Are you a fan of historical aircraft and the game Space Engineers? This guide will provide tips and instructions on how to accurately build a scale model of the Soviet LaGG-3 in a lightly-modded setting. Follow along as we document the build process and create an impressive replica of this iconic aircraft.
Introduction
For the past 2 years I’ve been involved in an alt-history modeling project interpreting real historical vehicles in a lightly-modded space engineers server. We’ve attempted to sort of re-live history “from day one” starting with a Wright Flyer sort of aircraft:
…progressing through World War I:
…continuing through the Golden Era:
…And we have now arrived at WWII. The server has paused for a spring hiatus, but I still have no life so I’m going to keep building. I’ve decided to document and share this build and my process in the hopes it might help some other builders with similar goals.
Step 0: Selecting an aircraft
In this server, scaling consistency is very important; in the previous guide I gave an overview of our scaling system. The tl;dr is that we try to stay as close to 1:1 as possible but do allow build scales up to 5:4 (1.25:1). In the same guide I give a very brief overview on a build process, but only on how it relates to scaling, not the specifics of the build itself. This post will be a more detailed look at that process.
Today we’re going to build a model based on the Lavochkin-Gorbunov-Gudkov LaGG-3[en.wikipedia.org] because it’s what I feel like building.
Step 1: Research
🤔hmm….apparently that reputation was something of a misconception. Once again we have the classic debate of the tradeoff in technological vs. industrial superiority. Can a Tiger tank 1v1 a T-34? Sure, all day…but when you can make 10 T-34s for the cost of 1 Tiger, it renders that sort of comparison moot. I suppose you could say this is sort of the aircraft version of that philosophy. Interesting…🤔…let’s read on…
…it seems the aircraft was of wooden construction, designed to be built cheaply and quickly, and constructed using non-strategic materials wherever possible, older low-powered engines, and weapons scrounged from whatever could be found lying around. Very ad-hoc. Very Soviet. I love it! …but they did get shot down a lot. So yeah, if you view it in terms of how it matched up with frontline fighters in 1940-41, it looks pretty bad. But if you view it as an iterative step towards the far more successful La-5[en.wikipedia.org] and La-7[en.wikipedia.org] designs you can see the beginnings of a competitive modern design. Definitely worth a build.
So what are the important details relevant to building a model based on this in Space Engineers?
Most of that can be found here:
Most important things to take away here are the length and wingspan measurements, the crew size, and the armament. As far as other flight model stuff you’re mostly just looking to how it relatively compares to other builds in the server. It would be impossible to accurately model all those little details without going crazy with mods, so there’s a lot of leeway for interpretation in that regard.
Step 2: The “Holy Cross”
Now, build the “Holy Cross” using the length/wingspan dimensions on the wiki:
In the name of the father, the son, and Holy CLANG
I’ve noticed most aircraft set their wings about 1/3 of the way back from the front, so that’s usually how I build the cross. This is just a template for now, but it’s the “full size” of the aircraft for reference. So this is the aircraft in so-called “perfect scale”. Note that it’s likely we end up adding a block or two to most dimensions, resulting in most builds being slightly overscaled but this often helps to preserve other details of authenticity, which is something I discussed in my previous post.
This is where we need to use our mind’s eye to visualize the build. Bring up our 3-view drawing (usually available on wiki but sometimes you need a more extensive google search to find):
Hmm…sort of looks like the bastard lovechild of a Macchi C.202 and a P-40. Maybe a little Bf-109 thrown in there with that motorkanone…actually not a bad looking plane. I love the planform: slightly tapered with a sort of elliptical wingtip, moderate aspect ratio, and almost a WWI era empennage. I think the biggest risk here is that it winds up being difficult to distinguish from some of the other single-engine builds we’ve been cranking out. We’ll have a look at that later.
We move back to our cross and start at the front. For now we just plop down components as we continue to figure out how they’ll fit into the structure:
The nice thing about this plane is the cockpit is set way back in the fuselage giving us plenty of room to play with components up front, although it probably means visibility from the cockpit will be bad.
