F-94B Starfire

Allen,
Thank you again for making this and sharing it with us! And thank you L'iguane, Mick and Tom.
I am done with the Air File and I am real happy with it! Taking off out of Thule Air Base looking for that Unidentified target. Sure is cold up here!

Sorry I cant share the Afterburnner effect but the Alphasim/Virtavia F11F Tiger FS2004 is a very good price and the effect is just perfect for this bird! My effect is Taxi light actuated.

So we need to put an upload together soon!

Now I want to convert my RC T-33 into an F-94B!
 

Attachments

  • F-94B Thule.JPG
    F-94B Thule.JPG
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Got the aircraft.cfg from you Scale Dail. Ported all of the Take off, Climb, Cruise and Desent and Landing
data taken from F-94B Pilot's Handbook. Will see how it works out.
 
Tried getting flight model to match the rear world book or close to it but NOPE. Where my chute I want out, Oh wait I'm sitting on it. *grab reject handle* :pop4:
 
Couple More

Idaho & Minnesota Air Guard

That does it, I think, for the Air National Guard.

Next some active duty Air Force planes.

Soon. It's raining so I can't go out and play.
 
Blackbird686 said:
Mick -- Those are absolutely gorgeous paints! Do you plan to upload them "soon"?

BB686:US-flag:
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Thank you!

I planned to upload them when the final version of the model is released. That way there won't be any last minute texture mapping changes to deal with. But that probably won't happen, so if version 2 of the model isn't ready when I finish painting, I'll go ahead and upload the skins.

I plan three sets of skins. The Air Guard planes are finished, unless someone comes up with a request for a plane from their local Air Guard unit and can provide photos, with color notes if the photo is black & white, and if there's a unit insignia graphic I can use if needed. I'm presently working on some regular Air Force planes. I have three of a planned four finished. I might finish the last one of those this evening since the ball game I was going to watch has been rained out.There will be some Korean War skins, but I have so much reference material on planes from so many units that sorting it all out and deciding what to paint will be a bit of a chore. And there's a NASA bird that doesn't fit with anything else.

Meanwhile, I know that work is being done on the flight model and the afterburner and maybe some other things, so I'm not in a rush. But I might have the skins painted in a few days, and if they're ready before the final release, I'll put them up anyway for use with the " starter kit" that L'iguane posted.
 
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The model I attached-ed in post #58 should be the last one unless some one finds any bugs that needs to be fixed. The last texture mapping change was done because when I made the horizontal stabilizers bigger it overlapped with a few parts. I didn't see this until I had l'iguane texture.

Been fighting with a new air file still....
 
Allen said:
The model I attached-ed in post #58 should be the last one unless some one finds any bugs that needs to be fixed. The last texture mapping change was done because when I made the horizontal stabilizers bigger it overlapped with a few parts. I didn't see this until I had l'iguane texture. Been fighting with a new air file still....
Click to expand...

That's what I figured; I thought the 3D model was finished, but I wasn't sure if anything else was anticipated.

Thanks for the confirmation.

Good luck with the flight model!
 
Korean War F-94s

Well, I didn't get any painting done last evening but I learned some things. Or re-learned, I should say.

In an earlier post I mentioned that there seemed to have been quite a few F-94 units in the conflict and that they didn't seem to have accomplished much. Last evening I went over my references and re-read an article in an old Wings/Airpower issue and found that my impressions were wrong on both counts.

In fact there were only two F-94 squadrons in Korea, and only one at a time. My quick skim of the references led me astray, as one of the squadrons used flight colors in a rather elaborate manner that suggested squadrons in a group rather than flights in a squadron, and markings standards changed some as the war progressed. That's why my quick perusal gave the impression of multiple squadrons.

As for their accomplishments, I recalled reading in multiple sources that the F-94 was limited to local air base defense because the Air Force wouldn't allow its top secret radar to be flown over hostile territory, lest a shoot-down present the enemy with a radar set, limiting the F-94's combat to attempts to shoot down Po-2 "bed-check Charlies." But that was only in the beginning. Later in the war the F-94s flew night fighter escort for B-29 raids over North Korea. They engaged night flying MiGs and shot some down. Aside from actual combat, on many occasions MiG interception flights were recalled without attacking when their radar controllers learned of the presence of the F-94s. So they actually accomplished quite a lot.

