Color matching whites
George Caswell
Hi,
It would seem the most serious problems with my battroid aren't due to the
damage caused by the pastel weathering I applied and removed, but rather due
to the mismatched whites that I applied back in August (it's all the same
white, but over gray in some places..) So now I'm trying to figure out how to
make the color match better in a few key areas. Stripping the paint off the
legs is not an option, as I don't have replacement decals for that area.
My plan so far is to coat the too-bright areas with future mixed with
tamiya smoke (mixed thoroughly! I've learned the hard way what happens when a
mix like that isn't mixed thoroughly enough) and possibly some clear blue.
After that, dull-coat the whole kit again (aagh) and then perhaps go for a
semi-gloss finish.
I have a few questions. First off, is that likely to work, or will I just
wind up with yet another mismatched white? Second, are there good techniques
for observing the differences between the colors? (I imagine playing around
with color filters in the GIMP could give me an idea where the colors are
mismatched, I was thinking of viewing parts under different light, too - it
seems like the effect's more noticable under fluorescent light (and I think my
yellows look much nicer under fluorescent, too!) and if I could view the model
under colored light, like red, green, or blue, that might help, too..)
Granite-con was fun. Mark got a well-deserved first place in sci-fi for
his Gouf, my Guncannon got best out-of-box (though, I remembered later, it
actually might not qualify as out-of-box: I added two sewing pins, a couple
pieces of styrene tube, and one T-shaft hinge. :) ) and the battroid, I'm
told, was "too noisy". This brings me to my last question, which I was gonna
ask Mark at the show, but forgot:
I'm thinking of putting kill stripes on my Guncannon for the show prizes
it's won. It seems to be the king of sparsely-populated categories, always
finding some niche in which it can win some sort of prize by default. But the
question is this: How do kill stripes work on something with two cannons? Is
"one" kill stripe applied to both cannons, or is one kill stripe on each
cannon considered "two" kill stripes?
---GEC
New projects page: http://home.attbi.com/~sieg_haro/
(M-x depeche-mode)
Itchin' for more Hasegawa goodness!
Ron
I don't really have answers to your questions but aren't offshade
panels more realistic? Panels get replaced due to battle damage,
bullet holes, etc.. Typically, these replacement panels are never the
exact same colour. If you look at monotone coloured aircraft (eg. F16
Falcons or F18 Hornets), you notice that they don't have a monotone
colour but rather panels will have all sorts of offshades.
If the effect is really apparent, you might consider spraying a light
mist of white on the white parts of the kit. This will still
provide panel demarcation but tone down the effect. If certain panels
have this 2 shades of white effect, you may want to use some post-it
notes and mask the adjoining panels. Mist your desired shade of white
onto this panel to get a more even tone on this panel.
In any case, always tell people that you intended to pull off this
effect.
Ron
On Mon, 21 Oct 2002 15:41:35 GMT, George Caswell <sieg...@attbi.com>
wrote:
George Caswell
> George,
>
> I don't really have answers to your questions but aren't offshade
> panels more realistic? Panels get replaced due to battle damage,
> bullet holes, etc.. Typically, these replacement panels are never the
> exact same colour. If you look at monotone coloured aircraft (eg. F16
> Falcons or F18 Hornets), you notice that they don't have a monotone
> colour but rather panels will have all sorts of offshades.
>
If they were panels, yes it might be more realistic. The end effect I've
achieved, however, is not. The lower legs are bright white and the chest is a
subdued grayish-white. They don't need to match perfectly, but the difference
ought to be subtle for that kind of effect. In retrospect, yeah, I think it
would have been kind of neat if I'd planned for that kind of effect...
though, on the other hand, if the judges are saying it's too noisy -now-, (on
the basis of the high-contrast markings, I assume)... Plus I really wasn't
anticipating that I'd have as much trouble painting the white as I did. Live
and learn.
