[MOC] Sukhoi Su-57 Felon - Alternate Build of 2 x 31160 Race Plane

[Wurger49]

My Su-35 was extremely well received so I decided to follow it up with the current Russian 5th Generation jet fighter Sukhoi Su-57 Felon, featured in the movie Top Gun: Maverick. 
 
The Su-57 is the first Russian fighter aircraft designed with stealth technology and is expected to succeed the Su-27, and acts as the competitor to US F-22 and F-35. Sukhoi used existing Su-27 airframes for testbeds for various subsystems and concepts, which was reverse implemented to the Su-35 to bridge the gap with existing fourth generation fighters.
 
The aircraft has a wide blended wing body fuselage with trapezoid wings, two widely spaced engines and has all-moving horizontal and vertical stabilisers. I moved the 12x6 wedge plates out to create the blended wing body, with 10x3 curved wedges smooth out the connection from the leading edge root extensions to the cockpit.
 
The aircraft has two separated podded engines and a twin tail. The space between the two engines housed two internal weapons bays, and smaller side weapons bays in fairings near the wing root, I used two technic 1x5 round plates to represent the weapons bay fairings. Internal weapons carriage eliminates drag from external stores and enables higher performance compared to external carriage, as well as preserving the stealth shaping.

A pair of 4x1 inverted curved slopes are used for the rectangular intakes, and the two engine pods are built by stacking plates. The twin tails are brick built, I can’t do the canted version but the horizontal tailplanes are done quite well using different cut tiles.
 
The 45° cut tiles in white, dark azure and dark blue gave me the chance to try out many different splinter camouflage patterns, this time for the original user of the plane, instead of aggressor squadrons.
 
My Su-57 is slightly smaller than my Su-35, but it looks bigger due to the wide blended wing body fuselage, it has a shorter nose for an active electronically scanned array radar, longer engine pods for large internal weapons bays. Like the other models from this series, it’s very swooshabilty.

Instructions are on Rebrickable: https://reb.li/m/217605

 

 

 

 

 

[Max_Lego]

Looks recognisable, but not utterly accurate. I do think the horizontal shape (wing/integral fuselage) of the model can be improved further (especially the rear parts of the wing - the front is obviously tougher).