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1/72 Italeri Horsa


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Just finished the Horsa from Italeri.  Fit was pretty good on the major parts but other parts like the landing gear had no locating marks so it was off to the photos, and Italeri would have you put the aileron mass balances on backwards.  RC 56 glue for the windows worked well.  Paint is Tamiya dark earth and dark green, Model Master for the flat black and the white.  The decals from 3 kits were a complete mess so some are from spares and others are from a laser printer.  The nose wheel was lengthened with brass tubing and music wire. 

 

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With the Airfix C-47 (as a C-53), Italeri 1/72 CG-4A, and Airlines/Frog Hotspur

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Horsa, CG-4A, and Italeri Me 321 Gigant, with an Academy Dodge ambulance for scale:

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Thanks, everyone.  I appreciate the comments.  Doing up collections seems to keep up my motivation and interest.  Now I just need more time and energy!

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Excellent Horsa!

Also loving the collection (including the military ambulance, which is itself a little gem).

Having read a few tomes about D-Day glider missions and the like, I can only say that anyone who piloted (or indeed flew in) a military glider was made of sterner stuff that me!

Your collective is a fine tribute to all of those brave souls, whether Allied or Axis.

:clap:👍

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Towing a Gigant with two or three Me-110's?  Yeah, not a good plan!

 

Thank you all for the continuing nice comments.  Sadly there is no Hengist in my collection, nor do I know of a kit for one.  The Hamilcar would be nice to have, but so far as i know there is an expensive resin kit and a poor vacuform.  I do have two Russian troop gliders, the Antonov A-7 and the Gribovskii G-11, in the stash.  There was one Japanese troop glider that saw use, the Kokusai Ku-7, but I've never seen a kit of that either.  Since it was never in civilian use I doubt we can get Moa to scratchbuild it.  But at any rate, I am off in entirely different world right now, building an F-15.

 

I did this Italeri He-111Z about the same time as the Me-321, and I've thought of doing a Stirling for the Horsa.

 

 

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Edited by jeaton01
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Very nice.  I had a 1/72 RAF Dakota (still have it somewhere I think) plus a Horsa and a Hotspur when I was a kid.  My grandad was killed at Arnhem so I have always been interested in the aircraft and gliders.  Mind you he was infantry coming up the road but I met at least one airborne veteran who swum the Rhine to get away.  So always nice to see anything related modelled well.

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Very nice model of the Horsa, my dad went up in one on a training exercise and hated every minute of it, especially when it was released from the towing aircraft, as it went down like a roller coaster, I think a few lads were sick 

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Lovely collection of assault gliders - one I'd like to emulate. I have quite a few of them in the stash.

 

A couple of glider kits you might want to add to the collection would be the Arado Ar232 and the DFS230, both of which are available in 1/72 injection moulded form.

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What a lovely collection of powerless planes there @jeaton01. My current stash has ignored gliders, but they actually have quite a charm when i see them sat next to one another.

I never realized the size difference between the Hotspur and Horsa, or how big the Horsa was compared to the C47! The thickness of the wing root on the Horsa is quite surprising, as i would have thought you would want that as small as possible to reduce drag?

 

Last year i was looking into the Baynes Bat, a british flying wing glider concept, and learned that the Germans during ww2 developed, produce and deployed the Gotha 242, a large glider somewhat similar in capacity to the Horsa. What interested me even more, and which has been nearly impossible to find information on, was the Gotha 242 C-1 - what i think was the only Floatplane glider ever. To shamelessly copy from the Wikipedia article ;

 

A few gliders, the Go 242 C-1 variant, were constructed with a flying boat-style hull allowing water landings. It was proposed that some carry a small catamaran assault boat with a 1,200 kg (2,600 lb) explosive charge suspended between its hulls. The proposed mission profile was for the pilot to land near an enemy ship and transfer to the assault boat, setting off at high speed for the enemy ship and locking the controls before bailing out.

 

Have you ever heard/seen pictures of this oddity?

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1 hour ago, Kushan_Farsight said:

The thickness of the wing root on the Horsa is quite surprising, as i would have thought you would want that as small as possible to reduce drag?

The objective for military gliders was a consistent, accurate and fairly steep descent, and a short landing possibly over obstacles without building up speed. Increasing the L/D ratio of the gliders would have been a disadvantage operationally by introducing a lot more variables

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