Airframe, Sparrow missiles, Phoenix missiles - Skystriker
Sidewinder missiles - Dragonfly


Skystriker XP-14F
Interceptor-Fighter

The F-14 Tomcat is a Navy jet. No other US service branch ever operated it, in large part because it was designed specifically for use on an aircraft carrier. Now technically, the Skystriker is not an F-14, it's an XP-14F, which could be some Air Force variant of the airframe since it's clearly based on the same jet. But since the Joes have the USS Flagg, and since the Tomcat's airframe is so clearly built for aircraft carrier operations, it's a Navy plane in my Joeverse.

The Skystriker is actually a very good scale model of the Tomcat, in 1/32 scale. The only thing that's really out of scale is the interior of the cockpit, which allows two 1/18 scale figures to sit in it. This custom is mostly about the paint job. Rather than plaster it with all the stickers that came with the original, I used a fairly minimal amount of reproduction stickers and did some painting, adding red and blue to the wings and painted the vertical stabilizers black as they appeared on the box art. This gives it a cleaner look.

The Skystriker being a Navy plane did create a dilemma. Since Ace is a USAF pilot according to his filecard, I was going to have to either give the Skystriker a new pilot, or make a change to Ace's background. Since Ace not flying the Skystriker would be tantamount to heresy, he's now a Navy man in my universe. And since all Tomcats require a RIO (Radar Intercept Officer) to fly in the back seat, I created Scope.

The only non-Skystriker part I used are the Sidewinder missiles. The Sidewinders that come with the Skystriker have extra flangey bits in the middle which don't appear on real Sidewinders, so I prefer to use the Dragonfly version (or a close approximation) when possible. They fit nicely on the Sidewinder's pegs and the colour matches with the other missiles pretty well.

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