Category: History
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When You Wish Upon A Star
Makes no difference who you areAnyone who shoots at you canKill you dead. The practice of painting stars- red, white, or black – on the sides of tanks is no guarantee against 17 pdr shells or Javelin missiles. Thicker armour and party tricks are a bit better, but the best protection is distance. At 200…
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The Whiff
Of what-if. This topic has been raised before on these pages in a somewhat sardonic fashion, but it can also have a serious side. a. Much of the whiffery revolves around Germany’s Third Reich in the middle to late 1940’s. Lots of unbuilt designs for tanks and aircraftare trotted out and kitted up. Yet few…
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Higgins LCVP – Part Two – The Built-up Barge
I can be no more complimentary than to refer to this Airfix landing craft as a barge. I admire barges. My whole family admired them – so much so that we built them for years for service on Canadian rivers and lakes. To our credit, none of them ever sank. The LCVP kit from Airfix…
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” How Can You Waste Your Time On That Kit? “
This one? This kit? This vintage classic old Airfix retro sagger of a kit? How can I waste my time on it? You misjudge. You mistake the meaning of the word ” waste “. You imagine that anything not conforming to the current latest magazine or YouTube trend is a waste. Oh, My Dear… This…
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RCN Swordfish – Part Four – HS 554
A real aircraft, really flying. Or, in my case, a model of one. The net contributed a wealth of images of this Swordfish flying as part of museum and airshow displays in Canada. The scheme is maritime patrol of the east coast and there were probably rocket or bomb rails fitted under the lower wing…
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RCN Swordfish – Part Three – Careful Observation
Does not necessarily mean sensible painting. The camouflage patterns painted on British aircraft were pretty standardised in WW2. You’ll all have seen the A and B patterns for fighters, bombers, and such and the basic designs were similar. Paint crews were issued with instructions and often masking mats to enable them to put on the…
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Heinkel He-111c – Part Six – German Republik Luft
I have decided to please myself and indulge in a little whiffery with this Heinkel aircraft. Not assigning it to Ruritania or imagining it sold to some other power – I have decided to base it upon continued existence of a German Republic past 1933. Hence the black/white/red tail colours and the naming of the…
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Republic P-47D – Part Two – Rum And Coca Cola
And another rare bird for my Middle and South American section; a Cuban P-47. Donated under Pan-American defence treaties, this came to Havana in the 1950’s – part of the FAEC under Batista. So far I cannot find out whether it saw any battle before or during the revolution, but at least is it a…
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Define Nostalgia
Easy to do for yourself – hard to do for others… The theme for some of the displays seen at the WAMA exhibition revolved around nostalgia. The vague meaning of the word – a pain for the past – may be a lot more apposite than you’d think if your past was a pain. Some…
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We Regard You As Innocent
Until someone suggests you could be guilty. A big local scale model exhibition seems to have attracted a very unusual visitor: A 1:1 scale replica of a motor vehicle from 80 years ago. It was parked in the front of the Cannington Exhibition Centre on the second afternoon of the show. I did not see…
The Little World 