IPMS doesn't want me, and how to hunt mines from the air

I may be finished with all my Enfilade building, painting rules tweaks etc., early.  Three weeks from the convention and I'm wrapping up the last of my painting this weekend.  One of my jobs is to finish a styrene kit of an Independence class littoral combat ship.  I bought this model because it was available relatively cheap from Amazon, and PT Dockyards discontinued their large, costly miniature. It's been sitting around the last couple of months, but I started working in earnest this week.  I still need to glue on the photo-etched, railings/netting for the flight deck, but then it will be ready to paint. Started working with the photo-etched parts--please shoot me now!!!

LCS 2 from three different views.

This was a fairly miserable model building experience for me. Lots of small, teeny pieces, great details for the kit, but some I just passed on, such as the microscopic three piece life raft racks. I'm really not equipped (or patient enough) to do microscopic.  Even so, despite some, er, um, mistakes, such as assembling the radar mast backwards, the ship looks okay.  The timing couldn't be better because I start deadline today with really late nights starting tomorrow.

CH-53 that comes with Coronado kit.  I stuck it on a 3" piece of brass wire and mounted it on base for a flying Martian (I'll have to figure something out for that lonesome miniature later).

Built and mounted the mine sled.  Painted the base and drenched it in Liquitex Gloss Gel Medium to give it that whale surfacing look.  Connected the copter and sled with eeny teeny gauge brass wire I use for rigging ships.  Yes that is an official wire weight.

One aspect of the kit that may play an important part in our scenario is completing the helicopter-towed mine sled.  These both come with the kit (LCS-5 Coronado by Cyber-Hobby.)  It provides the American player with one more option to work with.  The CH-53 Super Sea Stallion is nicely modeled, but like many things in this kit is needlessly fiddly.  The mine sled is likewise needlessly complicated, using at least ten parts including several photo etched bits.  My hope was to show the sled a bit more submerged, but the idea of chopping down the legs with the cable cutting edges didn't occur to me until it was already assembled.