Anyway, it's raining again this morning. If it's still raining when I get back from my mid-day dentist appointment I will start to paint Korean War skins.
 
Two More

OK, here's the first Korean War skin, a flight leader from the 68th FIS.

The 68th had a very unique and colorful way of decorating their tip tanks in flight colors, and I was planning to paint one from each flight, red, blue and yellow. Alas, there's a minor mapping glitch in the rear part of one tip tank that makes it impossible to paint the colors like the68th FIS did. I struggled for hours, pixel by pixel, and finally had to give up.

I found this plane that didn't have the tip tank treatment depicted in a profile in the Squadron Signal book, Air War Over Korea. Artwork is notoriously unreliable ("artistic license") so I can't be sure the plane really lacked the tip tank motif or if the artist just missed it, perhaps working from a photo that had the tanks cropped out.

Since the glitch is on the top part of the rear end of the tank, I'm considering taking a bit of artistic license myself and altering the way the colors go on the back end of the tanks. We'll see about that.

Meanwhile, I'll get started on a plane from the other squadron that fought in Korea, the 319th FIS. Their markings were simple and all their planes looked pretty much alike except for a thin stripe of color on the tail, so I'll only paint one of their planes.

Yesterday I took a break from struggling with tip tanks and painted a NACA/NASA plane, simple and easy but attractive in its elegance.

By the way, after about a gazillion times loading the plane into the sim to check painting progress, I finally noticed a little error in the UI section of the aircraft.cfg file. The file reads Type = F-94B Starfire, but the A and B models weren't called that. Only the C-model, which was originally designated F-97, carried the name Starfire. The early models were just called F-94.

Anyway, here are the NACA plane and the 68th FIS plane. One from the 319th FIS will follow, though probably not today. Then maybe some slightly "artistically licensed" planes from the 68th FIS with their full color regalia.

 
Allen said:
Where is the glitch at? I see nothing wrong with Piglet mapping.
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It's a tiny little bit near the back end of the left tip tank, near the top, on the inboard side. A line drawn through a certain little spot comes up jagged. If I put one pixel of a color in that area on the texture, that color shows up in two pixels on the model in the sim. It's only on the left tank, and I think it's only on the top (I didn't get around to trying that same curved line on the bottom of the tank, where it also was on the real plane.)

I'd post a screenie of it but I've already deleted those texture files.

I don't know if you can fix that sort of thing, or if only Piglet with the source file could fix it. More importantly, I don't know if it's worth the effort even if you can fix it. I think maybe it's not. I remember from when I was working with David, texturing his planes, little glitches like that would come up from time to time and they were a real pain in the butt to fix. Sometimes it took days of tedious fiddling.

It's not like we won't have enough F-94B skins. I will have painted over a dozen when I'm finished, even without one from every flight of the 68th FIS.

If I really feel compelled to paint those skins (and I think I may) I have figured out a way to work around the glitchy spot to produce a motif that's not 100% authentic but very plausible and will look fine on the model. Just gotta swing by the license bureau and renew my artistic license.
 
Update/test time again!

After a crash course in FS04 jet engines I have something that should work. The info from Scale Dail earlier aircraft.cfg was helpful as it showed me what could be done in the config but I had to give up on Piglet's air file. Something about its drag is wrong. I dropped in the stock CFS2 P-38F and started reworking it.

I was able to "persuade" the jet engines to be more J-33-A-33 like but not able to get it fully like how it should be. Likes to over RPM flying at sea level and loss of RPM is still seen at high ALT. Everything else looks to be in the "okay" range.

Includes a checklist with all of the Take off, Climb, Cruise and Descent and Landing info.

Mick
Think I found what you where talking about and fixed it. New model is included.

View attachment 49629
 
Allen;1080221..Mick said:
49629[/ATTACH]
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Thanks! I will try to find time to make another attempt today and let you know how it turns out. If not today, then no later than tomorrow.

Great news about the flight model!

 
Allen, your fix worked!

