1/48 Hasegawa F-15E Strike Eagle

Gallery Article by Eugene Tan on Apr 19 2012

 

 

Hello everyone, this is my first submission to the ARC Gallery, the 1/48 Hasegawa F-15E Strike Eagle in "The Idolm@ster" colors as it appears in the Xbox 360 video game Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation. I'm just starting to get back into the hobby after a long leave of absence from it and there were plenty of firsts for me on this model, the two most important being my first attempt at 1/48 scale and my first use of resin aftermarket parts.

In Japan, there exists a subculture in which manga, anime and video game fans decorate the bodies of their cars with art of their favourite characters, mostly of cute females. Such cars are known as 'itasha', with 'ita' coming from 'itai' or pain, which can be interpreted as 'painfully embarrassing' in this context, and 'sha' or vehicle. The Idolm@ster and Ace Combat series are both published by the same company, so a collaboration was made between the two game studios of each game to develop these planes as 'itaki', planes decorated like 'itashas'. Being a fan of both games, I knew I had to get the kits when Hasegawa re-released their previous models with the appropiate decals.

The Hasegawa F-15E is merely a F-15B/D two-seater with added parts to make it look like an E. In fact, some of those additional parts are incorrect too, most notably the Conformal Fuel Tank (CFT) pylons which are very different from the ones carried by the Strike Eagles. Hasegawa still gives the old style missile rails instead of the newer LAU-128s carried by all modern Eagles. Finally, also missing are several other small but visible parts that differentiate a Strike Eagle from its fighter siblings.

The general consensus is that the Revell or even the Academy F-15Es are much better than the Hasegawa one, but I still went ahead with the latter as the decals were more or less scaled to fit the Hasegawa kit, and I wanted to test my budding modelling skills by working on a so-called "inferior" kit. (That's not to say the Hasegawa F-15E is a bad kit; it still can be built into a very good looking B/D, just not an accurate F-15E out of the box).

 

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My plan was to update the Hasegawa with parts from another kit. I decided on Academy's F-15C MSIP II box, which has extra parts from sprues previously included in their F-15K and F-15E releases. I chose the C kit for parts instead of the E, I, or K kits as I didn't want to end up with an incomplete model later if I ever got around to building it.

From the Academy kit, I took the CFT pylons and CFT air scoops, both of which were listed as unused parts. I also brought over several smaller items, such as the gun loading door on the underside of the fuselage. The GPS dome carried by updated Strike Eagles isn't included in the Hasegawa kit, so I made this out of a small piece of styrene rod filed to shape. The Hasegawa kit also shows the fairing between the engines which the E doesn't have, so I sawed this part off and made a new tailhook out of styrene rod and card.

As mentioned earlier, I used my first resin aftermarket parts on this kit: ACES II seats by Wind Mark, exhaust nozzles by Aires, and ADU-552 adapters from Wolfpack Designs. I replaced the Wolfpack LAU-128s with the spare LAU-129s from the Academy kit, as these were more accurate in length. The Aires nozzles look much better than the kit ones, and are well worth the money.

Most of the parts during construction fit well and went together without any noticable difficulties, although I still had to use putty in some places like the joint between the nose and the fuselage. I decided to paint and decal the horizontal and vertical stabilizers seperately before attaching them to the fuselage at the end of the build.

The decals themselves are silk-screen decals and settled down nicely after several applications of Mr Mark Softer, but a word of caution: do NOT use a setting solution like Mr Mark Setter before application as these will make the decal stick instantly to the surface with no chance of moving it again, at least not without damaging it.

For the weapons, I chose to go with a load of 6 AIM-120Cs and 2 AIM-9s. It's a very unusual and rare load for real life Strike Eagles, but it's one of the loadouts for the in-game version and one of the more popular ones. The AIM-120Cs came from Hasegawa's Weapon Set E, and the AIM-9Xs (originally AIM-9Ms as depicted in game, but I botched those during the build and substituted them for -Xs) came from the Academy kit. The AAQ-13 Navigation Pod also came from the F-15C kit, while the AAQ-33 Sniper Pod came from Wolfpack. I drilled out shallow depressions at the rear of the AIM-120s and painted them black to simulate the exhausts.

Most of the stencils on the kit and AIM-120Cs are dry transfers by Hobbydecal. The ones for the F-15E went on okay, but I had a lot of problems with applying the ones on the missiles, as the decal paper couldn't quite wrap around the missile body for smooth application of the markings. Thus, a lot of the stencils on my missiles were out of alignment. The dry transfers look a lot better than decals, but next time I'll go back to using decals instead as it's just too much trouble.

Finally, the model itself was painted with Tamiya and Mr. Hobby acrylics and lacquers, and coated with a layer of Mr. Top Coat flat. The panel lines were washed with Promodeller Dark Wash, and light weathering was done with the Tamiya Weathering Master sets.

This build took about 5 months, which is the longest time I've ever spent on a model, both when I was still a kid and as an adult coming back to the hobby. I made a few mistakes here and there, but I've also learned plenty of new techniques and tricks for future builds (IMO the most important thing). She's no Cinderella but I'm pretty pleased with how this one turned out. Of course, anime-inspired designs will not be everyone's cup of tea, but if you've enjoyed looking at this one then you have my thanks. Another big thank you to everyone who gave encouragement in the build thread here on ARC.

Happy modelling.

Eugene

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Photos and text © by Eugene Tan