My son, Robert (17), has a PSP game called Heroes of the Pacific. One of the planes you can “unlock” during the game is a Yak-3 in winter camo. He used the 1/48 Eduard Weekend Edition to build the plane from the game, and added skis from the spares box from Accurate Miniatures Yak-1 with skis.
Eduard takes some of their kits and boxes them with no PE, only one decal selection, painting guide on the box artwork- basically a very simple but well engineered kit, theory being you can build it in a weekend. I love them- they’re a great bargain- usually about US$12.
Watch out, Jon. he’ll be through your Spitfire and P-40 stash in no time at all! Great looking model! So if he can do that in a weekend, how come I’ve been working on this TSR.2 for a month and a half? It came without photoetch too??[%-)]
Your son gets a high five for the model. I am curious though Jon… does he have a sense of humor similar to yours? Can we expected to have him romping through the forums witha lamp shade on his head too?[;)] Should make for fun times[:D]
i think that game might be bad. pretty sure that yak-3’s never came in winter camo and fairly sure that they never came with a ski undercarriage.
get him a copy of il-2+pacific fighters and a computer that can play it. you probably already have the latter since my 8 year old pc can run just fine.
one is eastern front germany+finland vs the russians, the other is allies vs the japanese. historically accurate to the point of being educational and brutally realistic (if you want it to be). ridiculous number of aircraft with individual models of each one. (that means mustangs and spitfires too.) you can also install them on top of each other and take on il-2’s in a zero if you want. both are actually more or less old news so they’ll usually be on the bargain shelf of mostly any videogame store that has pc games priced around $10.
the graphics aren’t half bad either:
incidentally, you can keep flying as is in the image above. if you want to bother trying to land an me262 with a missing engine that is. [:)]
Well, let me put it this way. My wife is more clever than I am, my father-in-law has more “bite” to his sense of humor, and, well, you know how I am. My son got equal parts from all of us, plus some Larry the Cable Guy and Ron White thrown in, and a dash of his own humor too. My humor is kinda goofy funny- he’s just plain funny. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him on his own version of Blue Collar Comedy Tour one day!
Seeing how much joy he gets out of modeling has had an effect on me, for sure. He doesn’t build for accuracy or detail or so many of the things that we often obsess over. Nothing wrong with that for sure- but it’s neat to get his perspective. It’s just for fun- pure fun.
He’s about a third of the way through an F-5E we got for him yesterday. It’s going to be orange and black and have his school mascot on it. [;)] Funny how we can often learn from our own kids, huh? [:D]
You need to post pics of his F-5, it would be nice to see a totaly different take on things-Gotta love the whatifs.
He did a great job on the yak.
one of the things I enjoy most is watching all three of my kids build-even if they dont use the right color, or dont get em together just right. Still is cool to watch em, gives you a new perspective
Good news, they just released IL-2: 1946, which includes hypothetical X-planes and early jets. It’s $30 at pretty much every game store, and Wally World.
It’s a great bargain, it includes every previous IL-2: Forgotten Battles game, including the Pe-2 expansion.
IL-2 is a great game, a true sim. The faults and problems of flying the aircraft pop up. You can go highly realistic with the engine control as well. Taking off a Me-262 shows why it was very vulnerable on the ground. Take off too fast and the engines burst on fire. They have some aircraft missing due to license problems like the TBF Avenger.