Work In Progress

That's what I call box art!!

It's your model, so by all means do that if it makes you happy, but I've never seen any evidence of it, or reason to think the white was see-through. Increasingly grimy and dirty, yes, as time went by, and with bits flaking coming off as time went by. But not being translucent at the point of application.

The only benefit of the Merlin's odd prop rotation by British / French / Russian standards was proabbly from the point of view of the USAAF, in that it conformed to the US standard, as American props generally go the 'wrong' way round. The last mass-produced piston aero engine with 'correct' prop rotation of which I'm aware is the delightful Russian Vedeneyev M-14P geared radial and its siblings, which I think is still in limited production.

I've never seen any reason to doubt that being red dope. Something that's going to be shot away regularly isn't worth doping and then finish-painting during types of active service where frequent contact witt the enemy is expected. There probably wouldn't be time, anyway, for the dope to go off properly so that finish-painting could take place.

Yes. That isn't natural weathering of the invasion stripes: it's intervention by the ground crew. You will also see some post D-Day USAAF aircraft with the white painted over with a darker colour on the upper-surface stripes. Note that the lower stripes remained crisp and highly visible.

It's a good kit: it's a lot better than the Frog / Frogspawn and Revell kits, which are the only other 1/72 alternatives to the unavailable Hasegawa kits for a later long-wing B-26. (The Monogram Snap-Tite can be made into a decent early short-wing variant but is also long out of production and hard to find on this side of the Atlantic. I don't know anything about the short-wing Valom kit.) At around a third of the likely price of what a Hasegawa reissue would be priced at, I reckon the Airfix kit is worth the money.

They are often very fragile and delicate, at least the ones I have used which are all 5+ years old. This helps them conform but they are not always easy to apply, especially large ones. Assuming the sheet you use has some spares that you don;t need, I would experiment with one of those on a scrap model first. You cam need to apply a protective clearcoat like Microscale Clear Decal Film to beef them up a little. e.g. g.

Duh, I withdraw my comment. I was looking at the wrong aeroplane

Dark Sea Grey, which is grey. Not Dark Slate Grey, which is green.

I am not the expert anyone would look for on this subject but it is a fair old can of worms. As evidence I note that Ultracast makes five different types of Mosquito wheel/tyre sets, sadly in 1/48 and not in 1/72, but their website does show the variety of permutations. http://www.ultracast.ca/Aircraft Accessories - 48 Scale - Mosquito.htm Probably everyone on here knows this, but for any Mosquito beginners, note also that the type of wheel with a brake drum one side and visible spokes the other side is not fitted in a 'handed' configuration. One of the Ultracast pics shows this well. This makes it pretty hard to tell whether a given airframe has double brakes from a photo if the photo is taken from the starboard side.

I like the current (second tooling) Airfix Mosquito at a bargain price, especially if you have a bunch of Falcon canopies stashed away or don't care too much about the viewability of fine detail in 1/72 interiors. But you don't have to pay anything like the current new price for for them. KingKit and other dealers usually have a bunch for sale at about £7-£8. The decals in the older releases are often fairly underwhelmng, but surely you won't be using kit decals anyway. It's perfect for a wheels-up on-stand model, if you like that sort of thing. Reflecting Graham's caution, the inaccuracy of the Tamiya fin/rudder has been verified by Jennings Heilig by independent measurement of a surviving airframe. See illlustration with dimensions here (sorry for the verbosity of the link, but that's Google searching Google Books for you...) https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dKPvCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT26&lpg=PT26&dq=heilig+tamiya+mosquito+fin&source=bl&ots=UBiALYf1KN&sig=97VawgUKfXXlqni6njGP6XEUHbo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwix46baoebZAhVJJ5oKHUxvBOEQ6AEIRjAG#v=onepage&q=heilig tamiya mosquito fin&f=false It doesn't bother most people and if you're one of them then no fix is needed. Personally, on the 1/72 Airfix, in addition to the points Graham notes, I am in favour of adjusting the dihedral slightly at the outboard of the nacelles, as it always looks as if it needs just a touch more. Only a touch, maybe a millimeter under each wingtip. I doubt it is high on the list for replacement as it is basically accurate, the surface detailing is mostly fine, the moulds seem to be OK still, it clearly still sells, and is therefore solidly in the profit-making phase of its life. There are far higher priorities for Airfix in terms of new tools, from the point of view of modellers and the company alike.

https://www.hannants.co.uk/product/TM32059

I think you're answering points no-one has made: I can't see anyone in the thread saying it would have produced a vast increase in numbers of Hurricanes, or even that that would have been desirable. All I said was "it would have been a much cheaper aeroplane and more quickly produced, with a far lower parts count." Fewer man-hours, fewer parts, less money. As reflected by the fact that welded steel tube has survived against all available options as an economical, practical fuselage technique in the small-volume end of aircraft construction, and continued in industrial aircraft production until the end of the '80s. Whereas the Hawker system, as far as I can see, died out with the Hurricane (and has been a significant obstacle to the economics of Hurricane restoration ever since. As Tony Ditheridge of Hawker Restorations puts it, the Hurricane compared to the Spitfire is "the more complex of the two and requires far greater skills and resources to restore... It takes some 26,000-29,000 hours to return a Hurricane to airworthy condition, at a cost of approximately £2m". The complexity of the fuselage construction is by far the greatest source of that difference and consequent cost.

You might be surprised: people don't build successful unlimited competition aerobatic machines in a haphazard manner, and such methods worked welll at the highest levels until the modern composites revolution. Welding jigs are of course also easily made of many other materials. Welded steel tube fuselages worked pretty well in the high-speed Yak-1 and Yak-7 fighters, and the somewhat lower performance Wirraway. It's clearly no cure for other failings, so I wasn't arguing that it would have overcome the Hurricane's aerodynamic limitations, only making the simplicity / complexity point: that through the adoption of an construction method thoroughly documented in the global aviation press, and regarded as orthodox mainstream in the highly visible US aviation market, the Hurricane's extremely complex fuselage could have been made much simpler, with an order-of-magnitude reduction in the component count. Obviously Hawker had indeed trained its workforce for the construction methods it had chosen rather than those of rival manufacturers, but that was a matter of policy rather than force majeure - the potential of welded steel for world-class aviation structures had been clear as far back as the Fokker D.VII, the Fokker influence being one reason the USA took up the technique with such enthusiasm. There was nothing preventing Hawker from adopting welded fuselage frames when they transitioned away from the timber-framed Sopwith tradition during Horsley production. If they'd done that, they could have used it for all of the Hart and Fury families if they'd wanted to, which would have made it a breeze for them subsequently to build Hurricanes that way. The Wikipedia entry for Camm says that he and Sigrist cooked up the jointed steel tube structure in 1925 "using cheaper and simpler jointed tubes, rather than the alternative welded structure." I just can't see where the simplicity and cheapness appear in such a high parts-count system, though as I mentioned above, it does enable smallish damaged sections to be unbolted and replaced without welding.

I would be going with insignia blue I think. It's not much but I found a reference to a old "recall" USN signal flag here, blue and white curiously there is also a flag with diagonall blue stripes on white, but that's listed as something different "Number 6" https://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/us^nvsf2.html