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Loaded for Bear (Revell 1:72 F-89 Scorpion)


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USAF must have been thoroughly impressed by sporadic successes of Luftwaffe jets using unguided rockets against US heavy bombers in closing days of WW2. Otherwise they would have never developed this monstrosity! Luckily for us the Cold war never turned to Nuclear one and Scorpions never had to engage Soviet TU-95s over the Arctic, where the majority of F-89s spent their careers. I’ve never considered Soviet leadership to be so dumb to send unescorted fleets of heavy bombers with nuclear bombloads across the Artic only to be shot down with unguided, guided and nuclear air to air rockets by radar guided F-89s, but apparently the USAF brass thought differently.

 

Anyhoo, the Revell/Academy kit rates about 3/5 in my book and I definitely won’t be building another one in this life. It looks OK in the box, but if one really wants it to shine, one should invest in Pavla’s cockpit and canopy upgrade set. This one was done mostly OOB with some minor additional work.

Its quite a survivor this one as it nearly ended in trash not once, but twice! Luckily for us Revell’s customer service is great and I got additional parts mailed pretty soon.

 

And here it stands! Red was airbrushed with Revell acrylics and metal was dry brushed with Model Master metalizers of various shades.

 

Just for the sake of comparison I’ve placed some of my other models in order to easily comprehend the size difference between them. And they called it a fighter!?!

 

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Josip

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Superb model and I especially appreciate the pictures with other airplane - the jet is huge ! Next to the mig-21 , it looks like a 48th scale model .  

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great build, I almost trashed my scorpion too (but it was caused because of a bad paintjob I'm correcting now). It's really amazing how big this thing is, I guess most mislead by thinking straight wings=automatically small. Like a F-84, Vampire or similar.

 

Alex

 

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Josip,

 

Great job on the F-89! One of the best nmf models I have seen in quite a while- you say you drybrushed it? If so, could you explain? The Yugoslav F-86D also looks outstanding. Very realistic staining/weathering on the wingtip rocket pods, too! Well done, sir!

Mike

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2 hours ago, Basuroy said:

Superb model and I especially appreciate the pictures with other airplane - the jet is huge ! Next to the mig-21 , it looks like a 48th scale model .  

Sure does.  Mind you, I think the more surprising comparison is with the Mitchell!

 

An excellent set of models.

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On 10/13/2017 at 1:46 PM, Basuroy said:

Superb model and I especially appreciate the pictures with other airplane - the jet is huge ! Next to the mig-21 , it looks like a 48th scale model .  

My thoughts exactly, thanks for posting.

 

Duncan B

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Buy one- get three free! Great collection of builds that could all deserve their own posting. Excellent Scorpion, and yes, what a beast- shaped like a fighter... the size of a Mitchell. Bet they were nimble with those big old outriggers too... :)

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Umm.....Yeah, It's big.

 

If the infamous "Battle of Palmdale" is any indication (Final Score, Navy:1, Air Force: 0), the F-89 may have been hard-pressed to knock down something as big and more-or-less stationary as a Tu-95. On one hand, based on pilot reports i've seen it was a docile and well-liked aircraft, once the wings stopped coming off. On the other hand, from a maintenance standpoint the engines had a nasty tendency to suck up debris from the ground.

 

Finally, as one ADC professional once said, the F-89 was at best an emergency third-string "backstop" defense especially against something faster like a Tu-16, but that was late in its career when ADC was largely comprised of F-101B and F-106 assets.

 

But it sure was cool.

 

-d-

Edited by David H
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Nice builds!  As to size, compare it to the P-61.  And it's job was to be an interceptor, which put maneuverability at less than the No.1 desired characteristic.

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One of the volunteers at the local museum was an retired F-89 pilot. He said it was a miserable plane. He said it was against regulations to roll it and he claimed the C-47 was more maneuverable! But he also went on to say it wasn't all bad, it was reliable and steady in an era where few fighters where.

 

 

Outstanding build! 

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Thank you all. I'm glad that you like it.

As for the other builds I rate the B-25 and MiG 21 far superior models.

And they've been posted here before, but the ammount of daily quality models here is such that one gets inevitably forgotten in a few days.

 

Josip

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