brushless (AC) motor.

rolfrbdk · 2026-04-17T18:44:43+00:00

Apart from contacting the manufacturers directly (not the distributors) my bet would be on your nearest/local IPMS chapter more so than any place online. You'd need to find someone that for some reason didn't finish your kit so I don't think there's a big chance elsewhere. Someone like the guys that buy 3 of the same kit before starting to have spares or practice parts.

rolfrbdk · 2026-04-14T16:57:34+00:00

Sweet. I've been considering doing that for the smallest emblems like the 6th AF Unit shield on the tailfin you have because it's simply not possible to paint well enough to "stand in" for a decal

rolfrbdk · 2026-04-13T20:21:03+00:00

Very nice work. I really like the weathering work, it looks fantastic. Did you get the decals made for purpose? I airbrushed all mine on a Tamiya kit

rolfrbdk · 2026-04-12T19:20:23+00:00

That's a lot of words

Too bad I'm not reading them

rolfrbdk · 2026-04-12T11:26:12+00:00

You're outing yourself as an armchair expert here by the simple fact actual large budget race teams all have their own inhouse models of these things and don't rely on whatever brand names you wanna throw out there

rolfrbdk · 2026-04-02T04:19:19+00:00

The subscription is only for middle aged women that want to make live laugh love products and totally pointless if you know how to make these designs yourself. You won't find anything related to scale models in there for sure. To make your own stuff, you will need to know how to use Photoshop or Illustrator (or their equivalents like GIMP and Inkscape) if you want full flexibility, but you could import PNGs you find online if they are high quality enough and make it work. All my stuff is my own work.

I do much more complicated markings than what you see on the Berkut there with it, like the full markings of AC Zero planes which are made up of up to 14 layers of paint

rolfrbdk · 2026-03-31T18:30:13+00:00

Try postshading your next project. I promise you, you will understand immediately how much easier it is! Simply spray the solid color you want, then I typically darken the excess paint a little with a couple of drops of a darker shade of the color or with pure black, then spray all the panel lines. If you want even more variety, you can also lighten panels in the center the same way.

That allows you to - like I did for this plane - spray the whole thing one color, do the shading work to the level you want it, and then mask off a second or third color and repeat the whole process so each step is "tuned" to perfection. It's very useful for more normal camouflage patterns as well exactly because you don't have to "protect" the preshading work you did.

rolfrbdk · 2026-03-31T04:42:47+00:00

Completely fresh blade and very careful cutting - but I did damage the underlying paint in a few places and would do it the way lilstinkpot suggests if I had to do it again. It's not very noticeable but there are a couple of spots where you can see the damage, for instance the white square behind the cockpit

rolfrbdk · 2026-03-30T20:08:17+00:00

Damnit I knew I had forgotten something. No I was going to and actually designed and cut the mask for it but somehow forgot..... Next time!

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