USKN "Dragoon" fighter

The Dragoon

The USKN (United Solar Kingdoms Navy) Dragoon class fighter is now regaurded as obsolete for frontline service. Designed to operate from the High Space Fleet's carriers the Dragoon features a double engine layout; the upper engine being a space drive, the lower being a jet for use in atmosphere. The design features folding wingtips to reduce the storage space required aboard it's mother ship and twin nose mounted missile hard points.
Although no longer present in the USKN fleets, the Dragoon is still popular with the Local Defense Flotillas of smaller, poorer duchies such as Avalon.

The Model

A while ago I saw a model based on the English Electric/British Aerospace 'Lightning' and suddenly realized how god damn cool that plane looked - particularly the under/over engine arrangement. I spent a weekend in Melbourne trying to find a model without success, then I found one in my local toyshop, and it was on special!

Originally, I'd been thinking about a twin-tail arrangement, sort of like a futuristic Vampire or Venom, but this seemed to work better.

I built the entire model over a weekend. A weekend when my parents were visiting so I had less time to myself than usual, and they were sleeping in my model building room. And I still finished it around noon on sunday.

The conversion is pretty simple. I lopped off the tail end, moved the cockpit backwards and cut the wing tips off. The wing mounted hinges are the wing-tip tanks from an F-104 starfighter with rare earth magnets holding them together. The gun barrels are actually the tails of the Redtop missiles from the Lightning kit. The outboard wings are, of course, from the F-104.

I painted this thing up to match the "Aldiss" using citadel paints and declared it finished. It sort of set the seal on my reputation for high speed modeling.