(The real nightmares start if I want to make my VF-1S fighter, which I
haven't started yet, match the colors of my battroid... <shudder>)
> If the effect is really apparent, you might consider spraying a light
> mist of white on the white parts of the kit. This will still
> provide panel demarcation but tone down the effect. If certain panels
> have this 2 shades of white effect, you may want to use some post-it
> notes and mask the adjoining panels. Mist your desired shade of white
> onto this panel to get a more even tone on this panel.
>
I don't want to cloud or speckle the decals that have already been applied.
The big black bars on the sides of the legs would be easy enough to mask, I
suppose.
> In any case, always tell people that you intended to pull off this
> effect.
>
Nah, there was a starfury at the show, and the guy there said he intended
to do what he did to it... and I don't think it made it a better effect at
all. :)
...Still can't believe all the hairs those fancy-pants airplane guys had
all over their models...
Ron
On Mon, 21 Oct 2002 16:21:59 GMT, George Caswell <sieg...@attbi.com>
wrote:
>On Mon, 21 Oct 2002, Ron wrote:
I didn't know that you had added the decals already. Yeah, its going
to be tough. My only experience with smoke was when you recommended
it to me a while ago for my HGUC quebley kit. I used a silver base
coat and wanted to shade the edges before I applied a clear red. The
smoke was way too subtle on the silver and I ended up resorting to gun
metal for shading.
>> In any case, always tell people that you intended to pull off this
>> effect.
>>
> Nah, there was a starfury at the show, and the guy there said he intended
>to do what he did to it... and I don't think it made it a better effect at
>all. :)
>
> ...Still can't believe all the hairs those fancy-pants airplane guys had
>all over their models...
>
I'm not sure if panel shading is as effective for starfuries. I don't
know the proper term for it, but most starfuries I have seen use a
form of panel line shading. They get post it notes, mask off one edge
of a panel, spray the shade colour onto this panel line and finally
remove the post-it. This gives a nice effect but I have only seen it
on some luftwaffe aircraft and sci-fi kits.
"Hairs"?
Ron
George Caswell
> >> In any case, always tell people that you intended to pull off this
> >> effect.
> >>
> > Nah, there was a starfury at the show, and the guy there said he intended
> >to do what he did to it... and I don't think it made it a better effect at
> >all. :)
> I'm not sure if panel shading is as effective for starfuries. I don't
> know the proper term for it, but most starfuries I have seen use a
> form of panel line shading. They get post it notes, mask off one edge
> of a panel, spray the shade colour onto this panel line and finally
> remove the post-it. This gives a nice effect but I have only seen it
> on some luftwaffe aircraft and sci-fi kits.
>
Well, on this Starfury in particular the effect was completely botched:
the panel shading was airbrushed with black after the decaling was done. It
was way too severe, coarse, and speckly to be a good effect. I'm just using
it as sort of an extreme example of how, if there's a flaw in my work, it's
not gonna do much good to act like it's not really a flaw.
> > ...Still can't believe all the hairs those fancy-pants airplane guys had
> >all over their models...
> "Hairs"?
>
One of the two starfuries had a hair in its paintjob, bridging an engine
with one of the greebly pylons that stick out the back. So when I saw all the
prop aircraft models with hairs on them (representing antennas and such) the
joke was "Dur, they made the same mistake as that guy with the Starfury"...
George Caswell
> It would seem the most serious problems with my battroid aren't due to the
> damage caused by the pastel weathering I applied and removed, but rather due
> to the mismatched whites that I applied back in August (it's all the same
> white, but over gray in some places..) So now I'm trying to figure out how to
> make the color match better in a few key areas. Stripping the paint off the
> legs is not an option, as I don't have replacement decals for that area.
>
The effect is a bit subtle, but pretty easy to see once you know what to
look for - thanks to Mark for pointing it out to me. (I'd known there were
some color matching issues, I guess I didn't know how severe they were..)
