Rolls-Royce

How about R7159 on page 35 of the Wingleader MK I book? It is factory-fresh, with no squadron markings. This one also has the IFF "cheese slicer" aerials introduced in late September of 1940. The angle the photo was taken from eliminated the glare one usually sees in photos of the area in question.

Not surprised. Full scale aircraft paints are tough stuff - they have to be, given the wide range of environments and conditions the aircraft operate in - and the thinners and carriers involved are pretty gnarly!

I was just perusing the photos in WingLeader's Photo Archive on the Spitfire MK I. As terrific as the pictures in that book are, very few clearly show the tank, even on the aircraft with the original two-bladed props, which were certain to have it. Most were taken from the aircraft's port side at ground level, which went far to obscure the tank. Even shots from the starboard side were mostly full of glare from the perspex, making it difficult to see the top of the tank. Sigh. My personal feeling is that this was not a common retrofit item, as it didn't enhance the aircraft's combat performance, instead adversely affecting it by adding weight even though it was relatively slight. This is not to say that a VIP's or commander's mount wouldn't have been so modified, as The Boss gets perks us mere mortals can only long for. In short, if a Mk I left the factory with the hand pump, it likely kept that setup to the end of its days...

Perhaps BS285 was also meant to be a direct replacement for BS241 in particular cases that needed IR suppression such as fighting vehicles, while things like water bowsers and GP vehicles do not and hence use the non-IRR color. Generally, if special capabilities aren't thought to be needed, they aren't provided. Even in wartime, military budgets aren't unlimited.

I think the only uncertainty is WHEN the changeover occurred, and at what serial number. I happen to subscribe to the "about the 600th aircraft" theory. Both N3200 and P9374 were recovered with manual hand pumps, and P9374 was the 557th Spitfire built.

Agreed. I've already read multiple samples a member here sent me, and would be pleased to do so again. I'm retired, so free time is not an issue. The money and space to store paints bought solely for testing, are.

I'd like to echo Jamie's offer for those living on the east side of the Atlantic...

You may be interested to know that the Tamiya RAF Dark Green 2 measured the closest to an available reference of any paint I have yet tested. That was a dE of 0.69 to the color given for Dark Green in Nick Millman's Ministry of Aircraft Production monograph. I don't have any of the Mr Hobby, so can't measure it. Please note that this is not a condemnation of any other paint. I have tested only a relatively few water-based acrylics, mostly because enamels are getting harder to find here and I needed to find other available paints that "looked the part".

Personally, I would like the colors I use to begin as the closest things to the originals that the manufacturer can make, if reference samples exist (in this case, they do). The manufacturer should allow me to make the decisions on lightening, darkening, tinting, etc from that point.

Thanks, Jack. I already got that correction from him. I was going to mention trying an eyedropper tool to fubar57, but some sources end up dithered, especially scanned materials, and the sRGB values can change - sometimes considerably - from pixel to pixel as the eyedropper moves over the swatch.

Nobody said his document wasn't accurate. Far from it. The majority of WWII RAF colors in the RAF Museum volume do fall within the sRGB gamut, but a few (3) do not. Nick also gives Munsell and FS395 references where applicable, along with qualifying text about the accuracy of those matches. I strongly suspect sRGB was included because Adobe uses it in .pdf production, and it is the most common colorspace used on computer displays, allowing owners to view facsimiles of the colors on screen. Had it been a print-only document, it's entirely possible that sRGB values would not have been given. His "Combat Colours" volume on the A6M Zero, for instance, gives comparisons to FS395 colors, but not to sRGB.

Jack, several months ago, when I measured the chips in my RAF Museum volume, a number of them were identified by the 3rd-party software I use (BabelColor's CT&A) as being outside the sRGB gamut. Despite the number of colors a gamut can produce, any color that lies outside its Red > Green > Blue boundaries cannot be accurately represented by that gamut, as I'm sure you're aware. BTW, those colors were Deep Sky, Yellow, and Matt Red.

The problem I see with apps like this is that some real-life camouflage colors are outside sRGB space, so the app can't really suggest a mix. sRGB is also a little "coarse" in steps compared to something like Munsell.

Shokaku and Zuikaku were new to the fleet, having just been commissioned, and had crews patched together from nuggets just out of training and aviators from training and shore billets. In addition to graduating only about 100 naval pilots per year at this time, Japan did not rotate their air wings among carriers as did the US, treating the fliers and their planes as weapons systems attached to the ship. This came back to haunt them after Coral Sea.

If you can get Mission Models' paints, their MMP-110 is an extremely close match to the Munsell reference listed by Nicholas Millman for the Mitsubishi amber gray in his works on the early Zero. I used the color on my own 1/48 Hasegawa A6M2 last year. Sadly, the Colourcoats paints aren't easily available here in the former Colonies...

Japanese carriers didn't have catapults, by the way. Taiho, late in the war, was supposed to. However, by the time it was launched they had no working designs. This was a particular issue for them as they were left with shorter and smaller flight decks, aircraft that were steadily climbing in gross weight and wing loading, and no catapults. They were more or less forced to use older lighter aircraft that had the flyoff performance suitable for those shorter decks.

Note that I said "might" . They almost certainly wouldn't have been forward with aircraft recovery in progress.

Not the bow, Graham, but the stern might have had planes awaiting launch. Planes directly forward would be too much of a hazard to landing aircraft even if tail hooks were employed, in case one was a "bolter" and missed all the wires. In addition, the A6M2 had a stall speed of 69 mph. With 20 knots or better of wind over the deck (carriers run at nearly flank speed into the wind for both launch and recovery), the aircraft was touching down at far less than 49 mph of actual forward speed.

Jon Parshall's book "Shattered Sword", about the Battle of Midway, discusses their carrier operations in great detail. Not only tactical, but the day to day minutiae of Japanese flight and maintenance operations. Unless a plane was taking off, flying, landing, or being spotted on deck for launch, it was below decks. Nearly all their arming and refueling took place there. This is a great talk by him about it:

My guess is that the tail hooks weren't really needed all that often. Without an angled deck like modern carriers, their decks had to be completely empty for aircraft to land, and once on board, they were struck below immediately. Given that the A6M2 weighed only about 5500 lbs at combat weight and had a low stall speed, they landed light and slow and probably could easily stop with brakes alone.

The Tamiya JV-44 boxing has the corrected wing. Several aftermarket companies produce properly-sized 190 wheels in resin which will help correct the "sit" of the plane, and there are also aftermarket engine "plugs" and wheel well detailing kits for these and the Trimaster/Dragon/Italeri kits, which suffer from some of the same issues.

If your model is of a PH Zero, do remember that these aircraft were on balance a year or less old, with their entire time until that point spent in their home waters in the northern Pacific, where sunlight is far less intense than it is further south. When I built mine, I went for minimum weathering, with most of the wash for the gaps between the airframe and the various control surfaces. Period photos of the recovered wreckage of the plane I modeled showed that the finish was still glossy at the time it crashed, indicating a new or very well-kept aircraft, so I kept that in mind during painting.

It was what I chose for my Hasegawa A6M2 last year after checking it with my own spectrophotometer against the Munsell reference listed by Nicholas Millman for the Mitsubishi exterior color in his "Painting the Early Zero" PDF. It is an extremely close match, measuring in at a dE2000 of under 2.0. I would disagree with the "airbrush ready" part, though. It does need to be thinned prior to use.

It is lighter and cooler, more of a neutral grey. I used the J3 from an AK acrylics set.

I used straight J3 Gray for the fabric control surfaces on my 1/48 Hasegawa A6M2 last year.