Tarkas

Excellent work, and well done for a first attempt at airbrushing. Which decals did you use? I want to get a set for 617 Sqn like yours, but tyr kit I have has on,y a prototype scheme.

Afraid not. AFAIK, both the XL5 moulds and the Stingray kit are long gone. SHame about that...

Obviously a cousin of the other rarely-heard-of reserve Angel -- Concerto Angel. Certain model companies -- Japanese, IIRC -- had translation problems with Destiny being a non-musical Angel (name), and so they re-named her. I remember seeing a kit featuring her and wondering who the heck "Concerto" was...

That's interesting (the race stats), but I must challenge one of them. The Mean Machine did indeed at least one race. Right, SPOILERS ahead! IIRC, the race in question was held in Russia, because the prize was Red Square, and Dastardley was overjoyed to think that he'd won such a prime piece of real estate fair and square -- or as close to it as he ever got; for once, he crossed the finishing line in first place, and hadn't blown all the others off the road. Much to his disgust, what he'd won was a red square (of cardboard, AFAICT). 😁

Oh, yes... Great concert; the music varied from spot-on to a bit off due to a lack of some of the odd instruments Barry Gray used at times, but it was all done with love and enthusiasm. Great night out.

Well, a quick calculation shows that, if the 22-inch Round 2 Eagle model is supposed to be 1/48 scale (which it is), then the length of the Eagle is 88 feet (or 26.82 m). Other dimensions can be scaled from that.

I think that was from the days when all Airfix boxes showed assembled models (not always very well made) for legal reasons. The concept of "no win, no fee" cases for lawyers started off a huge rise in litigation, first in American courts and then all over the place, for all sorts of reasons, real and spurious. The "reason" that got the model manufacturers worried was people (usually parents of kids) complaining (and suing!) because the kit did not contain everything that was in the box painting. All those wonderful Roy Cross paintings were dropped because they didn't just show the model that could be made from the kit. There might be other aircraft in the painting, or a target for a strafing run, or ground crew and their equipment, or whatever. Basically, Airfix and others were scared of having their socks sued off in the legal equivalent of a DDoS attack and so resorted to a WYSIWYG approach for kit boxes -- boring, but safer in litigation terms. It's purely speculation on my part, but the thought comes to mind that the low standard of modelling shown on some of the box photos could have been done deliberately to prevent claims that little Johnny couldn't make a model that looked like the photo! 🙄

If only it were that cut and dried... Forward-swept wings do have some aerodynamic advantages at certain speeds, but they haven't been used much due to aeroelastic problems before tailored composite naterials were available. As is well-known, Derek Meddings "flipped" the wing panels on Thunderbird 2 because he thought they looked better that way rather than for anything to do with aerodynamics -- yet another case of the people on various Anderson series getting things right (and horribly wrong, often on the same craft!) by luck rather than management. Of course, research has since shown that TB2's wings do have a problem at higher speeds, namely that the nose shock impinges on the tips and can cause damage. Getting back to the Victor, the "M-wing" was a potential planform for large supersonic aircraft (bombers and airliners) that cropped up a lot in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The idea was that it produced a decent-sized wing that benefited from the effect of sweep without becoming too long and spindly, and thereby prone to other aeroelastic problems. It should be noted that the usual M-wing design had the forward sweep on the inner panels and the aft sweep outboard. Details of one such project can be found here: https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/armstrong-whitworth-awp-22-m-wing-sst.13319/ There were quite a few others of similar layout.

I had an idea about that, based on what we see on screen and what we don't. Maybe the "conveyor" that carries the pods is made of separate sections for each pod which can move individually or as part of a group. The pods move across until the correct one is beneath TB2, and then the pods on either side move apart -- if, say, pod 3 is chosen, pods 1 and 2 move further to the right as we look, and pods 4 to 6 mpve back to the left -- until there is room for the wings and TB2 lowers itself onto the chosen pod. As for saturnapollo's point about where the legs are... well, that one's not so easy. Except that we have seen the pods move past on screen, so your guess is as good as mine as to how it works. And then there's the fact that the vertical jets used for VTOL (and hovering in episodes like End of the Road) also come out of the leg positions. Guess that was where the model was strengthened and so it was used for everything -- kinda like Stingray's nose, where the depressions were used for searchlights and sting missiles, and were supposed to be intakes for the hydrojets (!). Ah, the marvels of 2060s technology... 😁