My Battroid project page now includes a version of one of the images I
submitted to the CMC contest - the right half was darkened and the color
saturation boosted in the GIMP - the warmer, brighter color of the lower legs
shows up like a flare. I guess the hands are that way, too - I probably
didn't prime them. :)
Battroid project page:
http://home.attbi.com/~sieg_haro/models/Projects/1_72_Battroid/
You can't see it in the photo, but the head's mismatched, too - the main
head part is lighter than the top plate or the laser turrets. I might keep
that as-is though, or just subdue it a bit. It seems odd to me that I didn't
get this problem on the upper legs... I don't think I re-primed them, but I
did sand down the front and back to fix up the seams after I painted them a
bit... <shrug>
Another question - and this is, as I've learned, one of the first questions
ever asked on RAAM. What sort of gloss-level should the finish have?
Originally I was going to go for a high gloss, but I actually don't know what
kind of finish is appropriate for an aircraft. (I do consider a Valk to be an
aircraft first and a robot second... which is odd, since I've built the robot
version first... unless you count my old Macross kits, in which case I first
built a Gerwalk... Valkyrie with an identity crisis. :) Back then I hated
Fokker's colors, too... wiggy.) For those who didn't go to the show - I did
put the "UN Spacy" on the gunpod, and I did put it on "upside-down" relative
to how the Battroid holds it. I know some people don't like model show
entries to have a bunch of backstory information along with the entry... but
personally, I wonder if that bit might be worth explaining, just so nobody
thinks it was an accident! :) (I put a lot of thought into that decision,
dammit! :) )
---GEC
New projects page: http://home.attbi.com/~sieg_haro/
There's nothing like figuring out a solution to my problem, to make me
less-stressed about it! :)
Ron
wrote:
>> > ...Still can't believe all the hairs those fancy-pants airplane guys had
>> >all over their models...
>
>> "Hairs"?
>>
> One of the two starfuries had a hair in its paintjob, bridging an engine
>with one of the greebly pylons that stick out the back. So when I saw all the
>prop aircraft models with hairs on them (representing antennas and such) the
>joke was "Dur, they made the same mistake as that guy with the Starfury"...
>
That's hilarious. I used to build some WWII aircraft but my hair was
never long enough or thin enough to use as antennas. I fell back to
the old way of stretching sprue.
Needless to say, I better not show you any of my kits. I'll be
laughed out of this newsgroup. I always have had trouble getting a
flawless gloss finish on my gundams and have some specs of dust
trapped within the clearcoat. Polishing with polishing cloths has
never been my strong suit.
Ron
Mark Wilson
wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> It would seem the most serious problems with my battroid aren't due to the
>damage caused by the pastel weathering I applied and removed, but rather due
>to the mismatched whites that I applied back in August (it's all the same
>white, but over gray in some places..) So now I'm trying to figure out how to
>make the color match better in a few key areas. Stripping the paint off the
>legs is not an option, as I don't have replacement decals for that area.
>
> My plan so far is to coat the too-bright areas with future mixed with
>tamiya smoke (mixed thoroughly! I've learned the hard way what happens when a
>mix like that isn't mixed thoroughly enough) and possibly some clear blue.
>After that, dull-coat the whole kit again (aagh) and then perhaps go for a
>semi-gloss finish.
>
> I have a few questions. First off, is that likely to work, or will I just
>wind up with yet another mismatched white?
I cringe at the thought. Successfully applying that sort of coat
evenly just sounds near impossible. I would strongly encourage you to
practice on something else before trying it on the kit. Remember,
with the acrylic base coat, you will not be able to strip this
"smokey" coat off. You may just end up with a "It was my first
attempt at applying weathering with an airbrush/paintball gun" type
results, so be careful.
Short of stripping, I still think weathering can save the day.
>Second, are there good techniques
>for observing the differences between the colors? (I imagine playing around
>with color filters in the GIMP could give me an idea where the colors are
>mismatched, I was thinking of viewing parts under different light, too - it
>seems like the effect's more noticable under fluorescent light (and I think my
>yellows look much nicer under fluorescent, too!) and if I could view the model
>under colored light, like red, green, or blue, that might help, too..)
Aside from natural light outdoors, you might want to look for a full
spectrum or natural lighting type bulb. Fluorescent tend to be bluish
when new, reddish when dying. Incandescents tend to be reddish from
the git-go. If you can find a true color incandescent, that might be
your best bet.
