Thanks Don, I appreciate the kind words and encouragement. This thing is kind of taking on a life of its own, I hope I can ride it out
I've been thinking about the landing gear. I would have like it to be retractable. But given that the original model looks like the gear is supposed to piston out, this doesn't seem likely, so I'll settle for having closable doors and removable gears if I can make it work.
The rear legs are housed in very oddly shaped external boxes. The feet of the gear form the doors. So what I have done is to glue a short stub of plastic pipe (drinking straw + lollipop stick) into the main hull, then the landing gear box slips over top of that.
For the front gear, it seems to have to have retract into the narrow space between the two front cannons. For that to happen, the stub has to go inside the nose, underneath the cockpit. So I first performed some surgery to the bottom of the cockpit to give me some space, then added the lip that goes underneath the front cannons. The lip is custom built, since the template's version is... just plain wrong.
