Myasischev M50 ...Nuclear bomber

[InFlames]

For your pleasure, 3 of the Bounder pics I took at Monino in 2007 - I'll probably visit museum again this year - it's such an amazing place with so many interesting aircraft

[general melchett]

Thanks Sebastijan wonderful stuff ,it really is a powerful presence isn't it !!, do you know if they are adding to the hangar in the background or is it routine maintenance ?

Really will have to go there !!!

[InFlames]

Thanks Sebastijan wonderful stuff ,it really is a powerful presence isn't it !!, do you know if they are adding to the hangar in the background or is it routine maintenance ?

Really will have to go there !!!

I think it's just maintenance - I was inside that hangar - some nice planes in there - Kozhedub's La-7, Yak-3, Bi-1, Ilja Muromets bomber replica,...

[general melchett]

Thanks , do they still have the wonderful little ANT 2 in there and Beriev VVA-14 designed by Bartini in open storage ? , now that would make a great model !!

Edited April 9, 2009 by general melchett

[smuts]

General Sir, hope to see the M50 again at Coventry, but that Valkyrie would look a real show stopper in SAC bare metal I've always thought of doing one

in SEA camo as well.

Andy.

[InFlames]

not sure about ant-2 pa VVA-14 is till out there in a pretty sorry state

[general melchett]

Now that's a real shame as it's such a wonderful looking machine, I know it was stored in pieces , wonder if they'll ever put it back together again ?

It used to look like this,

Wonder if Amodel could be persuaded to make one in 1/72nd scale.......

[keefr22]

Well, you see something new everyday - that's a new one on me!! Looks like something Han Solo would be proud of owning!

Second the call for a 1/72 scale one please Mr. A-model!!

Keef

[InFlames]

Looks like something Han Solo would be proud of owning!

exactly my thoughts - russians made a cousin of Millenium Falcon I wonder where Chewie is

[general melchett]

It's a shame that so many of these amazing machines never saw the light of day, mind you some have made it to plastic or resin thank goodness !! here's just a couple,

Shkval 2 by Sharkit, basically a 4 wing VTOL foxbat ......

Anigrand Sukhoi T4MS , (this one built by Mike McEvoy) , I'm giving serious thought to scratchbuilding one in 72nd scale.

Talking of which this is the very old, ultra rare Aurora kit of the Bounder boxed as the ' Nuclear powered Russian bomber ..!! !, based on the brief glimpse of the M50 at the Tushino or Domododevo airshows , a fairish attempt even though clear photos were available at the time.

Edited April 10, 2009 by general melchett

[Alan P]

Talking of which this is the very old, ultra rare Aurora kit of the Bounder boxed as the ' Nuclear powered Russian bomber ..!! !

Nuclear powered bombers were almost a reality, extensive studies were done in the 50s to try to achieve it - Pratt & Whitney almost managed to develop a working prototype powerplant before the funding got pulled.

Would have made a perfect candidate for the much-feted unmanned bomber concept! I suspect the amount of lead shielding for human pilots would have rendered the aircraft too heavy to fly?

[keefr22]

Would have made a perfect candidate for the much-feted unmanned bomber concept! I suspect the amount of lead shielding for human pilots would have rendered the aircraft too heavy to fly?

They did fly the NB-36 with the reactor aboard - & apparently fired up on many flights, but not to actually power the aircraft. Good article here;

http://www.aviation-history.com/articles/nuke-american.htm

Scary thought of SAC having a fleet of those airborne for 24/7....!!!!

Keef

Edited April 11, 2009 by keefr22

[general melchett]

Good point Al ,as Keef points out Convair managed to get their NB-36H (XB-36H) Crusader into the sky but it's cockpit area weighed a ton !,the reactor didn't power the aircraft Its sole purpose was to investigate the effect of radiation on aircraft systems. Had funding come through the projected aircraft X6 would have been powered by General Electric X-39 engines, utilizing a P-1 reactor. In a nuclear jet engine, the reactor core was used as a heat source for the turbine's air flow, instead of burning jet fuel.

