Well, we have to completely rebuild the flap system from scratch due to new reference, and coltris still have to be done, along with some more minor issues.
Not exactly, as the floats are about 7 feet off the ground. Aircraft like this used something called beaching gear, which is basically the same as detachable wheels. However, these do not have a suspension, as they were only meant to be used to take the plane from water to land and vice-versa: However, the PBM-5a variant, the one I'm currently making, had standard retractable landing gear, so...
So, this took me most of the weekend, but there was a pretty big problem with the Mariner: The tail wasn't lining up with the horizontal stabilizer. After looking at some blueprints, I realized the entire hull aft of the step was swept at too steep an angle, making the tail too tall. So with that, I fixed the height problem one bulkhead at a time and rebuilt the tail from scratch, making the shape much more accurate, especially at the part where the horizontal stabilizers taper into it. More importantly, I realised that in order to make the faired over tail section, I'd have to make the regular tail section first. It's still missing some bulkheads, and the turret is just a quick dummy turret (I'll make the real turrets when I actually start modifying this thing for combat), but it is a lot closer to the real thing. TL,DR: Tail was too tall and the wrong shape, remade it
just curious, how far are you done and if you can a releace guess? so far it looks very promising! (Sorry for bad spelling) and im not asking for you to rush im fine with waiting
It's complicated. The first thing we did was work on the jbeam and programming side, while I took longer to work on the mesh. A side effect of that is that as more reference pops up, the mesh starts to line up less with the jbeam, and the jbeam has to be redone so that it all works okay. Another problem is the landing gear, because at the same time the jbeam has to line up with the real thing, but also be built stronger to be able to actually handle the massive weight and still be able to steer and/or retract, so that is still being reworked. The flap system is also only present in Martin aircraft, which tend to be forgotten (So reference is scarce), and even then still has variations unique to the Mariner itself (Only reference for the actual flap system are pictures from a PBM at the bottom of the sea near Saipan and one assembly line picture). And there's also the fact that I finally did find useful reference for the interior, much better than a lot of the pictures I took, so I also have to change that and revisit the tail again. So yeah, there's a lot of stuff that has to be done. And it can't be released because that stuff's halfway through being replaced, meaning that some parts aren't even currently connected.
