For reasons not entirely clear even to myself, a considerable number of F-11 Tigers found their way into my stash of unbuilt kits. One or two would make sense, as this is after all a US Navy jet, But there's four of these, plus one mutilated vacform.
Anyway, they're there, and they're going to get built. Putting four or five similar kits in the USN projects list would seriously clutter up the page, so I forked them off to this one.
Given that I have a bunch of Tigers, I did some research into the history of the aircraft. Although the Tiger itself was fairly unremarkable except for some serious technological innovations, there was a prototype project related to it that gave rise to some interesting configurations. For example, these Super Tigers could carry Sidewinder missiles on their backs, and have been flown with Falcon missiles under the wings. More than sufficiently strange for me to want to build the prototypes in these configurations.
So, the master plan is this: the first kit will be built as a standard operational Tiger from VF-121. One of the others will become an early, short nosed model, and the remaining injection kits will be built as the Super Tiger prototypes, with two Falcon missiles and two droptanks, and two each of dorsal Sidewinders, droptanks and Sparrow misiles respectively. The latter kit might also acquire two Sidewinders on launchers below the fuselage; although this configuration wasn't proposed, let alone tested, it would demonstrate the location of the various hardpoints. The Sparrow plus Sidewinder configuration was never flown anyway (although it was proposed), so this configuration is conjectural in any case. Finally, the vacform, if I ever feel sufficiently masochistic to start working on it, may end up as a Blue Angel plane.
2004-09-08
Another Tiger has crawled into my attic, and there's yet another on the way.
This time, though, I've got an excuse. I have such a nice collection of decals
for these chaps, that I'd never forgive myself if I didn't stick them on some
plastic. Which means more plastic was needed. The two new additions will
become the very toothy Tiger depicted by the basic Hasegawa kit, and a plane
from VF-51.
| 2004-09-08 |
A Hasegawa Tiger of VF-121, built
straight out of the box. Finished |
| 2005-09-29 |
A Minicraft Tiger of VF-21,
sporting a most toothy grin, once again straight out of the box. Finished |