> Granite-con was fun. Mark got a well-deserved first place in sci-fi for
>his Gouf, my Guncannon got best out-of-box (though, I remembered later, it
>actually might not qualify as out-of-box: I added two sewing pins, a couple
>pieces of styrene tube, and one T-shaft hinge. :) ) and the battroid, I'm
>told, was "too noisy". This brings me to my last question, which I was gonna
>ask Mark at the show, but forgot:
>
> I'm thinking of putting kill stripes on my Guncannon for the show prizes
>it's won. It seems to be the king of sparsely-populated categories, always
>finding some niche in which it can win some sort of prize by default. But the
>question is this: How do kill stripes work on something with two cannons? Is
>"one" kill stripe applied to both cannons, or is one kill stripe on each
>cannon considered "two" kill stripes?
IIRC, you put stripes on both. I think there is a Naval precedent for
that, since Army cannon tend to be single barreled.
Then again, with your win streak going the way it is, you might want
to do only one barrel at a time. May run out of room...;)
>
>---GEC
>New projects page: http://home.attbi.com/~sieg_haro/
>(M-x depeche-mode)
>Itchin' for more Hasegawa goodness!
Mark Wilson
Change .org to .net to reply by e-mail
"If we lose the war in the air, we lose the war, and we lose it quickly."
--Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery
http://home.earthlink.net/~mmwilson2/
RAAM FAQ:
http://home.earthlink.net/~mmwilson2/RAAMFAQ/index.html
Mark Wilson
wrote:
>On Mon, 21 Oct 2002, George Caswell wrote:
> Another question - and this is, as I've learned, one of the first questions
>ever asked on RAAM. What sort of gloss-level should the finish have?
Show aircraft generally have glossy finishes--Thunderbirds, Blue
Angels, Snow Birds (Canada, not Florida--did I get the name right?).
Combat aircraft avoid gloss like the plague. Last thing you want it
the glint of you wax job getting you waxed...
Support aircraft, like AWACS, HawkEye, Orion, etc, the guys who aren't
supposed to be directly shot at, tend to have glossy finishes, while
most if not all transport aircraft are flat
>Originally I was going to go for a high gloss, but I actually don't know what
>kind of finish is appropriate for an aircraft. (I do consider a Valk to be an
>aircraft first and a robot second... which is odd, since I've built the robot
>version first... unless you count my old Macross kits, in which case I first
>built a Gerwalk... Valkyrie with an identity crisis. :)
Herein lies the rub: These are anime aircraft, where normal rules
don't apply. There are no pure white combat AC, not red or blue.
Considering the paint scheme does nothing to hide a Valkyrie, it is
fair to say a gloss or semi gloss finish (leaning towards semi gloss,
which is harder but more in scale) would be perfectly acceptable.
Giuliano Moschini
Don't you think?
-Giuliano
George Caswell
>> My plan so far is to coat the too-bright areas with future mixed with
>>tamiya smoke (mixed thoroughly! I've learned the hard way what happens when a
>>mix like that isn't mixed thoroughly enough) and possibly some clear blue.
>>After that, dull-coat the whole kit again (aagh) and then perhaps go for a
>>semi-gloss finish.
>>
>> I have a few questions. First off, is that likely to work, or will I
>just wind up with yet another mismatched white?
>I cringe at the thought. Successfully applying that sort of coat
>evenly just sounds near impossible. I would strongly encourage you to
>practice on something else before trying it on the kit. Remember,
>with the acrylic base coat, you will not be able to strip this
>"smokey" coat off. You may just end up with a "It was my first
>attempt at applying weathering with an airbrush/paintball gun" type
>results, so be careful.
Hrmmm...
How does weathering save the day? What's likely to go wrong with my plan?
(It would be a low concentration of smoke mixed in with future, applied over
several coats, if that helps... I might actually be learning a little
patience in my paintjobs! :) ) And is a paintball gun -really- the wrong
choice for simulating the look of weathered panels? What if I loaded black
paint into my nose and sneezed it onto the model? Does snot make a good flat
base?
