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Several years ago I was considering refurbishing my old Revell C-6 but having lost one or two of the parts I decided to start again with a cheap HobbyBoss kit. I have not as yet decided which actual variant to build but I rather fancy one of the "heavy" fighters. HB provide markings for ZG 26 and ZG 76 and say it is a C-6. Should be a fairly simple build if they have not screwed anything up like the props on their Do-335 - the cockpit will need a little work and the gun barrels may need replacing. Assuming I have both the time and inclination I will have a shot at this before too long. Pete

ROBIN (Juliette Lewis): They don't care about dying, just losing. -- Way of the Gun (dir. Christopher McQuarrie) Hope is the only good god present among men The rest abandoned us and went to Olympus. -- Theognis, Fr. 1135-6 Athenians: Hope, danger's comforter, may be indulged in by those who have abundant resources, if not without loss at all events without ruin; but its nature is to be extravagant, and those who go so far as to put their all upon the venture see it in its true colours only when they are ruined; but so long as the discovery would enable them to guard against it, it is never found wanting. Let not this be the case with you, who are weak and hang on a single turn of the scale; nor be like the vulgar, who, abandoning such security as human means may still afford, when visible hopes fail them in extremity, turn to invisible, to prophecies and oracles, and other such inventions that delude men with hopes to their destruction. Melians: You may be sure that we are as well aware as you of the difficulty of contending against your power and fortune, unless the terms be equal. But we trust that the gods may grant us fortune as good as yours, since we are just men fighting against unjust, and that what we want in power will be made up by the alliance of the Lacedaemonians, who are bound, if only for very shame, to come to the aid of their kindred. Our confidence, therefore, after all is not so utterly irrational. -- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, XVI I'll be building the PZL P.11c of Hieronim "Himek" Dudwał, who flew with 113. Eskadra Mysliwska (113 Fighter Squadron) in the Pursuit Brigade responsible for Warsaw's defence. It's just possible that in the famous photo of Polish volunteer fire-fighters watching an aerial duel above Poland's embattled capital, that "Himek" might be somewhere above them: Dudwał was an interesting fellow. Along with Stanislaw Skalski, he was the top-scoring Polish pilot of the September Campaign (both he and Skalski are credited with four victories, though Skalski claimed two more), and before the war he was a keen modeller as well as a fairly good amateur artist. Our own @GrzeM wrote an excellent profile of him for Arma's website. Sadly, although he survived the September Campaign and escaped to France, Dudwał was killed in action aged 26, flying the obsolescent MB152 against the Germans with GCII/10 on 7 June 1940, when he was shot down probably by Leutnant Leonhard Gottmann of 7/JG3. Gottmann himself had only a few months left to live; while flying as adjutant for III/JG3, he was shot down into the Thames on 7 September 1940. We are left to imagine what Hieronim Dudwał might have accomplished had he lived long enough to fly a modern aircraft against the destroyers of his country, and what he might have contributed to the postwar world had he survived the war. As an interesting side note, the two pilots who flew with Dudwał during his first combat flight of the war were Cadet Jerzy Radomski and Senior Airman Mieczysław Kaźmierczak. Kaźmierczak was shot while descending in his parachute on 6 September 1939, but Radomski escaped to France and flew with Dudwał, shooting down a Bf109 on the day the latter died, and ultimately escaped France via North Africa and Gibraltar to fight with 303 Squadron in the latter days of the Battle of Britain. He survived the war and was a flight instructor with 6 FTS until the early 1960s, ultimately retiring from the RAF as a Squadron Leader in the catering branch (!) in 1973, before passing away in 1978. Anyway, on to the kit! The Arma kit is of course lovely, as those of you who've built any of their offerings will know. I managed to lose one of the smaller PE pieces for the cockpit, but got cracking away on the cockpit floor and seat. My understanding is that the Poles painted their aircraft with a slivery lacquer on the interiors, and so I've gone with the Hataka silver colour in their Orange Line set of paints for Polish Aircraft in the September Campaign. I happen to have the surprisingly useful MMP book on Polish instrument panels, which has a nice series of photos of the cockpit cribbed from the PZL P.11c manual, and the kit even has a PE part to duplicate this lever on the control column: (I assume that's the brake?) Tonight I painted the PE and laid down the interior colour, and got started on the cockpit. It feels good to be back.

Hi all, I'm currently working on the Airfix 1/72 Harrier GR.1 and I have a question about the airbrake positioning when the aircraft is in normal flight (i.e. not hovering about). I know that the airbrake overlaps the surrounding panels when retracted and the Airfix kit has two different actuators to pose it fully or partly open but I want to model it in full high speed flight so my question is how retracted did it go, did it sit as flush as it could to the fuselage or is the smaller Airfix actuator used to show it fully retracted? I've searched google but all the photos that I could find that show the airbrake in flight show the aircraft hovering (which is fair enough, it was fairly unique at pulling off that party trick). Any Harrier experts about who could help? Thanks. Dan