Fighters that use non-radial engines are always more of a challenge for a couple reasons: Takeshi’s plane parts mod has these wonderful 3×3 cylindrical blocks you can hide stuff in, but lend themselves better to radial engine cowlings than the sleeker inline- or V-engined aircraft, which need to be constructed from vanilla block shapes. I’m getting hung up on this front cowling section and I’ve barely started the build:
Eventually we just earmark it for fine-tuning later and forge ahead. I put the propeller where it’s supposed to go and promise to come back and fix the upper front fuselage later.
Step 3: Taking Shape
There’s plenty of space as far as fuselage length to position them over the engines, however having them exposed is unsightly and ahistorical. Usually we can lean on the cylinder blocks from plane parts mod, although we can’t continue that all the way to the front, so we need a hybrid solution:
So the cylinder covers the engines and (most of) the guns. We need to build out the front later but need a design that allows the weapons to fire unobstructed.
Now hide the rest of the guns with some tapered 1×1 cylinder blocks:
Now the guns are completely “hidden” and contiguous with the aircraft’s conveyor system. We add armor panels to the sides of the cockpit block to simulate uniformity of the fuselage along its entire length. This is terrible for actually being able to see out of the plane but makes the cockpit appear much more authentic, especially when viewed in profile. We’ll discuss cockpit visibility in more detail later.
Continue working rearwards. Refer to the 3-view drawings regularly and just sort of use the general shape of the fuselage to inform your decisions as to how to place slopes as it tapers rearwards.
We make a small canopy “extension” immediately behind the cockpit block using 1×1 face and inverse slope, and we notice the fuselage continues to the rear at the same level as the canopy. So the canopy sort of “steps” the fuselage up a bit. This is terrible for rearward visibility but does allow the installation of armor in that section to protect the cockpit from a rear attack
Notice where the wing roots begin on the LaGG-3. Use other sections of the fuselage as a reference. For example, where the leading edge root meets the fuselage relative to where the engine or armament is. Here is where you generally set in stone how your wings will be scaled. Plane parts mod’s sloped functional wing blocks have a width of 5 blocks, so generally speaking, you want wing lengths of some multiple of that to maximize lift. Decorative blocks can be added but will only add weight and no lift.
So here’s our first problem. The LaGG had a wingspan of 9.8 meters. If we round that up to 10 it’s EXACTLY four wing blocks wide, but we have the extra central block, so we either need to have just 2 functional wing blocks per side or scale up slightly. This is an easy decision. We’ll add 1 block per side and use the half-block wingtips. We also insert these lovely landing gear door 5x3s directly into the wing, courtesy of plane parts mod. Unfortunately this necessitates a broadening of the wing planform compared to the historical LaGG-3. Fortunately I’ve already made the decision to scale up a bit so I’ll add a block or two to the back of the fuselage.
Plane parts mod also has these little sliver blocks you can use to cover the gear doors (which are not physicalized) so you don’t fall through the wing when you’re standing on it. You can make them out on the wing in the picture above. Now is where I generally start hemming and hawing over authenticity, and you can already see this is going to come out a bit “stubby” with these broad wings.
One authenticity/usability tradeoff we are more than happy to make is having the full-size connectors on all these builds. Yes, they’re hideous, but it makes refueling these things so much easier if you can just fuel them from a ground-level large grid connector at an airbase…also helps with transferring cargo/power. They’re easy to cut out later if you want a creative mode-only more realistic looking version. They often create a challenge on some smaller builds but this one mercifully slots right in behind the cockpit.
The rear sections of these aircraft tend to taper down in all dimensions, so I use ARC to enable some granular transitions between block faces. It can take some time fiddling with the different slope options to find something you like. Empennage can be a chance to add some more precious wing blocks to add lift if you can fit them. I’m going for broke here, so I’m stuffing them in the tail. A functional wing block vertical stabilizer is almost mandatory in these builds if you want to be able to yaw the aircraft.
Step 4: Functionality Pass
This aircraft had retractible landing gear. That’s why we had to mess around with those gear doors. Luckily that’s the only complicated subgrid we’ll have on this build.
The gear were located in the wings and retracted inwards towards the fuselage. We use the plane parts wheel and gear motor positioned in the gear door. Make sure you set the limits of the gear motors so they don’t mash the gear into the wings! And add a hefty amount of braking torque to the gear motors as well so they don’t collapse when the plane loses power.