(Unless you're right, and weathering is the answer, after all, my only
other option is to strip the paint and re-paint the whole thing... and even
if it weren't for the decal problem, I'd need to figure out just how to
replicate the look of the other parts without applying a metric buttload of
white acrylic over a coat of Mr. Surfacer...)
(...I wonder if I could do this by dipping the part... Nah...)
(I think my Ingram would make the perfect victim-er, volunteer for this
kind of test... muhahahaha!)
(When that guy told me it was pretty good for his first attempt I really
wanted to say, "Yeah, I suppose, but it's still salvagable. But you should
strip it down, repaint it, and apply the Sheridan Tiger decals left over from
the other kit.")
> > Another question - and this is, as I've learned, one of the first questions
> >ever asked on RAAM. What sort of gloss-level should the finish have?
>
> Show aircraft generally have glossy finishes--Thunderbirds, Blue
> Angels, Snow Birds (Canada, not Florida--did I get the name right?).
>
> Combat aircraft avoid gloss like the plague. Last thing you want it
> the glint of you wax job getting you waxed...
>
OK, so for a scale model of a jet fighter that's been in service for some
amount of time (perhaps as much as, but probably no more than a year and a
half) would that be a flat coat or semi-gloss?
Also, I've been looking at F-14 pictures to try to find a useful reference,
and most of them seem quite dirty, especially around the variable-geometry
wings. How much time in service does it take for an aircraft to get like
that?
> >Originally I was going to go for a high gloss, but I actually don't know what
> >kind of finish is appropriate for an aircraft. (I do consider a Valk to be an
> >aircraft first and a robot second... which is odd, since I've built the robot
> >version first... unless you count my old Macross kits, in which case I first
> >built a Gerwalk... Valkyrie with an identity crisis. :)
>
> Herein lies the rub: These are anime aircraft, where normal rules
> don't apply. There are no pure white combat AC, not red or blue.
Yeah, Roy's got some real "shoot me" colors goin' on. :) I think Hikaru's
the only one who even approximates low-visibility (white-ish aircraft, often
done in a gray tone, and just a little bit of red). How high-visibility are
the browns seen on Kakizaki's (and most other) VF-1A's, assuming atmospheric
flight on Earth? I know these things don't matter, I'm just curious.
But still, even if Roy's done everything but send up signal flares from his
fighter at 30 second intervals, it's an aircraft, and I'm going to do the
matching fighter model as an aircraft (my own amateurish attempt at something
that would fit in with the 1:72 jet aircraft section, if it weren't marked in
colors to blind the VF-84, and not as science-fictiony), and I'd like the two
to match to a certain extent (major structural and proportional differences
notwithstanding).
That reminds me: What is the "VF" for in those squadron IDs? I know it
doesn't mean what I associate normally it with. :)
> Considering the paint scheme does nothing to hide a Valkyrie, it is
> fair to say a gloss or semi gloss finish (leaning towards semi gloss,
> which is harder but more in scale) would be perfectly acceptable.
>
OK, what's the best way to go about semi-gloss, assuming I've done a
flat-coat for another round of pastel weathering first?
---GEC
New projects page: http://home.attbi.com/~sieg_haro/
Mike Rybak
"Mark Wilson" <mmwi...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:mb59ruclifbgvuoll...@4ax.com...
> > Another question - and this is, as I've learned, one of the first
questions
> >ever asked on RAAM. What sort of gloss-level should the finish have?
>
> Show aircraft generally have glossy finishes--Thunderbirds, Blue
> Angels, Snow Birds (Canada, not Florida--did I get the name right?).
>
> Combat aircraft avoid gloss like the plague. Last thing you want it
> the glint of you wax job getting you waxed...
I've always thought that the Valkyrie paint schemes were inspired by the
"Hi-vis" U.S. Navy schemes of the 1960's and 70's, though. (Focker's Jolly
Roger scheme definitely is). Those schemes were typically a gloss gull
gray over a gloss white, with various colorul stripes, squadron markings,
etc. So, in keeping with the inspiration, I'd go with a gloss finish on the
"hero" Valkyries. The tan/white VF-1A and overall gray VE-1 schemes seem
much more like typical camo schemes, so there I'd go with a flat finish.
