A friend of mine has turned me on to a theme which I am sure would get me into all forms of modeling: Create a model in 1/72 scale of all jet and rocket aircraft which flew during or just before World War Two. This would include turbines such as the Italian Caproni without props and there is at least one Soviet turbine with props. I am not looking to do drawing board aircraft. However, I will include first flights that proved to be last flights. Any help about types and kits, as well as sources, will be appreciated.
This is a start. There are others and newer versions of these kits (not always better) and I haven't gone into the Special Hobbies (plastic) or the Planet Models (resin) kits at all because you stated that you weren't looking for Luft '46.
At the Zumbro Valley (Minnesota) this year or last- forget which one a guy had such a collection and gave a talk on early rockets. He had a WW2 soviet fighter also, but have no idea whose kit it was.
If you are looking for the unusual, Heller used to do a kit which contained two aircraft, the Bacham Natter and the Fi-103 (piloted version of the V1). Not sure whether it is still around.
I started something like that in 1/48 - is was supposed to just be a collection limited to WWII German jets. Then it turned into a collection of WWII German firsts - rocket planes, V-1, V2, etc. Then Monogram came out with that nice He-111. Then I found a DML Ju-88 for $10. Then the Monogram Ju-52. Then an Me 110, and a collection of 109s and the stash grew far beyond what I was intending...
...but I think your idea is a really great idea. If you can maintain some self control, unlike myself.
You think you have a problem? I did mine on all the secret, test, and operational German jet and rocket fighter, attack, and recon aircraft in
1/72 scale... including all the designed ones... I finally gave up after filling a book case with them and still needing more. I've got 44 of them now. I didn't want them to get boring so tried to do variations of accurate German camouflage schemes on them that varied in some way from aircraft to aircraft. That became difficult around the time I hit 30. Here's a fun bit of trivia; check out the unpainted upper section on the Ju-287's rudder:
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know why that's unpainted? Because that's as high as the guy could reach with his paint sprayer while standing on the tailcone. :-D I did paint the airflow tufts on it originally, but took them off as they looked goofy. Those engine nacelles in primer suggest that they may have been trouble with the Junkers-Jumo 004 engines at some point in the test program also. Something probably involving fire, shedding turbine blades, or both. At least I did mine in primer; I wonder if they were yellow to identify it as a test aircraft as it didn't have wing markings, at least on top.
actually, they just had to change the engines costantly so there were more than one set of covers. they were told to change engines every 5-10 hours running!
Not a bad assumption...I knew a guy at GE that ran away and joined the Canadian forces (lied about his age) and ended up flying Spits and Typhoons for the RAF during WWII. His unit was in charge of mopping up and securing German airfields after D-Day, and he told me they came across six Me 262s and burnt one of them up on the ground trying figure out how to run the engines on a mix of avgas and tank diesel (there was no fuel on the airfield and the jets were just left behind)...said the throttles were very touchy. They painted roundels on them and everyone in the unit supposedly got to fly one once before the intel folks found out and came and hauled the off...the jets, I mean.
I don't generally do Luft '46, but I'm thinking of scratch-hacking one of these in 1/32, starting from the Revell kit:
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