Very interesting take on an alternative Interceptor design, and extremely well made. HadesOmega mentions the Millenium Falcon as a design influence; I'd have said the Apollo CSM myself -- which would fit, time-wise -- with a touch of Mike Trim's original Interceptor design, which the model resembles somewhat. But only the maker knows for sure, if he does; strange indeed are the processes of the creative mind. 😉 Anyway, it looks great. Any chance of some other types? Serkan Sen's MiG-37 looks more like a Sky 1 alternative to my eye, but YMMV. I'd expect a Soviet/Russian "assistant Interceptor" to have lots of little engines rather than one big one, and a crew compartment to be based on an expanded Soyuz capsule. Soviet practice was never to reinvent the wheel, so there are components on modern Soyuz craft that date back to Sputnik 1 and Vostok 1 -- it ain't broke, so they don't fix it -- so I could see a UFO-era Interceptor following the same philosophy. Whether you do or don't do more in this vein, what you have done is great work.

That is brilliant! It is so great to see my favourite tankadillo in 3D -- and the evil look in thiose beady little red eyes is just perfect. That was one of my favourite album covers from the golden age of vinyl, back when having two or four (as in Tarkus) large (12 inch square?) panels to do things with gave rise to some amazing pieces of artwork. As you might suspect, my username was based on the album name, but I mis-spelt it 🙄 -- it'd been a long time since I had seen the record. Also, for some reason, I mis-remembered the side sponsons and guns as being large exhaust pipes from its engine, so I had this image of Tarkus as being an armed tankadillo with a huge blown Hemi engine... But enough of that. I repeat that your model is brilliant and the base and name are equally excellent. If you want another "critter" for a diorama, the mechanical pteranadon/whatever looks to be the easiest, but simply recreating Tarkus is a delightful piece of work. Very well done.

Very nice overall, and the F-22-style paint scheme suits it. Now you'll have to go looking for the other "F-19" kit as a mate for it. I think it was by Monogram and it was based on a fictional futuristic aircraft originally designed for a series of trade advertisements (in magazines like Aviation Week and Space Technology) for an avionics/systems company -- it was so long ago I can't remember who, but I do remember seeing the kit box and thinking, "I recognise that!"

Definitely. Purely for interest's sake, the model's length of 340 mm scales up to 119 m or 390.4 feet. The supposedly 1/144 Elevator Cars measure roughly 108 mm in length. Using that as a basis gives an overall length for the Fireflash of 132.2 m or 433.7 feet. To anyone who's seen the shots of TB2 flying along a Fireflash, either of those sounds decidedly short, but that could be chalked up to perspective, at least for some shots. Kallisti is dead right about the production team not caring about continuity that way. Still, it's entertaining to think about it. Against that, the Airbus A380 is 73 m long and the Boeing 747-8 is 76 m long, so 390-440 feet is a reasonable figure for a ;large long-haul airliner, though it wouldn't fit on a modern airport very well, being well outside the "80-metre box" that gives the maximum size of an aircraft for jetway access. But then, "London Airport" doesn't seem to be any known airfield, so it could be something new with facilities modified to take larger airliners.

Lovely re-creation of the World's Unluckiest Airliner, and a highly inventive way to display it. Brilliant work. I'm curious: how long is the aircraft, and how long are the elevator cars? It'd be interesting to know because by scaling up the latter in comparison to the ones that came with my 1/144 TB2, we could get an estimate of how long the Fireflash is meant to be. It'd have a horrible margin of error, like most of these estimates (e.g., the various "lengths" that have been calculated for one or other versions of the Battlestar Galactica), not least because the 1/144 cars don't look like it's possible to get 4 of them into a single pod! But it'd be nice to get an estimate, however rough. Oh, and Gazontipede, thanks for the music. Definitely an excellent accompaniment to this thread.

The grid has always been controversial. My understanding is that it was part of Matt Jeffries' original drawings of the ship, as reproduced in The Making of Star Trek, but wasn't present on the filming models in the way most kits represent it -- that is, as either raised or recessed panel lines. Instead, it was drawn on lightly using a pencil, which made for much lighter lines, to the point where, like the "rust belt", it can be difficult to even see it on the original film. IIRC, it's a bit more prominent in the remastered version. And yes, the model looks good. 😀