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Description
After a lot of lessons were learned during the first 6 years of the war, designers of the スカイリィ (Skyly) factory took a bold decision: instead of refining or upgrading an existing fighter plane they would blend together the best designed bits of the top-end fighters of that period, no matter what nationality, to build the ultimate prop fighter. The J2 was the result. Pictured here is the J2V2 version, intended for use with the JNAF but also in service with the JAAF, which had added wing tip tanks to increase an already impressive combat radius.

Some games and movie titles often inspire when it comes to 'what-if' aircraft. The anime (and novel/game/manga) Sky Crawlers is certainly one of those. So, me being me, I flipped that around and used an actual design from the anime and turned it into a what-if, in this case I used Bandai's 1/72 Skyly J2 and gave it the Japanese Army Air Force treatment. You can tell how well designed this kit is (for those of you who build their Gundam kits this is no surprise) by the fact that during this build only two tiny drops of glue were used, and those were for the German fuel tanks that I added to the wing tips. Those tanks came from the spares box, as did all of the decals. Painting and decal placement is based on nothing but imaginative guesswork.

Description
After a lot of lessons were learned during the first 6 years of the war, designers of the スカイリィ (Skyly) factory took a bold decision: instead of refining or upgrading an existing fighter plane they would blend together the best designed bits of the top-end fighters of that period, no matter what nationality, to build the ultimate prop fighter. The J2 was the result. Pictured here is the J2V2 version, intended for use with the JNAF but also in service with the JAAF, which had added wing tip tanks to increase an already impressive combat radius.

Some games and movie titles often inspire when it comes to 'what-if' aircraft. The anime (and novel/game/manga) Sky Crawlers is certainly one of those. So, me being me, I flipped that around and used an actual design from the anime and turned it into a what-if, in this case I used Bandai's 1/72 Skyly J2 and gave it the Japanese Army Air Force treatment. You can tell how well designed this kit is (for those of you who build their Gundam kits this is no surprise) by the fact that during this build only two tiny drops of glue were used, and those were for the German fuel tanks that I added to the wing tips. Those tanks came from the spares box, as did all of the decals. Painting and decal placement is based on nothing but imaginative guesswork.