Landing gear can be a funny thing. I generally control them with a timer block, a “toggle” which reverses the rotation of the gear motors and resets their height offset. The gear doors are controlled by an event controller detecting when the motors are within 5 degrees of their final position, then closing the gear doors. There aren’t collision physics with gear doors but I like to make them behave realistically.
For taildraggers, the rear wheel can simply be added as any normal wheel block, and does not need to be a retractable subgrid. This is extremely useful because it can still be used to taxi the aircraft around without the propeller running, and give you a little boost for takeoff power if needed.
Oh, at some point I must have finally finished the upper fuselage behind the propeller but I forgot to take photos. It’s a 2×1 slope tip and 2×1 slope tip transition and after testing it turns out they DONT interfere with the weapons firing 😅. Anyway, now we delete our little stand under the aircraft and set it down on the ground. This one has a pretty steep AoA on the ground….we’ll have to fiddle with the gear height offsets in a minute. But now that we’re on the ground we can test its ground handling characteristics and cockpit setup.
Yeah, as predicted, you can’t see ♥♥♥♥ out of this thing. With wheels on the ground you’re pointing straight up to the sky, can’t see anything on either side of you, can’t line up with a runway or taxiway, and can’t see directly in front of you. Basically when you’re on the ground, you can see everything except the ground. Believe it or not, that’s exactly what we want. Taildraggers IRL famously had terrible problems with forward visibility during taxi operations, especially ones where the cockpit is set as far back as ours. Combined with the armor panels blocking half the visibility out of the cockpit, this is pretty realistic, although annoying. Luckily we allow 3rd person view in the server.
We’ve set up the pilot information system mostly using native scripts. The programmable block directly in front of the cockpit serves as our HUD and above it is the corner LCD running Whip’s Planetary Compass script. I actually rather like this layout, having additional HUD elements outside of the cockpit is something I’ve experimented with in other builds and it works really well on this one. You have to pan the view down a bit to see the less-important panels but the centered 1st person view actually looks pretty good HUDwise, so we can move on
We’ve got some empty space in the tail so we add a couple small hydrogen tanks, hook everything up, add a gyro and a small battery wherever it will fit, fuel it up and take off! When we retract the gear we see this smoke trailing the aircraft. Now, we do have exhaust blocks on the build but this is the wrong sort of smoke. It turns out its a collision issue with the retracted landing gear and the wing blocks. I redesign the slivers covering the upper wing, bump up the gear motor limit a tiny bit and the problem stops. Other than that I’m pretty satisfied with its flight performance. I nerf the gyroscope to about 40%, anything over 50% with an aircraft this light is sort of unrealistically maneuverable.
Part 5: Finishing Touches
Our server requires all aircraft to have a strobe, nav lights, and landing lights, so those get added here as well as fiddling with the cockpit hotbar. I use single air brakes from the plane parts mod as “flaps” hidden in the wings. My hotbar for this aircraft looks something like this:
1. Flaps
2. prop decrease
3. prop increase
4. Engine Switch (timer block)
5. Cruise autopilot (cruise gyro set to pitch -.014, works best above 1500m and 100 m/s)
6. Navigation Lights On/Off
7. Landing Gear Toggle
8. Antenna on/off
9. Battery recharge on/off (effectively serves as a battery switch)
This puts all the controls right at your fingertips. Combat/weapons related controls are in hotbar CTRL+2 but generally are just a single key set toggle fire all the guns.
Final Thoughts
But we don’t agonize over these things. The scale is good, all the important bits are there, and the model quality…..exists. We must move on and to the next build, we’re trying to create as many of these as possible, quantity is far more important right now. We’ll probably stick it in the B-tier replicas. But it was quick at least, it took me longer to make this writeup than it did to actually build the damn plane.
Thank you for sharing this moment with me.
o7
And that wraps up our share on Space Engineers: [Modelling Tips] Sample Build: Soviet LaGG-3. If you have any additional insights or tips to contribute, don’t hesitate to drop a comment below. For a more in-depth read, you can refer to the original article here by picea_scabies, who deserves all the credit. Happy gaming!