The Soviets had something similar in the Tupolev Tu-95LAL nuclear test-bed airplane.

The M50 would have paved the way for the M60 which was to have been fully nuclear powered,

and I know North American were looking seriously at a nuclear reactor powered aircraft,

Who knows we could have ended up with one of these !!!

Edited April 11, 2009 by general melchett

[Mike]

It's mental isn't it? Mind you, without these apparently lunatic offshoots from traditional aviation, we probably wouldn't have had jet engines or any of the really fancy stuff we have today. It's very interesting to see the evolutionary dead-ends though... and I'd seriously consider a VVA-14 if one every came out

[rob challis]

Hi there, following on with my Soviet cold war aircraft comes the 1/72nd Amodel M-50 NATO code name 'Bounder' , designed as a long range intercontinental nuclear bomber the M-50 first flew in October of 1959 and was heralded as the new wave of Soviet jet bomber technology.Sadly it never met it's design promise as though the design was sound enough, in fact very cutting edge with all powered control surfaces, all moving tail and satilators, advanced air con system , advanced auto guidance system,huge weapons capability etc, the engines of the time just weren't up to the job and the M50 refused to go supersonic in level flight, ( though it was very close !).The design engines were just round the corner built by the Zubets company and were the most powerful in the world, but due to development problems the M50 ended up with the same engines as the TU-22 Blinder, the Dobrynin VD-7'S and only the inboard pair were fitted with afterburners!! So lots of smoke and indescribable noise was the order of the day. Only one M50 was finished and that now lives at the Monino air museum near Moscow, an amazing sight, still very futuristic , had it had the right engines who knows what might have been !!

The proposed production bomber was to be called the M52 and have a slightly redesigned shape with of course those Zubets engines !!.

Here's a short video on the M50 for anyone that's interested....M50 video

Stunning-absolutely stunning.

Look at the fun and games the crew had getting in and out !!!!!

The aircraft as stored at Monino in it's 1963 Tushino airshow scheme,

This is the Amodel Amonster series kit that comes in a very big, solid box filled with hundreds of parts, mostly IM plastic though the fuselage and wings are made from resin impregnated fibreglass and are beautifully done with fine recessed detail. The kit is limited edition, just 250 being made and horribly expensive !!, I wont say how much but I paid significantly less by pre ordering from Linden Hill in the US through a friend...

The model has taken about 9 months to build and was finished last week in time for the Cosford show. I have depicted it in it's original scheme as 023 (3+2=5 +0 = 50 ... clever eh , done to confuse and make out more aircraft had been built !!).

Model was preshaded with medium grey and airbrushed in 8 shades of Alclad , finished off with pro Modeller washes and pastel/ chalk post weathering. ( I got through 2 rolls of Tamiya tape and half of my Alclad on this massive model having said that it needed only a tiny bit of Mr Hobby filler and was a joy to build !)

The finished model was very difficult to photograph due to it's huge size . It It seemed to go down well at Cosford drawing a lot of comments mostly along the lines of , 'was that plane in thunderbirds???'

(Need to finish my XB-70 to sit along side it now ... )

One thing i did correct was the sit of the model.I think Amodel moulded the nose gear in the fully extended poition as seen at the museum , but that airframe has no engines, equipment or fuel !!.So I cut the oleo in half and the ouriggers automatically touched the ground...

Hope you like it,

Cheers now,

Andy..

A fair bit of Alclad was used on this one !!

Comparison of size to MIG 21. !!!

[David H]

Wow. Just Wow.

WOW!!!

Obvious you really ARE enjoying every minute of your insanity.

Really nice M-50, Andy. I gotta show this one to Bill Dye. He's gonna need a cigarette after he sees this thing. I also like how you photographed it, against the stormy sky background.

Don't know much about the plane. Always wondered if its inability to go supersonic was a drag-related problem, or just not enough thrust. In its subsonic state i wonder if the plane would have been better off range-wise than a B-58. The fuselage was obviously intended to truck a huge amount of fuel.

The design also strongly resembles Boeing's XB-59 proposal and wind tunnel test models, main difference is that Boeing explored burying the engines in the wing roots for a while, before they too stuck the engines on pylons.

