1/18 V-1 "Buzz Bomb"

i like the wavy side pattern best. really makes the beast look evil.

...that might be kind of fun to hang over my desk.

Can you imagine how batty you could drive people by sticking a high intensity red LED in the tailpipe flashing at 47 hertz?

Pat

...yeah, like dat.

If we can't see individual movie frames @ 24 hz, I'm betting the LED would look like a solid red one @ 47 hz.

I can't believe all the stuff that's becoming available in 1/18th scale. The ones I've bought so far have outgrown my space to hang them.

Doug Wagner

the right model could be a spare room. a ju390 perhaps?

God help me, if they build it I'll but it! Probably won't fit in the house, but wouldn't it look great on the roof as a weather vane.

Doug

Hook up the props to a generator and make your own electricity!

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.

that would be amazin if you have a strong roof. perhaps it could be a mailbox. the trappencrapper door would make a good opening for packages.

yeah, help the ecology, that's the ticket.

It well might have that effect, just as fluorescent lights do at 60 hertz. If you ever need info on the innards of a V-1, here's the place to go:

Pat

Pat Flannery wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com:

The spheres we found were all metal spheres, but metal wire wound also. I never knew they had wooden spehers too.

Ah, well. one is never too old to learn.

They did everything possible to cut production cost per missile to a absolute minimum; as the war progressed the original mild steel wing structure was replaced with a wooden one to cut costs. By the time it was in full production on the optimized form it cost somewhere between 1,500 and 10,000 marks to make each one (estimates vary wildly, which might have to do with slave labor being used for construction; even the upper limit though is less than 1/7th what a V-2 cost, at 75,000 marks) and it took only 280 man-hours to build a V-1, versus 13,000 for a V-2. I'm still digging around in my books to find out about the steel or wooden compressed air tanks. I've seen them described as wood wrapped in piano wire, or the pressed steel in the wire tape wrapping the website I cited mentions the latter as being standard. One possible source of confusion is that the V-1's magnetic compass was housed in a wooden sphere, so I wonder if some author confused that with the compressed air tanks, and they were actually all steel through the whole war, or if wooden ones were used to save weight and materials as the design matured, like the wooden wings replacing the steel ones. As Germany started hitting a strategic materials shortage during the last half of the war, wood began to be used for more and more aircraft parts, such as tail structure components on the Bf-109K and Ta-152.

Pat

Pat Flannery wrote in news:13lbkno7cocgm38 @corp.supernews.com:

We had a crashed and not exploded V1 in our museum which had the steel wire wrapped spheres. and there are still some spheres known to me that are all steel. Me personally I have never heard of wooden spheres other than for the compass.

We even dug up a V1 that had a wooden AND a steel wing (the wooden wing was weighted) that crashed within meters after leaving the ramp.

A lot of them did that, with the skid marks and burns of the impacts leading allied aircraft right back to the hidden launch site in the edge of the woods. At least it tended to be going away from you when it crashed; several V-2 launch teams had a malfunctioning V-2 come right back down on top of them Was the wooden wing also skinned in wood? It's odd they'd do that rather than use a matched set. Maybe the factory that made wings for one side of the missile got behind schedule compared to the factory that made them for the other side.

Pat

Pat

Pat Flannery wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com:

Yes also in winter, with snow. After a couple of launches a great "plume" of deposit from the launch chemicals was visible in the fresh snow. It would extend some 30-40 meters from the ramp. That gave'em away too.

The complete wing was made of wood. Skinned with plywood and weighted with an unshapely piece of lead near the wingtip. It was indeed probably a trouble shoot solution.

I've been visiting a V2 launch site in Heek (rather just across the border in Germany) where a V2 obviously came down again because the place was litterally littered with torn pieces of aluminium skinning with holes melted(?) in them. and other technical parts. Lots of artifacts found there. Tools like spanners, hammers, screwdrivers, pliers, etc.

That's probably parts of one of the aluminum propellant tanks. The exterior of the rocket was built and skinned out of thin low-grade steel sheet to conserve strategic metals. There's info on them here:

Pat