It's back to the AK47 front now that the Picts have been sorted, so I thought I'd kick off with the helicopter gunship that I need for the dictatorship army. I thought about using the diecast Mi24 Hind that I found on Ebay but have decided to try a conversion of another Nubee Mil Mi4 Hound kit into something less up to date. This seemed like a good idea but wasn't going to be easy.
The problem was how to model the weapons pylons for the rocket pods but I had a stroke of luck when I dusted off the box containing the kit bits. I had saved a leftover sprue of undercarriage parts from the Il-28 Beagle kit that I build a couple of weeks ago, amongst which was a strut for the nosewheel. When inverted and attached to the side of the helicopter this was a perfect rocket mounting platform.
Luckily, I had a second Beagle kit in the loft so retrieved a duplicate undercarriage oleo leg from that to match with the one I already had. With a bit of drilling and some superglue, these attached smoothly to the side fuselage of the chopper. I then added the rocket pods from a 1/144th scale Frogfoot kit which I paired up using some plastic rod.
Thus far, I'm pretty pleased with the results. I've added a nose mounted heavy machine gun to the underslung gondola, which is what it was originally designed for, and have a readily converted Peter Pig door gunner to add in the left hand side cargo door for a bit of additional firepower. I should get the rest of the model built by the end of the week, ready for painting up over the weekend.
I have a game lined up for the beginning of November so need to get the army finished buy then....!
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