The Ragnarok has a scoop on the underside that is *similar* to the one on the Cosmic Interceptor but not the same (also the Cosmic's scoop is on top). A piece of tubing is provided; originally I thought it was the same 2" PSII tubing but actually it's one size larger, so it'll slide over the body tube. I don't know its numeric designation. It's also somewhat thinner-walled than the body tube. Prospective scratch builders be aware.
Process for cutting the scoop is to apply the piece of skin, then use that as the cutting guide, much like the sausage cut at the aft of the BT.
As shown above, I drew an alignment line on the tube to ensure that the skin was applied straight. Here's the skin on the tube:
Knowing full well that the skin was going to want to lift, I taped the edges down, taking care to only tape of the white extra, and not on the blue skin itself. Time to cut!
The two end cuts were pure freehand. Because the tube was not too thick, it cut through in 3 or 4 passes with a fresh snap-off blade. For the long straight cuts on the side, I taped a piece of cardstock just to provide a bit of a guide to work from. Even though it didn't conform to the tube particularly well (or at all?) it definitely helped make straight cuts down the side.
Here's the cut-out piece.
Although these were some of the cleaner body tube cuts I've made (getting better, slowly), they still naturally needed cleanup. And so, CA was applied around the entire edge, then everything was sanded smooth, hit with black Sharpie, and then another layer of CA. Looking good:
Of course the edges started to lift:
I tacked them down with a bit of CA. They didn't need to be perfect, since they'd eventually be held down by the CA fillets after the model was assembled.
Two coats of Tamiya gloss black were applied to the inside, leaving a small border around the edge for gluing. I wasn't sure it really even needed the second coat; the Tamiya gets pretty good coverage with one, but why not.
Then I started to wonder: how the heck am I going to glue this thing on? TBII on the edges wouldn't be so great since they're CA-coated. And so what I did was this. I applied a heavy bead of TBII around the inside perimeter of the part:
I figured that when I laid it in place, the glue would flow down and make a decent bridge between the BT and the un-CAed parts of the scoop. So I turned it over and placed it down, and then realized that I had forgotten to come up with a plan to hold the scoop in place while drying. In the heat of the moment, all I could think was to tape it down:
The tape did not really hold it in place as tightly as I would like. To be fair, I don't think there is *anything* that could have done so, short of sitting there like an idiot holding it with my hands for 20 minutes while the big glob of Titebond set up. The good news is that the glue did seem to have pretty well secured the scoop to the BT; the less good news is that one of the sides of the scoop didn't quite sit down flush as it dried. In this picture you can see a bit of the TB through the gap:
I decided there wasn't much to be done here, so I just applied my nice CA fillets around all the edges, and as it turned out that pretty much hid the gap in the joint. I would say that when I was finished the scoop was really quite secure. Also, after the CA fillets were applied, the edges of the skin weren't going anywhere. Success!
Oh hey, look, the scoop skin has the same chameleon pattern as the nose cone...