I agree with Mark, though- a high gloss looks out-of-scale in 1/72. I use
something like Pollyscale "Satin Finish," which looks glossy, but not TOO
glossy.
Futari-G
George Caswell wrote:
>That reminds me: What is the "VF" for in those squadron IDs? I know it
>doesn't mean what I associate normally it with. :)
>
In the Macross world, I always thought it meant "Variable Fighter". I
don't know what they stand for in real life, though.
Jeff
--
"Shared pain is lessened, shared joy is increased.
Thus do we refute entropy."
Jeff's Waste of Bandwidth, slowly turning into Futari Creations:
http://home.earthlink.net/~futari/main.htm
Nick Wesson
George Caswell wrote:
>
>
> That reminds me: What is the "VF" for in those squadron IDs? I know it
> doesn't mean what I associate normally it with. :)
>
VF is a US Navy code - it means "Heavier than air" "Fighter". I'm not sure how V
got associated with heavier than air, but it did at some point during or just after
the first world war. I'm in Kingston and all my books are in Toronto, so I can't
look up the exact date. Some other codes I can think of are:
A for attack
M for marines
P for patrol (I think).
So VMFA-212 (just pulled them out of google) is a Heavier than Air US Marine
Fighter Attack squadron.
Nick Wesson
Clifford Yeung
>
> George Caswell wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > That reminds me: What is the "VF" for in those squadron IDs? I know it
> > doesn't mean what I associate normally it with. :)
> >
>
> VF is a US Navy code - it means "Heavier than air" "Fighter". I'm not sure how V
Aren't all aircrafts heavier than air :)
Best regards!
Cliff.
Mike Rybak
"Clifford Yeung" <ye...@zk3.dec.com> wrote in message
news:3DB55202...@zk3.dec.com...
> Nick Wesson wrote:
> >
> > VF is a US Navy code - it means "Heavier than air" "Fighter". I'm
not sure how V
>
> Aren't all aircrafts heavier than air :)
>
No, not necessarily. The US Navy used a number of dirigibles between
the world wars. They were kept aloft by helium, which is lighter than air.
(Although technically one could argue the craft itself is made of materials
that are heavier than air, only the gas is lighter) .
Thomas Hamann
enough ('cause everyone knows fish don't talk), said:
>On Mon, 21 Oct 2002 18:20:37 GMT, George Caswell <sieg...@attbi.com>
>wrote:
>
>>On Mon, 21 Oct 2002, George Caswell wrote:
>
>> Another question - and this is, as I've learned, one of the first questions
>>ever asked on RAAM. What sort of gloss-level should the finish have?
>
>Show aircraft generally have glossy finishes--Thunderbirds, Blue
>Angels, Snow Birds (Canada, not Florida--did I get the name right?).
>
>Combat aircraft avoid gloss like the plague. Last thing you want it
>the glint of you wax job getting you waxed...
>
>Support aircraft, like AWACS, HawkEye, Orion, etc, the guys who aren't
>supposed to be directly shot at, tend to have glossy finishes, while
>most if not all transport aircraft are flat
>
planes...
Space craft...usually use glossy finish in *reality*. For some reason
they often do not use glossy finish in *fiction*...why is beyond
me...probably for the military look... Not that it serves for anything
in space.
You'll also want to avoid dark colors on space craft like the plague,
because you don't want your space craft to transfer heat like some
kind of giant heatsink which at one moment fires the electronics
inside and the next moment freezes them close to absolute zero.
Only use dark colors for parts that are meant to transfer heat
(exhausts, heat shields, solar panels, etc.).
Most space craft are white (to keep heat & cold out). Some parts may
be covered in gold foil (same reason as white, but works better (also
damages easier due to being foil)).
The light colors also serve to heighten visibility (consider a dark
blue space craft on a spacy background...).
>>Originally I was going to go for a high gloss, but I actually don't know what
>>kind of finish is appropriate for an aircraft. (I do consider a Valk to be an
>>aircraft first and a robot second... which is odd, since I've built the robot
>>version first... unless you count my old Macross kits, in which case I first
>>built a Gerwalk... Valkyrie with an identity crisis. :)
>
>Herein lies the rub: These are anime aircraft, where normal rules
>don't apply. There are no pure white combat AC, not red or blue.
