Le Taureau Qui Rit

Hi Marc, I have to admit I had a kind-of gut feeling that the mid-fuselage insert for the Lincoln might be a sticking point with the HK Lancaster. Thanks for confirming that. It seems to me that (perhaps counterinuitively given that one needs to change the number of engines) the Manchester is actually less of a drastic conversion than the Lincoln! As you say, I'm probably better off keeping the HK Lancaster as a Lancaster, and use the (slightly cheaper) and more basic Tamiya Lancs as donors, particularly seeing as they are the kits that Paragon had in mind when they produced their conversions. It seems quite odd to think of the Tamiya Lancasters as being relatively "basic" or old fashioned as I can vividly remember as a youth looking up at the big Tamiya Lancaster boxes that would always be stood quite prominently in model shops, usually fairly near the ceiling and always positioned with their box tops facing into the room as, to my mind at least, the ultimate model kit to aspire to build!

Good Morning all, I have both the Paragon 1/48 Manchester conversion and the Lincoln conversion sitting in my stash. I picked them both up back in the dim and distant past when they used to only cost about £50 each, but they've stayed on the shelf awaiting a time when I would become brave enough to risk attempting a couple of conversions that have become increasingly rare to the point of being borderline irreplaceable if I were to make a dreadful mess of them. Before anyone asks though, I'm not interested in parting with them either! 🙂 My question is whether the HK Models Lancaster 1/48 is a possibility to use as a donor kit for either of these conversions? Also, if a conversion using the HK kit with either of the Paragon sets is do-able, is there any particular point or advantage to choosing the HK over the Tamiya one they were originally designed for? I built a Tamiya Lancaster back in about 1995, and I enjoyed it a lot but even back then it seemed a little long in the tooth. I haven't yet seen the HK Lancaster "in the plastic", so I would be interested in any thoughts anyone has on the matter. 🙂 Daniel

Hi all. I've got the 1/48 scale Alley Cat Vampire Mk.I in my stash and I'd like to back-date it to represent the first production Vampire TG274 as it was in the summer of 1945 when undertaking trials at Boscombe Down. The most obvious thing that would need to be changed is the canopy, which is the later bubble canopy in the Alley Cat kit. Does anyone know where I can find the early type canopy in 1/48? Would the canopy from the old Hobbycraft Vampire I be an option, or is it as flawed as most of the rest of the kit? Also, does anyone know if any other changes would need to be made to the Alley Cat kit to make it into an early Mk.I? Thanks, Daniel 🙂

Excellent! Thank you very much!

Thanks

That's fantastic. Thank you very much. The Air Kruise Dragon Rapides look like they were silver overall (as far as I can tell from the photos I have seen), but I imagine the blue that Air Kruise used would probably have been constant throughout their fleet.

Thank you. I can't seem to find an image anywhere, but at least I've now got another direction to go to investigate.

Hi all, Does anyone have any ideas of the actual colours of the livery worn by Dragon Rapides employed by Air Kruise on their cross-channel service during the 1950s. Pictures here I've managed to find a few photos but only ever in black and white. The best clue I can find is on a postcard which features a cigarette-card style painting of an Air Kruise DC-3 (see here) which (in combination with the black and white photos) suggests something like an Oxford Blue cheat line and Navy Blue lettering but I'm not sure that was also the case with their Dragon Rapides. Any information or information gratefully received.

Based on what I've read in Martin Middlebrook's excellent books about Bomber Command (eg "The Peenemunde raid", "The Berlin Raids" and "The Nuremberg Raid") as well as other sources I can't quite recall at the moment, it's always been my belief that the Mk.I and Mk.III Lancasters had significantly better performance at "high" altitude ("high" in Bomber Command terms ie at around 20000ft) than the Hercules-engined Mk.II Lancasters, both in ceiling and speed. It appears that the Mk.II Lancasters had better performance at lower altitudes (presumably due to the Hercules engines producing significantly more power at lower altitude than the Merlins the other marks of Lancaster employed). On the Peenemunde raid (which was flown at a much lower altitudes than was normal for Bomber Command raids at the time, with some aircraft bombing from as low as 4000ft) the superior low altitude performance of the Mk.II was illustrated by the fact that the first heavy bomber to return from the raid was a Mk.II of the Main Force, which landed back at its base eleven minutes before the first of the pathfinders, having been flown back from Peenemunde in only three hours and ten minutes by a crew keen to get home quickly from the last mission of their tour. With regard to the bomb-doors fitted to the Mk.II, in addition to allowing carriage of the larger types of blockbuster, they also allowed for a smooth fairing between the bomb-doors and the belly or "mid-under" turret that was originally fitted to Mk.IIs. These "mid-under" turrets were for the most part removed to save weight (both of the turret and of the gunner necessary to operate it), which was to prove unfortunate when the German nightfighters started utilising the Schrage Musik upward firing weapons, which would have not have been nearly as effective had the British bombers not had a blind spot directly beneath them. Martin Middlebrook observes in "The Nuremberg Raid" that although the majority of Bomber Command were unaware of the nature of Schrage Musik, the Canadian squadrons operating the Mk.II Lancaster must have had an inkling because by that time (March 1944) they were refitting the belly turrets as quickly as they could.

