Cheers Pete,
to be honest the paint job was rushed and a touch rough as things were going wrong, fingers in the paint, peeling paint, spilled paint pots as the panic of the deadline approached etc. so there are few things left to do telescopic rods on the outrigger wheels, smoke pigments on the nostril gun ports, some more washes to accentuate the grills on the fuselage, fuel cap where there is one on a regular motorbike etc. etc. but hey, I had a deadline to meet, you know the drill, I'll add them laters...

As for a pilot, we're looking at 1/20th scale as a 1/24th can't quite reach and a 1/16 would be just too big, the model is a little bit smaller than you might think, so thanks for the compliment on that score
If I had got my shahit together sooner the idea I had settled on was to use a pilot figure from my Monogram 1/24th Huey and chop off the heads, hands and feet and make a wire and plastic tubed posable skeleton and pad it out with dense cotton/foam carved to a body shape, use thin plastic for the clothes, tape etc. for the belts and straps and glue on the hands, hands and feet so I could make sit with it's feet on the pegs and hands on the handle bars etc. but.... that didn't happen but I guess the benefit is that you can see the details without any "obscurings"  so to speak

Again, just to take you through my thinking on the engineering side of things it's about form meets function, thinking about what these things do and what it takes to make something fly, the first thing to consider is where will it balance, what is its centre of gravity going to be, as the thrusters and/or wings need to be pretty close, ie. the centre of lift needs to be on or just behind the centre of mass, for a stable arrangement, unless you have fancy stabilization software with fly by wire controls then it can be setup unstably like modern fighters ie centre of lift in front of the centre of gravity. On this model the wings are too far forward for a stable flight setup but then most of the lift is generated from the thrusters anyway, the wings are purely for attitude control during forward flight as well as weapons and wheel mounts, the pedals control the thrust vectoring of the exhaust nozzles, the gubbins under the seat is the nitro fuel booster cannister with the relevant pumps. pressure controls and diagnostics board on the left hand side on the right hand side under the seat are the mixture controls for start up and cruise settings and so on, handle bars control the flight surfaces and reaction controls for the hover, thumb trigger on the left hand grip, the right has a thumb joy pad stick to control the gun turret, guided missile controls sit on top of the dashboard, the brake levers control the split aileron air brakes etc. etc. etc. etc.

Also note that this model also has articulated components which also helps the engineering look of it because they actually work, or should I say move, the tail boom has sprung suspension, the pedals and seat are also sprung too and there is also some movement on the handle bars, not as much as was hoping for in the end but hey, anyhow, the main thing is getting the engineering looking right is to consider what it actually might do, first thing is to get the basics sorted and then the rest can fall into place as you drill down into the details, I hope that helps (someone at least )

Anyhow, video coming to show the moving parts