Feel good story of the day

Story here.

ICM Po-2

ICM has completely redone their Po-2 kit.  Given the ubiquity of this aircraft on the eastern front in WWII, this is good news for 72nd scale modelers.

Go Navy

The USN is mounting and deploying anti-drone lasers on-board DDGs.  Personally I think that in the next ten years the big weapons developments will be in lasers, not hypersonics.

B-17E 41-9112 Dreamboat

A great post from Jeff “Inch High” Groves on something I had never heard of. I was aware of the YB-40, but not this.

Inch High Guy

While the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress was arguably one of the most important aircraft designs of the Second World War, even the best designs can be improved.  Combat experience against the Luftwaffe over Europe identified several potential improvements suggested by the crews.  The job of evaluating those changes was given to Major Robert J. Reed.  Reed was sent to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio and given B-17E 41-9112 to experiment on.

Reed replaced much of the B-17E defensive armament with components already in production for the Consolidated B-24 Liberator.  The most obvious changes were mounting powered turrets in the nose and tail positions.  Jagdwaffe pilots had identified the hand-held nose armament as a weak point in the Fortresses defenses, and the tail position had a very restricted field of fire.  The Liberator turrets remedied both these problems at a stroke.

With the nose position now occupied by a turret the…

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Airfix MiG-17 #4

Part 3 here.

Well, I added a crap ton of weight behind the cockpit and on the side of the fuselage ahead of the wing.  There is also a small weight under the cockpit, behind the wheel well.  The problem with the positioning of the weight is that it is farther back than the nose and thus will be less effective in keeping the nose down.  Here it is right before the fuselage is closed up.

I swear at this point they are just making stuff up

Here.  Well not completely making it up, but are down to doodles on beer napkins.

Airfix MiG-17 #3

Part 1 here.

Part 2 here.

Work continues on the Burkina Faso MiG-17.  The seat and cockpit were finished and assembled into the cockpit tub.  There is a space in front of the tub where Airfix recommends you put 20g of weight in order to avoid having a tail-sitter.  If you happen to have a slug of depleted uranium lying around then by all means use 20 grams of it to weight the nose. However, for those modelers who don’t have some slightly radioactive super heavy metal lying around, good luck.  Because using any normal metal as your weight is going to leave you well short of 20 grams.  I used liquid gravity, which is very tiny lead shot which I sealed in with 6 minute epoxy.  Filling the cavity to the brim packed very tightly allowed me to pack in. . . . 3.5 grams.  Hmmm.  This presents a challenge.  Also, since the nose of the MiG is open, you’ll need to paint the inside of the fuselage to represent the inside of the intake tunnel I attempted to add depth I painted the fore part aluminum and the back portion steel.  Here is where it stands.

 

Night Shift new videos

Uncle Night Shift has some new videos up.  Check them out.

Movie review: The Lion in Winter (1968)

The Turner Classic Movie channel is one of the best channels on DirectTV.  The only bad thing about it is watching the movies on that channel will quickly make you realize what crap movies and crap actors we have in Hollywood today. The Lion in Winter is the story of an aging King Henry II in 1183. He has 3 sons. He has imprisoned his wife, the queen (who is also the former queen of France) and is having an affair with his ward, a French princess, who was sent over as a child to be the wife of his eldest surviving son Richard. Henry wants to bypass his eldest Richard for the title of the next King in favor of his youngest son, John. (BTW, in actual history Richard is later to become Richard the Lionhearted and John is evil King John of Robin Hood fame.) The queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, favors her eldest son Richard.  Eleanor and Henry are locked in a love/hate relationship and use every weapon at hand to hurt each other.  In fact, in many ways the question of who gets to be the next King doesn’t much seem to matter to either except in the fact that each chooses in opposition to the other out of spite.

The movie is phenomenal.  Peter O’Toole is amazing as Henry and Katharine Hepburn is great as Eleanor.  I did not realize that at the time of the movie, Hepburn was 25 years older than O’Toole. Anthony Hopkins plays Richard in one of his first movie roles. The dialogue is sharp and the interplay between Henry and Eleanor, switching between spite and love and back again is fantastic.  The film was nominated for 8 academy awards and won 3.  If you haven’t seen it, you should definitely add it to your must watch list. 5 stars.

New modeling fluid coasters