Somehow i don't see those downward loading ejection seats lending themselves too well to a 5-minute scramble! Would prolly look more like the "Keystone Cops" trying to get one of those airborne in a hurry. Of course, i doubt they could get a B-70 airborne in a hurry either....

On the subject of the XB-70, In the Jenkins Specialty Press book, mention is made of a special silver IR-absorbing paint finish intended to reduce the IR signature of the plane. One fellow actually build a hypothetical RS-70 over at ARC in this scheme. Looks pretty cool actually.

Anyways, Well Done. i don't know how you find the focus, or the drive to just build such consistently ginormous models. You are a source of inspiration to me.

david

[general melchett]

Thanks again chaps , David the main problem with the M50 was indeed a mixture of engine performance and drag co-efficiency of the fuselage shape.The projected engines for the operational version, the M52 were to be Zubets in the 40,000 lbs class with fully variable reheat and aerodynamic refinements including a second smaller tailplane high on the fin , required due to flutter at high speed in the all moving tail fin. The size of the fuselage was due to the corresponding size of the early nuclear bombs,( and the supersonic long-range M-61 cruise missile also designed by Myasischev at the time), plus the need to carry enough fuel for sustained supersonic flight to and from target. In flight refuelling was considered for the M52 but not the M50 which was only ever a proof of concept airframe..

This is how the M52 would have looked ,

I saw the RS-70 , very nice ...one to consider !!

Regards motivation for building these things , I love these subjects, they've always grabbed my imagination ever since getting my first Janes ''Book of world aircraft'' as a kid in the early sixties, so I just have to model them if I get half a chance. Got a few more lined up this year , hopefully they will meet with your approval

Thanks again for the kind words,

Andy

Edited August 28, 2010 by general melchett

[RMCS]

Never even heard of it until now. What a beast..lets hope that the old F4's could have done their job on that one!! Brilliant model.

[jimbuna]

That is one huge and excellent build Genaral.

[John_W]

Could imagine that in splinter camo with black crosses as a Luft '46 Whif.

[general melchett]

Thanks chaps...wow another blast from the past...hasn't been out of its 'suitcase' since Telford 2010, at least it's safe but hopefully with my new integral display cabinets nearly ready it can go alongside all the other big beasties,

Just out of interest I'm planning on getting hold of another one and modifying it into the proposed production version, the M-52. Some kind soul in Moscow sent me superb drawings and photos of the design and so I modded the 1/144th Anigrand kit a while back, (which was easy as the kit is quite inaccurate, but a great basis for the conversion, (which went down a storm on a couple of Russian sites), so a bigger version is logical, if a tad expensive, but as I'm off to Monino next year I'll see what can be done.

I've got a couple of other Soviet jet monsters on the go at the moment but as they're destined for Spence's Cold War magazine I can't show any build reports...just yet !

Here's the Anigrand conversion,

Cheers all,

Melchie..

[Michael louey]

Hi Andy,

I must have missed this one first time around but I'm always impressed by the style and realism of your large multi engine jets. I was wondering where you have the space to keep all of them but it seems from your last post that some need to stay in storage cases. A shame, they would look great in a large hall (for those who can afford mansions).

I always remember the 'Bounder' as one of those classic failures of aviation but it is an intimidating looking craft.

Cheers

Michael

[general melchett]

Thanks Michael, appreciate that, I've just had my hobbyroom/mancave/retreat built and incorporated 4 large, LED lit display cabinets into the room design so that they sit recessed into the wall. These are big enough to display just about any size models and hopefully I'll be able to get 2 or 3 models the size of the Bounder into each on one level. Once I've fitted all the glass shelves I'll post some photos of the result for those interested,

As I say I've got several more big Soviet builds on the go at the moment so space is going to be eaten up very quickly..

Thanks again,

Andy

[HL-10]

Incredible looking aircraft, and a stunning model!

Some of these machines look like they should feature in "Thunderbirds", or "Captain Scarlet".

[russ c]

Fantastic stuff (and I`ve not read it all yet ) great work too !!