It may take me a couple days to finish the affected skins, bu I did a preliminary test and was able to put the color demarkation line right there and it shows up properly.
 
OK, the Korean War skins are finished, with a big Thanks to Allen for making it possible to paint the 68th FIS skins accurately.

Here the 68th FIS planes are, with their trim in flight colors, and one from the 319th FIS. They were in Korea longer than the 68th, and after the restrictions were lifted that had made the 68th's F-94 operations an exercise in futility. But alas for us modelers, they painted all their planes the same except for that little tail stripe in the flight color.

Yeah, two flight leaders of Blue Flight. Both are authentic. The one from the 319th was significant, as it scored the first F-94 victory, a night kill of a Lagg-9 over North Korea. Pure luck that I had a good color photo of the 68th FIS plane and was able to us the blue flight leader bands again. The fuselage stripe ending in three different places on the three planes is just how it was. Photos show that there was no consistency with that detail from plane to plane.

Anyone who has a stash of old Wings/Airpower magazine should dig out the April 1988 issue of Wings. A long article about the F-94 in Korea fills most of the issue, and there are scads of color photos. I hadn't read it since it was fresh off the newsstand (who's old enough to remember newsstands?) and I'd forgotten most of what's in it. Many books and articles mention how the F-94 operations of the 68th FIS (who scored the war's first aerial victories in the F-82 Twin Mustang) was hamstrung by regulations forbidding them from flying over hostile territory lest their top secret radar fall into enemy hands. Warren Thompson's article tells of what happened after the restriction was lifted and the 319th started flying bomber escort missions to protect the B-29s from night flying Migs. (There was no radar equipped MiG-15 night fighter, but Russian radar controllers could vector the MiGs to the bombers in conditions of decent visibility.)

OK, I'll be quiet now...
 
Mick said:
OK, the Korean War skins are finished, with a big Thanks to Allen for making it possible to paint the 68th FIS skins accurately.

Here the 68th FIS planes are, with their trim in flight colors, and one from the 319th FIS. They were in Korea longer than the 68th, and after the restrictions were lifted that had made the 68th's F-94 operations an exercise in futility. But alas for us modelers, they painted all their planes the same except for that little tail stripe in the flight color.

Yeah, two flight leaders of Blue Flight. Both are authentic. The one from the 319th was significant, as it scored the first F-94 victory, a night kill of a Lagg-9 over North Korea. Pure luck that I had a good color photo of the 68th FIS plane and was able to us the blue flight leader bands again. The fuselage stripe ending in three different places on the three planes is just how it was. Photos show that there was no consistency with that detail from plane to plane.

Anyone who has a stash of old Wings/Airpower magazine should dig out the April 1988 issue of Wings. A long article about the F-94 in Korea fills most of the issue, and there are scads of color photos. I hadn't read it since it was fresh off the newsstand (who's old enough to remember newsstands?) and I'd forgotten most of what's in it. Many books and articles mention how the F-94 operations of the 68th FIS (who scored the war's first aerial victories in the F-82 Twin Mustang) was hamstrung by regulations forbidding them from flying over hostile territory lest their top secret radar fall into enemy hands. Warren Thompson's article tells of what happened after the restriction was lifted and the 319th started flying bomber escort missions to protect the B-29s from night flying Migs. (There was no radar equipped MiG-15 night fighter, but Russian radar controllers could vector the MiGs to the bombers in conditions of decent visibility.)

OK, I'll be quiet now...
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:applause: Great Job !
 
Blackbird686 said:
Outstanding brushwork, Mick. And historically correct too, just the way I like them. :encouragement:

BB686:US-flag:
Click to expand...

Thanks! You can't see in the screenies, but I picked two of the 68th FIS planes to paint because they had names on the nose gear doors. I picked the third one just because the fuselage stripe was a different length than the other two. I picked the 319th FIS plane because it made the first F-94 kill. I just got lucky that two had blue flight leader stripes in the same place. Lucky because the stripes go in five places on the texture: the two fuselage sides, the bottom, and across the two blow-in doors. Making them all line up was a bit of a chore.

That old article with page after page of color photos was a godsend!
 
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