WIP: F-14 B/D
-
… just saying before you cry about wasted time again…
Check the post (which you later quoted). He said that he WANTED to cry. Not that he DID cry.
WANTING to lick Donald Trump’s gonads and LICKING Donald Trump’s gonads are NOT the same thing.
Ara’
-
WANTING to lick Donald Trump’s gonads and LICKING Donald Trump’s gonads are NOT the same thing.’
Well thank you for THAT mental image, I will sleep well tonight :rolleyes:
-
Argh, Gorn, coming here for a rare BMS visit to see such an…analogy lol. Great job on the Tomcat, Stingray!
-
-
Thanks guys…update coming today. MLG is killing me but I’m making some progress. In the meantime had to share this pic:
https://c5.staticflickr.com/6/5786/29833855364_3e28fbbc89_b.jpg
really looking forward to your update for this pretty woman!! can you tell a story, bout this pic?
-
This is Bullet 201 (an F-14A Tomcat from the VF-2) moved to the Western Museum of Flight.
-
… had to share this pic:
https://c5.staticflickr.com/6/5786/29833855364_3e28fbbc89_b.jpg
Come one …
-
Well that’s one big white blob not nearly as hard to find as a Cat being towed around town :).
-
Hey buddy ! You still alive ?
-
He is immortal.
He cannot die.
-
Saint Tomcat bless Stingray 6-2
-
Hey buddy ! You still alive ?
Ara said it best - immortality, Baby. Plus lots of booze in the wee hours - jk.
Work and my other project been killing me lately so progress is slow. I managed to collapse the entire MLG including rotation and so on without rigging it to see how and more importantly IF it fits. Needless to say it doesn’t :D.
However, it’s not as bad as it looks. The nose gear fits just fine. On a more serious note, the glovebox has to be thickened a bit to the bottomside so the wheel fits. I don’t plan on changing the general shape of the fuselage as it took 100s of hours to put it into this shape and it resembles RL 99.9% so any misalignment is down to the MLG and I don’t plan on remodeling any part of the engine pods/lower fuselage. That being said the gear sits at a neat 90deg at the moment and in reality it tilts to almost 100deg and the wheel slightly inward to 95 so that will save some space.
Rigging this will be a bitch and shortcuts won’t work, I realized that when I manually rotated the whole thing. In RL there is less than half an inch between the wheel and the forward inner landing gear door during retraction so that’s gonna be interesting.
Apart from that it fits nicely in terms of length, width and wheel diameter:
See how far the wheel cuts the engine pod line? That’s why it literally rotates into the box during the last 10% of main strut rotation - insaine design.
Lessons learned:
Even the Grumman blueprints are worth sh*t when it comes to MLG proportions and measurements.
Never model a landing gear in down position :).
Whatever floats your boat, Baby.
-
Here’s to cheer you up, a vid I found in my daily navigation in the depths of the interwebs :
-
Stingray,
I just wanted to drop in and say that I only found out about this project yesterday, and Holy Mackerel, it’s awesome! Also, mad props on learning to use Blender - I never managed to sit down and get myself to do it. About the only thing I’m apprehensive about is the nosecone shape, and I know you won’t let anything less than excellent leave your workspace.
Freakin’ Awesometastic Sauce, Man!
-
November 28th? Wow almost 2 months…. You still alive out there Stingray?
-
-
Well well well what have we here…
That’s a bunch of beautiful captures posted there. The final Iraq cruise video actually motivated me to start this project in the first place, thanks for that!
Happy new years ya’ll! A bunch of you probably thought this is another never ending dead in the water once promising and now left behind project - rest assured that no cat gets left behind here :).
Back to business, Baby.
Even the Grumman blueprints are worth sh*t when it comes to MLG proportions and measurements.
I retract that. While they are slightly inaccurate when it comes to the profile view in terms of angle and scale they are dead accurate when it comes to the ‘wheelbox’. It took me ages to find the error here you see above. No matter how I tweaked the landing gear it just wouldn’t fit in the bodyshell and constantly protrude through the landing gear doors…until now.
-
Great Way to Start the morning baby!
-
So what was the problem? This.
Basically the entire MLG sticks out of the fuselage. Move it up? Didn’t work. Rescale? Can’t cuz the scale is close 100% authentic (at least total length and diameter). Move it in? Can’t cuz then it won’t rotate freely. So what to do…
Here’s another look:
So the ‘wheelbox’ is too small, sits too far back and all in all just didn’t fit. So I remodelled and repositioned the box. The entire gear was then tilted inward slightly as per the blueprint and the wheel strut extended out a good 50% more. Finally enlarged the wheel somewhat and fiddled with the hyfraulic lines and stuff on the MLG.
That looks better. Now need to check for clearance inward (engine pod/air intake), outward (landing gear doors), up (glovebox) and the upper inside rear edge cuz that is where the wings go when fully retracted. I tested this with full wing sweep and not oversweep but it should work. As you can see the margins are intensely small (like less than 10mm in some areas. Again the packaging is amazing on this design.
Wings:
As can be seen even in oversweep there is enough room.
Glovebox:
Enginepod:
That’s gotta be one of my favorite shots of this model ever!
Now the weapon fairings:
Also clear. Outlined is the ‘waist section’ of the fuselage housing the gear, this needs some fine tuning in the coming days now that it all fits together.
Some impressions:
Delta Tomcat, Baby.
-
Impressive piece of artwork!!