The point is that the Javelin didn't actually NEED the afterburner on take-off, and it was only there to provide a bit of an extra boost when it was required when a bit higher up, so the lack of afterburner at lower altitudes really didn't matter much. In contrast, the afterburner installed in some versions of the Supermarine Swift wouldn't light above about 20,000ft, which would have been a massive problem in the aircraft's original role as an interceptor, but mattered less when the Swift Mk 5 was was used in the fighter-reconnaissance role which was primarily carried out at lower altitudes where the afterburner deficiency was not such a problem. Most of the early jet aircraft were somewhat restricted on how they could be used operationally (although the Javelin had quite a lot of restrictions, and not just limited to the engines).

Definitely early. It had the early tail and ailerons. I don't think (though I may be wrong) that any Snipes with the revised tail or longer ailerons made it to France before the Armistice, although others may know more. D.

If you can get hold of it there's a Cutting Edge conversion kit for the B-26K (or A-26A as it was renamed during Vietnam) that is a lot more extensive than the Ozmods version, as it provides the modified tail already alluded to, in addition to the wing pylons, a replacement for part of the fuselage top (where the turret originally was), replacement engine cowlings, all sorts of antennae and replacement mainwheels (for some reason the Counter Invader was given new mainwheels which were apparently also used on C-135s and DC-6s). Although all of that is provided, it's still down to the modeller to convert the cockpit to dual control (as is appropriate for the Counter invader) and what changes were made to what was originally the gunner's position seems to be anyone's guess. The instructions of the Cutting Edge set admit that the original Monogram kit is dimensionally dodgy, but take the view that it's something you more or less have to live with and that they did the best they could with a rather sketchy donor kit. All of this said, trying to find this conversion kit is awfully difficult. They come up once in a blue moon on a certain well known auction-site and when they do they usually go for silly money. D.

That is truly one fantastic "Fee". I've got one sitting in the stash awaiting a time when I feel confident enough to give it a go. If mine turns out anywhere as near as nice as this one I shall be extremely happy (not to mention surprised!) Great work. Really superb! D.

Yep! When I was growing up near St Austell the buh-boom that rattled the windows in the frame was how I knew when it was 10pm each night without looking at my watch. That said, the boom we used to hear in Cornwall from Concorde was definitely being made over water. The sonic boom you could hear from Concorde if you happened to be out in a boat and closer to the source was something in a completely different league. I heard it a few times while on a boat and each time it made everyone who hadn't heard it before run up on deck in a state of near-panic as they initially had no idea what had made such a loud bang. D.

I'm not entirely sure that the down-turned wingtips on the TSR2 were really designed to reduce induced-drag due to vortices. An awful lot of the pictures I've seen of the TSR2 in flight shows it with visible vortices trailing back from the wingtips, suggesting that the vortices are pretty intense and powerful (a result of the fact that fairly obviously a pretty big air-pressure differential between the upper and lower surfaces of the wing must have been required to allow such a heavy aircraft to fly with such a comparitively small wing). In addition, the first aircraft to appear with winglets explicitly stated to be present to reduce drag didn't arrive on the scene until at least a decade after the TSR2 (and the first really well known application, the 747-400 didn't show up until two decades after the TSR2). I'm in agreement with mrvr6's suggestion that the downward turned tips are stability related. For various reasons, an aircraft with high wings (eg the TSR2) has greater stability in roll than an otherwise identical aircraft with low wings. Also an aircraft with swept wings tends to have greater stability in roll than a similar aircraft with straight wings. As a result, an aircraft with high-set swept wings will tend to be pretty stable in roll - often too stable in fact, for a combat aircraft, which requires a little less stability in order to allow a rapid and dynamic rate of roll. A solution to this is to give the wing anhedral (a downward tilt), which for various reasons reduces the stability somewhat and counteracts the excessive stability effects of the combination of a high and swept wing. The Harrier's wing is a very good example of this. An alternative to giving the entire wing anhedral is to give the majority of the wing zero anhedral or dihedral, but give the outer wings severe anhedral (as in the TSR2), which achieves the same result. I may be entirely wrong about this being the reason for the TSR2's wing form (particularly when you consider that the XB-70 also had downward-tilted outer wings but due to much more complex Mach 3+ considerations) but that was what I've always thought was an appropriate explanation for it. Daniel