To me, the YF-22 is and always will be the canon airframe for AC2 over the standard F-22. It was a massive bummer that AHL retconned it into a regular Raptor and we never got the true prototype back.

​That nostalgia alone made me grab this old 1/144 Trumpeter kit, and man... what a mistake. The kit is absolute garbage. It sat on my shelf of shame for literal years because almost nothing fit, seam lines were a nightmare, and the vertical rudders were straight up molded with the wrong angles/orientation. This thing just wanted to die in the box as if Phoenix himself double tapped it into a BINGO fireball.

​Eventually I figured I'd stop stressing rivet counting and just salvage it with a fun paint job. And honestly, what’s simpler than painting the whole thing red? So much easier than my last done Aurelian Viggen model.

​For the display base, I went with a little hangar setup. Lore-wise, I picture this as an early phase of the Zone of Endless project before the AI started relentlessly copying Phoenix’s combat data in the skies. It’s sitting in some dark, subterranean rebel hangar hooked up to diagnostic rigs while Grunder engineers run initial avionics calibrations and test the neural link algorithms before clearing the autonomous red devil for actual sortie.

​Pretty happy to finally have this cursed plastic done and off the bench.

Got fired, at least we have 2 ace combat games coming this year (8 and 0) so, as we all said in December, self erasure postponed ( joking) 🥲

Something my brother found, so i lowkey just took it cuz he didnt care for it.

Completely different shapes from one another

Localisation at its finest, lol

(Im sure the English account will probably say something different)

Edit: For context, I’m referring to the description for the plane, particularly for what’s in the second pic

Why are the explosions square?

There I was putting my life on the line only for Punkrock to bail on us 😡

Didn't remember seeing this here so if it has been posted, mods, please delete

Custom painted MiG-29 fulcrum in shadow squadron colors

Thanks to everyone for the ideas of the YF-23 paint; I’ll take several of your suggestions into account.

Also, appart from ZOE, what could COFFIN do that glass canopies can't?

Planes