F-15J "Masotan"

[kapteenipirk]

 

F-15J

What makes the F-15J a bit special is that it is a Japanise license built version of the good old Murican eagle. And this particular F-15 is even more special, but we'll get to that later.

 

 

This build was originally supposed to be a 1:1 replica, but it ended up being quite a bit bigger as i wanted to stick with the engine design on this one...plus, i figured the size would give more room for detail, and would set this apart from the usual 1:1 replicas seen these days.

I basically started by first building the engines, witch gave me a pretty good idea on how big the rest should be...tough not good enough as i had to extend the fuselage after it was already completed, as the wings didn't fit at all.

Even tough the fuselage looks simpler, it was a lot trickier in a lot of areas than the Draken, minus the cockpit, witch is built pretty much the same way as the one on the Draken. All the lifting surfaces where pretty easy to do.

Id say i nailed the look and detail pretty well, but unfortunately the flight side of this aren't as good. The aircraft is pretty slow in low altitude and is a bit unstable and quite a handful when it comes to landing. I suspect ive misaligned some few parts, that have then thrown the COM or COL by a hair. This can best be seen when you roll the aircraft, it likes to yaw quite a bit on it's own when doing that. The fact that the yaw on this one is over responsive doesn't help either.

But there is one thing that has to be said, it has some really amazing STOL capabilities.

 

As an extra bit of detail, i decided to use some very light tweackscaling and painting to finish the look, basically they are only used on the roundels, numbers and the airbrake. And since this is a special F-15J, i taught it deserved this extra detail.

 

Here are is bunch of extra screenshot's

Spoiler

A closer look at the aircrafts number "999" and the odd little detail on the nose. You can also see other smaller details, like the antennas, pitot tubes, and the little "hole" for the 20mm cannon. I did think about adding some lights using Airplane+, but taught it was perhaps a bit too much.

 

Unfortunately, unlike the Draken, or some other aircraft, the canopy has very minimal frames, witch makes the open canopy on this one look a little too open, but i wanted to make a well detailed cockpit interior, so i stuck with it. I also added a little "rim" around it to try and make it look a little more full.

 

A look at the top side-

 

A look at the side. You can see that the rudder and intakes a slightly different than in American F-15's (or at-least most).

 

I ended up using quite a few of those long thin intakes around the rear.

 

Minus the crazy shaking, you can get a pretty nice pilots perspective by aiming the camera at that weapons sight/hud, and zooming in.

I tried to even nail some of the color differences in the dashboard.

 

A better look at the cockpit.

 

It was surprisingly hard to get a good angle at the pilot's seat, especially with all the camera shake.

 

Tough it may be a handful when landing, it certainly does it well when under proper control, as it tends to lose speed really fast, allowing for some really short landings.

 

Gotta see the underbelly as-well.

 

Overall im very happy with the end result even tough it tends to have a mind of it's own mid flight. But, considering what makes this special, id say that seems about right.

 

 

Now, some of you may have caught the clues, the name, the number, and those weird round details on the nose.

Well, let me present to you,

Masotan

 

At first i was very intrigued by the Dragon Pilot, but didn't pay that much attention to it...but, recently i got too curious and decided to watch it, and boy did i enjoy it.

After my first watch, i really wanted to give ago at creating Masotan himself

Definitely not your normal KSP build, but despite that, id say it was a surprisingly amazing success, as i got him to fly in the first test flight. Even the more major changes/additions to realism didn't keep our friend grounded.

I mean...i've always said that i can get pretty-much anything to fly in this game, but i definitely was not expecting that.

 

 

The biggest worry for me was the lack of elevators, so in the firs version i added some canards at the back and made the sky colored to "hide" them. It worked, but i wanted to see if the canards would still give enough control if they where clipped inside the armor, weirdly it still worked just as fine.

My other worry was a lack of wing area and lack of a rudder, but seems the armor filled those gaps quite nice...plus, Masotan isn't all that big nor heavy, so i guess there never really was anything to worry about.

To make flight possible, i decided that i should simplify some of the elements in the armor, and that i should stuff proper engines in it.

 

I actually started the build by first creating a model of Masotan without the armor on.

I just used the F-15's nosecone as a thing to scale things from.

 

 

As a bit of a bonus, i wanted to design Masotan to be as posable as possible with minimal editing needed. Minus a couple spots, everything rotates quite nicely without creating too many giant cracks.

The pick above is an example of one of the poses i created using the base version. Just some rotating, and no offsetting of parts.

 

 

And just for the heck of it, and to sort of complete the set.

All the armor ready to be installed.

 

Here are some more picks of Masotan buzzing around the KSC.

Spoiler

Unfortunately the landing-gears do stick out a bit, but i didn't want the risk of them not being able to support Masotans weight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Masotan has a lot of the same flight characteristics  as the F-15J, it's a little unstable with OP Yaw, and it has amazing STOL capabilities. So, again not for a beginner pilot.

 

Technical specks (F-15J):

Top-speed: 125m/s.

Stall-speed: 27m/s.

Length: 27.3m

Wingspan: 20.4m

Height: 7.7m

Mass: 48.1 tons

Parts: 238

Mods used: Tweakscale and DCK for modded version.

 

Technical specks (Masotan with armor/flight gear):

Top-speed: 83m/s.

Stall-speed: 28m/s.

Length: 25.9m

Wingspan: 23.1m

Height: 10.9m

Mass: 38.5 tons

Parts: 328

Mods used: Tweakscale and DCK

 

Download link (Pack with F-15J, Masotan, and Masotan with armor): https://www.dropbox.com/s/81m8lcw6u2usbx3/Masotan stuff (KSP).zip?dl=0

Download link (stock, only F-15J): https://www.dropbox.com/s/8k2ch9vhp3kmju5/F-15J _Masotan_ (stock).craft?dl=0

 

 

An there it is, one of my more unique builds, and one of the more fun ones, i hope you enjoy it .

PS. sorry for the lack of a video, but i just wasn't in the mood, and it's also a little hard to do good commentary with a 3D printer going along pretty much next to me.