>Considering the paint scheme does nothing to hide a Valkyrie, it is
>fair to say a gloss or semi gloss finish (leaning towards semi gloss,
>which is harder but more in scale) would be perfectly acceptable.
>
I believe you're right; GLOSS or SEMI-GLOSS is the best. Remember, the
VF-1 is a space capable aircraft, so white is the best color
Also, weathering...is NOT a good idea. Your typical space craft has to
be as clean as possible before launch. In vacuum, the smallest speck
of dust can be fatal (and there's already enough crap in space),
especially if it's INSIDE the space craft. Once your VF-1 leaves the
atmosphere, all air etc. that is in contact with the vacuum of space
(which is not a true vacuum, BTW), the little bits of dust will be
sucked out of the VF-1 together with the air, with enough force to
damage something.
So unless you VF-1 returns from combat in space, do not weather it
(except on the obvious places: heat shields, exhausts, afterburners,
etc.).
--
My website: http://evilskylark.tripod.com/
Zoidfans Web Board: http://server1.ikonboard.com/Zoidfans/
George Caswell
> >> Another question - and this is, as I've learned, one of the first questions
> >>ever asked on RAAM. What sort of gloss-level should the finish have?
> >Combat aircraft avoid gloss like the plague. Last thing you want it
> >the glint of you wax job getting you waxed...
> >
> >Support aircraft, like AWACS, HawkEye, Orion, etc, the guys who aren't
> >supposed to be directly shot at, tend to have glossy finishes, while
> >most if not all transport aircraft are flat
> Space craft...usually use glossy finish in *reality*. For some reason
> they often do not use glossy finish in *fiction*...why is beyond
> me...probably for the military look... Not that it serves for anything
> in space.
My perspective: Your typical starfighter (Valkyrie, X-Wing, etc.) is an
aircraft that flies in space. It's a part of how they look, and how they
operate, thrusting, banking, what have you. In the case of the Valk I think
it goes a bit deeper - the design is an aircraft, which happens to be capable
of flying in space (just as it also just happens to be capable of transforming
into a robot and, I understand, operating under water), rather than a
spacecraft which happens to be capable of flying in the air. Because of all
this, I think I'd like to decorate it as an aircraft - hence my line of
questioning about actual aircraft paint schemes.
Also, given that the Valks are based on Supervision Army technology, I tend
to assume they have more sophisticated methods of regulating temperature than
the paintjob.
A flat coat would be the easiest thing in the world for me to apply to the
model, and it certainly is a look with its own appeal. (I think it's
generally a good look for robots.) I guess my final decision really isn't
going to be based on the real-world combat aircraft question, but I would like
to consider it at least.
---GEC
New projects page: http://home.attbi.com/~sieg_haro/
Nick Wesson
Mike Rybak wrote:
>
> No, not necessarily. The US Navy used a number of dirigibles between
> the world wars. They were kept aloft by helium, which is lighter than air.
> (Although technically one could argue the craft itself is made of materials
> that are heavier than air, only the gas is lighter) .
By definition a lighter-than-air craft is one that is lighter than air.
The all up loaded weight of the craft must be lighter than air or its not going
anywhere, right?
Lighter-than-air carriers....that's so neat....only mecha are better....
Nick Wesson
Mark Wilson
wrote:
>
> A flat coat would be the easiest thing in the world for me to apply to the
>model, and it certainly is a look with its own appeal. (I think it's
>generally a good look for robots.) I guess my final decision really isn't
>going to be based on the real-world combat aircraft question, but I would like
>to consider it at least.
>
>---GEC
>New projects page: http://home.attbi.com/~sieg_haro/
>(M-x depeche-mode)
>Itchin' for more Hasegawa goodness!
If it helps any, I did all my old Valks in flats. When I do them
over, I'm leaning towards the gloss/semi gloss. The flat just doesn't
look right.